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Transforming Research and Higher Education Institutions in the Next 75 Years: Proceedings of the 2022 Endless Frontier Symposium (2023)

Chapter: 4 Is the Science and Technology Enterprise Optimized to Benefit Society?

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Suggested Citation:"4 Is the Science and Technology Enterprise Optimized to Benefit Society?." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Transforming Research and Higher Education Institutions in the Next 75 Years: Proceedings of the 2022 Endless Frontier Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26863.
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4

Is the Science and Technology Enterprise Optimized to Benefit Society?

The question posed to the fourth, and final, panel at the symposium—Is the science and technology enterprise optimized to benefit society?—inevitably leads to other questions, said Bryan Walsh, editor of Future Project at Vox Media and the moderator of the panel. Who gets included and who gets left out? How can benefits be measured? Is there an optimal strategy? Is that the best way to think about the issue? “We have a great panel here to talk about this,” said Walsh.

CLOSING THE OPPORTUNITY GAP

The Great Hall of the National Academy of Sciences bears the following encomium to science: “To science, pilot of industry, conqueror of disease, multiplier of the harvest, explorer of the universe, revealer of nature’s laws, eternal guide to truth.” These words have changed since they were originally painted in 1924, said Alondra Nelson, deputy director for science and society at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). An earlier inscription said “promoter of industry” rather than “pilot of industry” and “healer of the sick” rather than “conqueror of disease.” “I don’t want to overread these editorial changes,” said Nelson, but “these edits are telling about our shifts in thinking about science and its applications.”

The many societal benefits of science and technology are evident from the world around us: mass production of electric vehicles, virtually instantaneous Internet speeds, vaccines developed in record times, algorithms that prevent credit card abuse. But a closer look at the headlines, Nelson said, reveals how solutions often must be retrofit to technological advances because people have been left behind in the pursuit of innovation. Financial incentives have to be provided to encourage electric vehicle use because rural and low-income communities and communities of color are faced with barriers such as affordability and access to charging stations. Communities have to extend cellphone and Internet access to vulnerable populations that do not have other affordable options. Local health departments have to bring vaccines to places where people gather because of lack of access to transportation and lack of confidence in health-care institutions. Artificial intelligence technologies have to be reprogrammed because they discriminate based on gender, race, or ethnicity. “Science and technology hasn’t benefited everyone in society equitably,” Nelson observed. “It remains at times discriminatory and exclusionary, in part because we don’t have enough pathways for all people, regardless of background or ability, to participate.”

Academics, innovators, policy makers, and others have a collective responsibility to close the gaps presented by the climate crisis, health disparities, environmental justice, and the increasing inequity of resources, opportunities, outcomes, and the experience of discovery for all Americans, Nelson said. “President Biden—who often

Suggested Citation:"4 Is the Science and Technology Enterprise Optimized to Benefit Society?." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Transforming Research and Higher Education Institutions in the Next 75 Years: Proceedings of the 2022 Endless Frontier Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26863.
×

says that America can be defined by one word, ‘possibilities’—has made it clear that science and technology is not only welcome in this administration but that it is a key driver of our commitments to economic opportunity, national security, environmental justice, and improved health and discovery.” By seeking to optimize the science and technology enterprise, OSTP has been working to advance health, prosperity, security, environmental justice, environmental quality, and justice for everyone in America, Nelson stated. It has been tapping the expertise of agencies across the government and external partners to create new visions, unified strategies, clear plans, wise policies, and effective and equitable programs for science and technology.

Policy decisions need to have an economic justification, and that justification needs to be for the many and not the few, Nelson pointed out. This requirement is why the CHIPS and Science Act (where CHIPS stands for Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors; P.L. 117-167) has two pieces. One is about innovation in the semiconductor industry. The other is about “an extraordinary vision of what the science and technology ecosystem can look like.” These “potentially transformative” aspects of the bill attracted bipartisan interest and support. Now the foremost concern is implementation of the legislation. “The effort there is to be very prudent about making sure that these resources serve the catalyzing function that we all hope they will.”

