Arts & Sciences

Science is public knowledge, discovered with public financial support, disseminated for public use; its practice is a public trust. The health of our society requires not only a robust scientific enterprise, but also a basic public understanding of science: without these there will be no firm foundation for our public health or our environmental safety no essential support for our civil infrastructure, or our military security, no source for our technological inventiveness and no secure basis for our industrial competitiveness or long-term economic prosperity.

And science is no less indispensable, I submit, for another quite different reason: it satisfies a universal hunger to understand, and a fundamental human curiosity Driven to understand ourselves, and the myriad living things with which we share our home planet, we are compelled to reach out to the secrets of the dark universe we inhabit, forever looking behind us, as much to catch a hidden suggestion of the future into which we move, as to make sense of the past, from which we came.And for each such halting personal quest for and meaning, science provides knowledge: not final, not exclusive, not comprehensive knowledge-but knowledge, nonetheless.

Science-for all its objectivity and rigor-is based on inspiration, as much as "facts": on hunches, as much as "proofs." It is, Peter Medawar once remarked, "telling fairy tales about the world, and waking up to find some of them to be true." Though its domain is all existence, its language global and its implications universal, its deepest disclosures are private and its innermost secrets reserved for those with the eyes to see and ears attuned to hear. But these, the professional practitioners of science, bear a peculiar societal obligation; they carry a particular public trust that involves not only the responsible practice of science itself but also the promotion of public understanding for the scientific endeavor. It is that obligation I propose to discuss.

The Cultural Context of Science The development of science, perhaps more than the development of any other product of human culture, has been international. No one society, no one nation or continent can claim credit for the development of science; it is the product of a glorious interwoven fabric of civilizations, each of which has contributed something to its development. Its roots go back to the classical civilizations of Egypt, Babylon, China, Greece, and the Arab world.

But it is a striking fact that modern science Is not the direct descendant of Greek science, or the science of any other ancient civilization. It arose in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Western Europe only by the conscious rejection of much of the Greek world view, and especially of the Aristotelian tradition. It was not a linear development. It emerged by fits and starts, by challenging many of the prevailing assumptions. But if its origin was widespread, its refinement into a working "system" arose from a particular cultural matrix, a set of intellectual assumptions, in which its discoveries took place. In the case of the rise of science, these included the belief in a regular, intelligible universe, belief in the value of rationality, and the belief that human intelligence is capable of grasping the workings of that rational dependable universe.

Science flourishes within a healthy variety of different cultural assumptions and competing viewpoints, and the future of science is likely to benefit from the diversity of people and debate, just as science has done historically. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Harvey, the Curies, Darwin, Mendel, and Einstein had very different backgrounds and very different views of the natural world, but each contributed in major ways to the progress of science.

As with the development of science, so also with its benevolent application, History suggests the greatest benefits of science emerge within a rather distinctive cultural context. Certain periods and cultures have been marked by an extraordinary flowering of the application of science. In Western Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, one sees a dazzling range of practical inventions, from vaccination to the automobile, and, by the mid-twentieth century, such things as television, radar, and antibiotics.

The pursuit of science and its optimum application seem to flourish particularly in societies with three distinctive characteristics: personal freedom, open communication, and strong support for science. First, science cannot exist without personal freedom of inquiry. Science advances, it has been said, by posing impertinent questions-impertinent not just in terms of the universe at large, but in terms of reigning paradigms. That will not easily happen where personal freedom is lacking.

Second, the pursuit of science, and its effective application, involve open communication. Science is now international in its enterprise and global in its human benefits, but it can take place only in an atmosphere of freedom and open communication.

The third requirement that seems to me essential is adequate support for within a fiscal, industrial, science, economic context in which scientific discovery and its application are encouraged, although reasonable observers will differ about the precise details of optimum conditions.

Open criticism, open communication, the encouragement to pursue ideas and to nurture practical ends-these are the conditions which encourage the pursuit and the application of science. Nothing better illustrates the effects of different cultures than the difference between Lysenkoism and cold fusion. Lysenkoism developed in the 1930s in what was then the Soviet Union and persisted for almost thirty years. T.D.Lysenko was a Russian agricultural geneticist who argued for the inheritance of characteristics acquired through environment influence. For thirty years in the former Soviet Union that was the reigning theory in agricultural genetics. Although it was ultimately overthrown by the sheer weight of evidence against it, it took thirty years under an authoritarian system for a faulty theory, backed by the government, to be eclipsed and for alternative theories to be considered. Compare that with cold fusion. It took a month or two for cold fusion to be rejected, and the difference between these two cases is the difference between an authoritarian society, on the one hand, with closed communication and an "official" view, and an open society with open communication of competing view-points, on the other

Science as an International Enterprise
Just as the origins of science Involved many cultures, the practice of science itself has now becomeincreasingly international. For example, Cornell has a cooperative agreement with Nanjing University in China that goes back almost seventy years. As a result of that agreement there has been an agricultural revolution in modern China, the seeds for which were planted in that early cooperation.

If one looks at the discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick, an Anglo-American international team, and the development of biotechnology that has followed it, with all its multi-tude of application, one sees again the importance of international cooperation in the practice of science. Jim Watson happened to go to Cambridge, where there was someone with whom he wanted to work. Would this land-mark discovery have been made, had it not been for the international journey that Watson made? I am sure that it would, at some stage, but clearly this particular discovery was a direct result of one graduate student happening to go abroad.

