5

Final Observations

In the symposium’s concluding session, Adam Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, thanked the presenters “for a day of extraordinarily interesting and incisive conversations.” Several compelling themes emerged from the discussions, he said, including themes of complexity, thinking “not just reductively but deeply in terms of systems,” and the emergence of scientific questions rather than scientific disciplines as preeminent. “Our practices and policies, strategies and attitudes, need to change in the future in response to the conditions of this new age.”

Interesting tensions also emerged within individual panels, he noted. One is the tension between a desire for flexibility and the challenge of accountability. “For those who have the discretion to be more flexible, how are they held accountable?” Another is the tension between the desire to take risks and to be responsible with public resources. “We all love risky investments that are guaranteed to succeed,” he quipped.

The Sloan Foundation has supported both Endless Frontier symposia because these issues are so “timely and important.” But even though there is great agreement about the importance of the questions, there is much less consensus about the answers, or even about concrete approaches for addressing the questions, Falk noted. Discussions of science and technology policy will continue to revolve around “the central question of how the context in which scientists do their work, and how society supports that work, has changed since the days of Vannevar Bush.”

Despite a lack of consensus about solutions, one shared conclusion clearly emerged from the symposium. “We must attend holistically to the overall social and cultural health of the scientific discipline,” Falk insisted. This requires making science much more inclusive of people of every gender and racial or ethnic background and from every part of our society and every part of the world. “We need all the talents of the human race if we are to address the huge scientific challenges of our time,” said Falk. “It’s critical for science, and it’s also a matter of justice.”

He closed by referencing a comment from Richard Meserve, the moderator of the symposium’s first panel discussion: “Let 100 flowers bloom and 100 schools of thought contend, and let’s keep listening to and learning from each other.”

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