Furthermore, the legislation goes beyond being just a catalyst, Nelson continued. Positive outcomes require “the force multiplier of partnerships with universities, foundations, industries, communities, and places like the National Academies to implement solutions that benefit all regions of our society.” All parts of the scientific and technical community must continue to optimize science and technology to expand equal opportunities, resources, and outcomes.

Only when the scientific enterprise is well knit into society, said Nelson “will all of the American public be able to access and benefit from the fruits of innovation. Only then will we be able to meet the full promise of science so powerfully depicted in this Great Hall.”

THE ENDS OF ENGINEERING

The question “Is the science and technology enterprise optimized to benefit society?” implies the existence of a yes or no answer, observed Darshan Karwat, assistant professor at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society in the College of Global Futures, Arizona State University, and a member of the National Academies New Voices program, which provides mid-career experts with opportunities to bring their collective ideas about critical and emerging interdisciplinary issues to the work of the National Academies. “I fall on the no side,” Karwat said, before adding that the answer to the question is based not just on things that are only partially knowable but also on values, assumptions, and biases.

In his presentation, Karwat focused on engineering, which overlaps with science but is “fundamentally different” in how it creates knowledge and value in society, he said. Engineering makes manifest the benefits of science and technical expertise. Engineers often build things that work before they know exactly how they work or what their consequences will be. The architect of postwar science and technology policy, Vannevar Bush, was himself an engineer.

Karwat said that he wants to live in a world in which all humans thrive, in which people care deeply about nature and the environment, in which there is no war, and in which health, wellness, beauty, fun, and inspiration are paramount. Yet a straightforward stocktaking of engineering raises the question of whether the profession is directed toward those ends. First, a staggering amount of capital and human talent in engineering in the United

Suggested Citation:"4 Is the Science and Technology Enterprise Optimized to Benefit Society?." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Transforming Research and Higher Education Institutions in the Next 75 Years: Proceedings of the 2022 Endless Frontier Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26863.
×

States goes into building weapons and warfare technology. In fiscal year 2020, for example, the federal government awarded the Lockheed Martin Corporation $76 billion in contracts, which was 11.5 percent of all money given that year by the government in the form of contracts. “To put that into perspective,” Karwat noted, “in fiscal year 2020 that is more to a single company than to the entirety of NIH [National Institutes of Health], NASA, and the National Science Foundation combined.” The F-35 combat jet program has an estimated cost of $1.7 trillion over its lifetime, which is more than the entire 2022 Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (P.L. 117-58), legislation intended to deal with everything from clean water to Internet upgrades to crumbling roads and bridges. “That might sound like cherry picking, but when those numbers are in the billions and sometimes trillions of dollars, there’s something there to think about.”

Second, inequality and health disparities remain rampant in the United States, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in science and engineering. Poor populations are exposed to more pollution, Karwat pointed out, “and the problem is worse if you are not white.” People are continuing to move to places that face significant climate and wildfire risks.

Third, government and other institutions are ill equipped to handle the kinds of engineering and scientific changes occurring in the world. Engineers working on deep fake technologies, for example, might say that it is not their responsibility to think about how their work is going to be used. Karwat said, “If people feel that government is ineffective, then engineers themselves need to bring a different sense of responsibility to the work that they do.”

