american perspectives on science and technology policy

Technology in Society 24 (2002) 1–8www.elsevier.com/locate/techsoc

Editorial

American perspectives on science andtechnology policy

1. Introduction

This special issue ofTechnology in Societypresents a variety of U.S. perspectiveson science and technology policy. The contributors, who represent a wide range ofviewpoints and experiences, were asked to address any topic that they felt was parti-cularly important or challenging to current science and technology policy making inthe United States. What emerges is a revealing account of the issues that concernpeople who are active in creating, implementing, and analyzing U.S. science andtechnology policy.

Although this special issue addresses a broad range of subjects, it does not attempta full review of U.S. science and technology policy—such a task would be far beyondthe scope of any single issue of a journal. Contributors focus on non-defense-relatedscience and technology topics. Leaving out defense-related research and developmentis an enormous, but in this case deliberate, omission in any review of U.S. scienceand technology policy, given that the Department of Defense (DOD) accounts foralmost half of the President’s proposed spending on research and development inFY 2002 [1]. The other major omission is any overall study of the role of scienceand technology policy in the health sector. The National Institutes of Health (NIH),with a proposed budget of $23.1 billion for research and developent in FY 2002[2], is second only to DOD in federal funding for science and technology researchand development.

While this special issue touches upon biomedical policy, most contributions dealwith the more “traditional” sciences which are increasingly overlooked in the floodof money and media attention that follows defense and health matters. The papersemphasize the physical sciences, engineering, and the social analysis of science andtechnology. Some papers present “big picture” scenarios, others focus on detailedanalyses of specific programs. Authors range from a former Science Advisor to thePresident to activists for community involvement in policy making. All are unitedby a sense of concern about the direction and future of U.S. science and technology

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policy, a willingness to debate the issues, and to actively contribute to the policy pro-cess.

2. Foundations of U.S. science and technology policy

The United States is the world’s most technologically advanced nation. Americanpreeminence in science and technology is rooted in the Second World War and thepost-War years. Science, technology, and the government became firmly intertwinedin the effort to produce new technologies to fight the Second World War. The infor-mal synergy achieved during the war between government and the research com-munity was given structure in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The structures, prac-tices, and policies set in place in the post-War years, albeit modified andreinterpreted, still set the framework for policy making today.

No review of the development of U.S. science and technology policy would becomplete without acknowledging Science, The Endless Frontier, A Report to thePresident by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Devel-opment, July 1945[2], or John Steelman’s more comprehensive 1947 report, Scienceand Public Policy[3]; two seminal documents that still cast a long shadow on scienceand technology policy making in Washington. Columbia University held no less thanthree conferences over three years (1994–96) with 62 formal presentations to markthe 50th anniversary of the Bush report and assess its impact.1

Vannevar Bush’s novel idea was that scientists should have “ freedom of inquiry” ;they should be free to do science and to set their own research priorities. The roleof the state, according to Bush, is to provide support (funding) for research, not todirect research. Scientists should provide the impetus for research, and then choose,by peer review, who and what should be funded. The National Science Foundation,which stems from the Bush and Steelman reports and is the main source of fundsfor university research in the United States, operates on this system [4]. Bush feltthat, because basic research creates new knowledge, one cannot anticipate its results,but he firmly believed that the nation would benefit from the results, no matter whatthey were.

The United States does not have a Department of Science, or any strong centralbody to coordinate federal research activities, though proposals for such centraliz-ation continue to be made. Responsibilities for federal research and development aredispersed over more than 20 agencies—agencies which often fund outside researchin addition to carrying out their own research programs. The resulting duplicationand competition between agencies fits well with the U.S. system of checks and bal-ances in government. D. Allan Bromley argues in his paper that it is one of thestrengths of the U.S. system.

Science and technology have thrived in the past half-century under robust Bush-and Steelman-style policies, but times change, society changes, and policies evolve.

1 Transcripts of the presentations are available at http://www.cspo.org

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Indicative of the changing times, there has been a revival of science-policy dis-cussion; a number of important studies have been published;2 and the first GordonConference to consider science and technology policy in 30 years was convened in2000. At the dawn of the 21st century there is no comprehensive new model forU.S. science and technology policy. The papers in this issue reflect some of themany changes that have taken place over the past 50 years, and outline conceptsthat must be factored into a new model.