From international cooperation in such studies as earthquake prediction, to multinational cooperation in the Antarctic, where forty-two different nations occupying forty bases work together as though national boundaries did not exist, we see the growing benefits of international partnership. From conservation to health, from nutrition to population policy and economic growth, from new materials to new sources of energy-the benefits of partnership flow both ways.

It is also true that our student bodies are increasingly international. Sixty-one percent of U.S. doctoral degrees in engineering are awarded to students from other nations, as are 41 percent of those in the natural sciences, and 28 percent of those in the social sciences. One of the encouraging things about this international movement of students at the Ph.D. level is that it has now become a two-way process. What was a brain drain in earlier decades has now been reversed in some cases; 6,000 Ph.D. scientists,mathematicians, and engineers have recently returned to Taiwan from other parts of the world, for example.

The Prospects for Science But perhaps the real question is not whether international scientific cooperation is desirable, but whether science itself is prospering sufficiently to provide the continuing basis for international development. I recently spoke with a Cornell alumnus, a brilliant young biochemist, a Ph.D. from our medical school, with a string of published papers of great distinction, who has spent the last four years as a postdoctoral fellow at NIH. I asked him what he was planning to do next year, and he said-to my amazement-"I am going to law school." I could not believe that he was serious, for he is an outstanding young scientist. But he insisted he was serious and that he was going to work full-time in the patent office to support himself in studying at night for a law degree, because he is convinced that there is no future for him in science. He will, no doubt, become a very successful lawyer, but he will be lost to science. I fear that you could replicate that story in other situations and probably in other countries.

Let me illustrate the current threat to the health of science in three different countries. In the U.K. the total govern ment budget for basic science is £1.3 billion (about $2.1 billion) and that budget is now controlled, not by the Ministry of Science or the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, as it once was, but by the Department of Trade and Industry.What will be the priorities, the motives, the criteria, for fundamental sciences as the budget is constrained and as the urgency for national economic development continues?

A second example: The Ukraine of the former Soviet Union has about 90,000 scientists, engineers, and professional technicians, among whom there is now being conducted a major peer review. That review will decide which of the present scientific pursuits will be sustained and which discarded.

Or consider the United States: most recent budget forecasts predict that, whichever party is in power by the turn of the century, real-dollar support of science is likely to be reduced by somewhere between 12 and 22 percent.

So we face unusual challenges in this and other countries as we wrestle with the support of science. What should we do as responsible scientists and concerned citizens? Scientists must become what Neal Lane, director of the National Science Foundation, has called scientist-citizens and scientist-educators, committed to an improved public understanding of science and to a balanced and adequate level of funding for its support. What, then, should we do?

I want to suggest four things, most of which we can do for ourselves, most of which do not require additional funds, but all of which involve additional personal effort. First, I believe we must take seriously our responsibility to nourish and develop youthful talent in science and mathematics. We are losing far too many young people in science and mathematics before they reach the doors of the university, and that is especially true in the United States. In elementary school, U.S. students compare favorably with students in other parts of the world on scientific and mathematical tests. But by the time they get to middle school, U.S. students have the lowest mathematics scores of any group in the world. And female students are 45 points lower on math SAT scores than male. These are challenges that must be confronted, It is no good complaining about unsatisfactory buildings, inadequate equipment, powerful unions, and lack of qualified teachers. We, the practicing scientific community, have to become engaged. We need scientists who are willing to become leaders in local school boards, PTAs and volunteers within those schools. We must develop new ways to excite and cultivate youthful talent.

Second, we must improve science teaching at our universities. We have an undistinguished record as teachers of science, especially in the introductory courses in many of our large universities. Nationwide, we lose in the first year of college and university, 35 percent of those who enter as students registered in science, mathematics, and engineering. If we do not take seriously first-year teaching in the colleges, science cannot have a viable future.

Third, we must raise the scientific literacy level of the citizenry at large. In response to that need we must take seriously the scientific education of nonscientists. We have to rethink, recapture and redesign the curriculum across campus, recognizing that science must both derive from and contribute to a shared cultural base. We cannot limit our concern to science majors.

Fourth, we must become public advocates for investment in science- in Washington, in state capitals, in corporate and foundation boardrooms and elsewhere. We must become tireless advocates for responsible levels of national and international investment of science.

Increasingly we are dependent upon the foundation of science and the wise application of technology that in many countries now faces the threat of serious erosion. We must develop a more stable pattern of public investment in science. We shall never solve the civil infrastructure problem, for example, or the housing problem without serious study of new materials and new technologies. No company is going to undertake that kind of longterm applied research.

The government has a unique responsibility here. Responding to the challenges I have outlined is not, it seems to me, an option to be selected only by the few. It is an urgent imperative for all, from the most senior scientific researcher to the ordinary science lover. And there is not a moment to lose.

Frank Rhodes, president emeritus of the university, is a former chair of the National Science Board, the American Council on Education, the Association of American Universities, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching He was also a member of president George Bush's Advisory Council on Education. This essay is an edited version of a talk given at an international symposium of science faculty members, sponsored by the Pew Foundation and held at Cornell in June 1996.