Engineers are responsible for some of the most awesome achievements of the modern era—the electric grid, getting astronauts to the moon and back, the production of vaccines for COVID-19. But they are also complicit in things like unwarranted surveillance and “monstrous projects like nuclear weapons.” Engineers often seem so interested in answering questions of technical feasibility that the enterprise overlooks questions of purpose, said Karwat. For example, engineers in Texas continue to work on extracting ever-harder-to-reach fossil fuels while engineers in Florida work to develop urban adaptations to rising sea levels caused by climate change. Engineers for gun manufacturers refine assault weapons while other engineers design medical instruments to treat gunshot wounds. Engineers design intentionally addictive social media apps while other engineers design apps that seek to cure the resulting addiction. “One can acknowledge the arguments that fossil fuels create immense value, that social media use is voluntary, and that militaries are necessary for stability in our current global configuration. But what these contradictions reveal is that, except for obvious cases, it’s not easy to map one-to-one engineering endeavors onto moral dichotomies of right or wrong, good and bad, let alone think about social benefit.”1

Engineering tends to justify itself as a catalyst for economic activity. But tying the benefits of engineering to economic ends shifts the discussion away from political and value-based questions, said Karwat. He quoted an engineer working for a firm involved with the building of a border wall between the United States and Mexico as saying: “There could be a political backlash, but we are in business to make money and put people to work and provide a good service, whether it’s a wall or a substation or an airport or prison. We don’t want to approach it from a political standpoint, only from a business standpoint.” This technical-social dualism resides partly in the profession’s ties to corporate capital, which tends not to care about public values, Karwat noted. “It may be the case that the engineering enterprise will make any product as long as there is a customer for it, regardless of the grotesqueness of the values espoused by the product. But how do society and its institutions deal with that?”

Karwat called for a “deep honesty about what it means to serve society in engineering.” Engineering education, which today is associated with a decline in concerns for public welfare, could seek to give the next generation of engineers a different set of values and considerations. Even more important, steps could be taken to give practicing engineers broader perspectives on issues like environmental justice. Work in service of society needs to move

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1 Taken in part from Dr. Karwat’s ISSUES article, “Creating a New Moral Imagination for Engineering,” which he quoted during the symposium: https://issues.org/creating-new-moral-imagination-engineering-karwat/.

Suggested Citation:"4 Is the Science and Technology Enterprise Optimized to Benefit Society?." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Transforming Research and Higher Education Institutions in the Next 75 Years: Proceedings of the 2022 Endless Frontier Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26863.
×

beyond pro bono or volunteer work to new kinds of financial models, said Karwat, and engineers need more spaces for debate and reflection, as led, for example, to the cancellation of a project that was weaponizing artificial intelligence technology at Google. Engineers also need to think about the significant costs imposed on other countries by supply chains that end in the United States. For example, cobalt extraction in the Congo, which will be vital to realize the vision of renewable energy in the United States, requires consideration of the effects of technologies that may promote violence abroad.

“In spite of all this, as an engineer, I love engineering,” Karwat concluded. “In the end, I do believe that engineers of all ages and disciplines can confront persistent challenges about what engineering is for by committing themselves to the service of public values like sustainability, justice, peace, and human rights.”

A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

Peter Gluckman, president of the International Science Council and distinguished professor at the University of Auckland, took a global perspective. Science, the Endless Frontier set the basis of science and innovation policy not only for the United States but across the developed world.2 Investments in science have been “massively successful,” as demonstrated by the close relationship between economic growth and research and development investments across the industrialized world. But today’s context is very different than it was when Bush wrote his report. There is a current need for “urgent and collective discourse” that takes the “broader nature of science and its values for society” into consideration, said Gluckman. The world faces existential threats, whether climate change, environmental degradation, the undermining of democracy, or the need to regulate new technologies. Yet scientists and engineers “have generally not considered the social implications of their work, or have done so only as an afterthought,” Gluckman pointed out. “One social scientist in a room of biotechnologists talking about gene editing is not an appropriate discourse. Today’s world requires modalities of research that extend beyond the traditional model of investigator-led siloed activities and assumptions of linear translation into the private sector. We need to become more conscious of the need to overtly support translation into the social and environmental demands of the broad range of policies and actions.” Many of the difficult issues now facing society ultimately result from past scientific and technological developments, as with the relationship between the industrial revolution and climate change, between the Internet and loss of social cohesion, or between the growth of the global population and the origins of pandemics. And despite enormous investments of public funds in science, especially by high income countries, recent progress on the societal benefits seen and experienced by the world, as measured by, for example, the Sustainable Development Goals, “has, by any measure, been disappointing.”3