3. Issues in U.S. science and technology policy making

As the papers in this special issue illustrate, there is considerable diversity ofopinion about the current state of science and technology policy in the United Statesand how it should evolve. A brief review of the papers in this volume highlightssome consistent concerns.

3.1. “ What is the end that we seek?”

In his 1998 William Carey lecture to the American Association for the Advance-ment of Science, the late Rep. George E. Brown, Jr., posed what may be the mostfundamental question for science and technology public policy: “What is the endthat we seek?” [8]. Under the American system of government, that end should bedecided by consensus—consensus between the executive and legislative branches(the President and Congress), at the very least, but ideally between the people andtheir governmental representatives. The direction of science and technology shouldbe in step with the direction of the nation. At the height of the Cold War there waslittle doubt about the role of science and technology—it was to provide the meansfor winning the war. In the 1990s, however, the goals became more diffuse. It appearsthat currently the primary goals are improving the health of the population and pro-viding a source of new technologies to fuel economic growth, hence the proliferationof research and development programs at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)and support for industrially directed research programs at the National Institute ofStandards (NIST) and other federal agencies during the Clinton Administration.

These broad goals, however, do not provide an overarching policy framework. Itis clear that both policy makers and scientists are struggling to define policies todirect the role of science and technology. Almost all the papers touch on some aspectof the question “What should we (government, industry, and/or society) be doing,and why, and how?” These questions can only be answered in the context of wherewe (or the government, or industry, or society) want to go. Science alone will notprovide the answers, neither will the humanities or the arts alone. Once any focusedvision for science and technology emerges, be it large or small, then structures canbe put in place to accomplish the vision.

2 Recent publications include D.H. Guston [5]; D.L. Kleinman [6] and D. Sarewitz et al. [7, 405 p.]


Carl Mitcham and Robert Frodeman argue that all the implications of science andtechnology, from the scientific to the philosophical to the cultural, must be acknowl-edged and debated if we are to have a healthy society. They provocatively questionVannevar Bush’s assumption that science is necessarily a good in itself, and ask thatcontinued investment in science be critically examined in the light of the commongood.

3.2. The internal social context of science and technology

Understanding what science and technology are, and how they are done, is essen-tial to defining their place in society. As Katy Makeig points out, science is anattempt to understand the world through systematic inquiry, and technology uses thisscientific framework to create ways to act upon the world. Traditionally, both scienceand technology have been viewed as impersonal activities, free from emotion, humanvalues, and culture. Don Ihde, however, wonders with some amazement how wecould ever have believed that science does not have powerful internal and externalpolitics and culture.3 Summarizing some recent advances in the philosophy ofscience, Ihde shows a middle ground between the extremes of objectivity and relativ-ism.

In a broad-based review of six centuries of science, technology, and politics, D.Allan Bromley clearly shows how developments in science and technology haveinfluenced politics throughout history, and how politics has influenced science andtechnology. He suggests that it may be time for scientists to re-engage with thepolitical process and to join forces with social scientists and humanists to solveglobal problems.

Advances in the philosophy of science are intellectually important—formal recog-nition of the human and social dimensions, indeed imperatives, of science providesphilosophical legitimacy for scientists who participate in the political or policy pro-cess—but it is up to scientists to transform the new realizations into pragmatic action.Bill Bonvillian argues that there is no guarantee of continued public support forscience. Some scientific disciplines, particularly the life sciences, have been excellentadvocates to the public and to policy makers for the importance of their research inrecent times, whereas other disciplines such as the physical sciences have been muchless successful in mobilizing public support. Scientists must explain and justify theirscience to the public and be open to public opinion in order to earn funding forscience.