Achieving equitable, healthy societies requires new modalities of research that extend beyond the traditional model of creating new knowledge and assuming that it will be translated by the private sector into global societal benefits, said Gluckman. In turn, this requires examining the enormous growth in what he called “the industry of academic science.” Too often, the major beneficiary of research funding has been the academic community itself, “both its institutions and its actors.” Rather than producing knowledge intended to promote societal benefits, science has seemed intent on producing outputs that assist promotions, tenure, institutional reputation, or other direct benefits to the actors within academia. Various mechanisms in the academic industry, such as bibliometrics and rankings, create incentives that result in self-serving behaviors, and these behaviors add to the cynicism toward scientific elites felt in the surrounding society.

To make progress on addressing global sustainability development issues, the scientific research enterprise must engage with stakeholders involved with the organizations and sectors affected by academic research, accept processes that result in codesigned structures and pursuits, and embrace transdisciplinarity, said Gluckman. On this last topic, for example, very few scientists are being trained in the nuances of transdisciplinarity, “what it means, how to assess it, and how it should be produced.” The natural sciences need bridges into other disciplines

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2 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2020, The Endless Frontier: The Next 75 Years in Science, Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, https://doi.org/10.17226/25990; V. Bush, 1945, Science, the Endless Frontier, A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, July 1945, Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, https://www.nsf.gov/about/history/nsf50/vbush1945.jsp.

3 For information about the Sustainable Development Goals, see https://sdgs.un.org/goals.

Suggested Citation:"4 Is the Science and Technology Enterprise Optimized to Benefit Society?." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Transforming Research and Higher Education Institutions in the Next 75 Years: Proceedings of the 2022 Endless Frontier Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26863.
×

and knowledge systems, especially into the social sciences, and need to recognize a far broader range of effective outputs, Gluckman stated. “This means real changes in our industry, and that’s hard because there are so many different actors, from universities to funders to academies, that fix and determine the shape of the system.”

To reinvigorate the social contract between science and the taxpayer, new kinds of missions must be directed toward what society and the planet needs, said Gluckman. This will require new mechanisms that support global, mission-led research that is designed and led in new ways that deal with the real issues of the sustainability agenda. Vannevar Bush identified one mechanism by which new knowledge benefits society, “and I do not want to, in any way, underestimate the political value and importance of that research,” said Gluckman. But circumstances change, “and maybe we need to think not about the endless frontier but about the impending boundaries against which we live.”

THE ROLE OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Asked by the moderator to comment on Karwat’s and Gluckman’s reflections on science and engineering, Nelson agreed that “we have to look honestly at the ecosystem we have.” But as a policy maker and a scholar, she also emphasized the potential of government to use collaboration across the science and technology enterprise to produce different outcomes, even if some prior practices and norms have contributed to inequities. As the previous panel observed, a major issue is who gets to ask the questions and how those questions are generated. Science and technology policy can elevate this issue so that it is considered early rather than after the fact. For instance, decisions about where to site facilities should include communities and other stakeholders in those decisions from the beginning, Nelson said.

For his part, Gluckman emphasized the current gap “between what we know and how it’s translated.” With issues like climate change or the potential for a zoonotic pandemic, the science has been fairly well known but the policy community has been resistant to taking action. “There are enormous social science questions that lie within that gap, and that kind of research is not undertaken or supported.”

Karwat observed that the science in these cases can be easier to resolve than the decision-making based on that science. An issue like climate change involves conflicting values, “and that’s where the difficulty lies.” Economic models, policy models, and long-held beliefs all can be questioned. “We know what we have to do, but are people willing to make those choices?”

As a social scientist, Nelson reiterated that these questions “are quite hard and complicated.” OSTP and the National Science and Technology Council recently rechartered the social and behavioral sciences subcommittee to work on such issues as economic opportunity, information integrity, and climate change communication. However, she also cautioned against thinking about the social sciences as a panacea. “There remain a lot of unanswered questions,” she said. “The social science piece is hard precisely because it is a systems issue.”

Suggested Citation:"4 Is the Science and Technology Enterprise Optimized to Benefit Society?." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Transforming Research and Higher Education Institutions in the Next 75 Years: Proceedings of the 2022 Endless Frontier Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26863.
×

INTEGRATING SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE PUBLIC

Complex problems require pluralistic approaches and large-scale ways of integrating science with the policy communities and end users. “It’s difficult because there’s skepticism about large-scale scientific organizations at times,” Nelson observed. The dilemma for those in science policy is that Bush’s model has done many things well, but in some areas the model is failing.

One essential need is for much better communications and listening between the science and technology enterprise and the broader public, Nelson said. OSTP has limited resources, but the office has tried to do a lot more listening and communicating. “We don’t just do a request for information in which the typical people in the ecosystem will respond. We try to do listening sessions for nonexperts and non-inside-the-Beltway people to engage in a conversation.” Trust in government and in parts of science has declined, Nelson pointed out. Indeed, one of the first executive orders President Biden signed was about scientific integrity, in part to help restore trust in government. “These are dynamic and hard problems,” Nelson observed. “We have to have a sense of humility about that.”

Box 4-1 is a transcript of the pre-recorded remarks provided by Oklahoma Representative (R), Frank Lucas, during the symposium. Ranking Member Lucas’ remarks highlight the bipartisan efforts taken to prioritize the positive effects and influence the scientific enterprise can have on society through the CHIPS and Science Act.

Suggested Citation:"4 Is the Science and Technology Enterprise Optimized to Benefit Society?." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Transforming Research and Higher Education Institutions in the Next 75 Years: Proceedings of the 2022 Endless Frontier Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26863.
×
Page 23
Suggested Citation:"4 Is the Science and Technology Enterprise Optimized to Benefit Society?." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Transforming Research and Higher Education Institutions in the Next 75 Years: Proceedings of the 2022 Endless Frontier Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26863.
×
Page 24
Suggested Citation:"4 Is the Science and Technology Enterprise Optimized to Benefit Society?." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Transforming Research and Higher Education Institutions in the Next 75 Years: Proceedings of the 2022 Endless Frontier Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26863.
×
Page 25
Suggested Citation:"4 Is the Science and Technology Enterprise Optimized to Benefit Society?." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Transforming Research and Higher Education Institutions in the Next 75 Years: Proceedings of the 2022 Endless Frontier Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26863.
×
Page 26
Suggested Citation:"4 Is the Science and Technology Enterprise Optimized to Benefit Society?." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Transforming Research and Higher Education Institutions in the Next 75 Years: Proceedings of the 2022 Endless Frontier Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26863.
×
Page 27
Suggested Citation:"4 Is the Science and Technology Enterprise Optimized to Benefit Society?." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Transforming Research and Higher Education Institutions in the Next 75 Years: Proceedings of the 2022 Endless Frontier Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26863.
×
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On September 22, 2022, the National Academy of Sciences held a symposium entitled Endless Frontier 2022: Research and Higher Education Institutions for the Next 75 Years. The event was a follow up to a February 2020 NAS symposium convened to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the landmark report Science, the Endless Frontier.

Building on the 2020 symposium and on lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, the September 2022 symposium sought to generate tools, strategies, and actionable steps that people and institutions can implement to ensure that science and technology continue to serve the public good. The symposium was designed to progress from broad perspectives that encompass the entire science and technology enterprise to consideration of more specific issues. This proceedings summarizes the 2022 symposium.

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