3.3. The interplay between society, science, and technology

If science has a role in society, what is the reciprocal role of society in science?Who should decide science policy in a democracy? Vannevar Bush suggested thatmany decisions should be left to scientists, without interference from government,

3 For a strong exposition on the personal element in science, see David L. Hull [9, 586 p.].


but concepts have changed as the government-university-industry-public relationshiphas evolved. Industry now influences the direction of science and technology byinvesting large sums of money in certain sectors; foundations, associations, and advo-cacy groups use their influence and money to directly affect choices in science andtechnology research; a well-educated public is no longer willing to cede all decisionmaking to scientists, elected officials, corporations, or bureaucrats. Defining theextent of, and mechanisms for, public participation in science and technologydecision making, at every level from international policies to laboratory projects andfrom multi-national corporations to individual researchers, will be a major challengefor 21st-century science and technology policy makers in the United States.

Jill Chopyak and Peter Levesque examine models for public participation inscience and technology decision making, drawing particularly on innovative Euro-pean Union and Canadian experiences. The flagship attempt to integrate the socialand scientific aspects of research programs in the United States is the Ethical, Legal,and Social Implications (ELSI) program of the U.S. Human Genome Project. LaurenMcCain undertakes a searching analysis of this ELSI program and, while acknowl-edging the ground-breaking efforts to bring an awareness of the public interest intoscientific research, concludes that the program has not risen to meet the great expec-tations placed upon it.

Controversy, like that provoked by the commercialization of genetically modifiedfood crops, might be avoided if the research and development processes were con-tinuously in touch with stakeholder and public input. David Guston and Dan Sarew-itz, drawing on techniques pioneered in the social sciences, propose a methodology—real-time technology assessment—to assess the social impact of emerging techno-logies. Techniques such as real-time technology assessment could join environmentaland cultural impact assessment as cornerstones of the planning process and acceptedpractices in implementing any major innovation.

3.4. Public-sector and private-sector science and technology

Industry now provides more funding for research than does the U.S. federalgovernment. Public policy, as implemented through the spending allocations of fed-eral agencies, no longer determines the dominant research focus of the nation. Theshift in spending power from the public sector to the private sector has major impli-cations for policy making.

The United States is a bastion of private enterprise. The spectacular growth of theU.S. economy in the 1990s has been attributed to a market-driven, entrepreneurialspirit coupled with technological innovation. Industry has always been, and remains,the main funder of the development process, but the private sector increased itsinvestment in research when it realized that the products of science and technologyresearch could be the basis for significant corporate profits. Research had traditionallybeen supported largely by federal funds but in 1996, as both Jim Tsang and BillBonvillian describe, industry funding for science and technology research exceededfederal support for the first time, and its share continues to grow [10]. Industryresearch aims to increase corporate profits; it is not necessarily concerned with the


common good or national priorities. In this new landscape, federal policy makersneed to reassess the role of federal funding for science and technology—returningto the question “What is the end that we seek?” and incorporating stakeholder input—in order to prioritize federal funding.

Jim Tsang, Murray Hitzman, Lauren McCain, and Lance Bush highlight relation-ships between the public and private sectors. In an analysis of federal and private-sector investments in research, Jim Tsang concludes that optimizing the nationalresearch portfolio is not a simple task. If federal research programs are to strike anappropriate balance for the nation, they must now factor in the effects of industrialresearch programs—effects that can change quickly and may be difficult to quantify.Murray Hitzman suggests that federal policy makers should look beyond short-termtrends to the common good in choosing what to fund. He offers the mining industryas an example where federal funding may be needed to achieve the common good,in this case an environmentally acceptable supply of raw materials, because theindustry itself may be incapable of achieving that goal. The inherent tensions betweenthe public demand for access to data and the private-sector need for confidentialityare illustrated by Lauren McCain, with particular reference to genomic information.In his paper on the commercialization of the International Space Station (ISS), LanceBush shows that making policy is not the end of the policy process; policies mustbe implemented. Congress directed that the ISS should be available for commercialuse; NASA then had to make the policy a reality by devising protocols that wouldbe agreed to by 16 participating nations and that would meet the requirements ofboth public and commercial users of the ISS.

The cultures of public and corporate policy making are quite different. Industryendorsement of globalization contrasts with the necessarily country-based emphasisof national policies. If there are to be cross-linkages between the public and privateresearch enterprises, each party must appreciate the very different roles, constraints,and even language of the other. In an industry perspective on policy, ChristopherGreen and Kristin Zimmerman describe how General Motors have attempted to cre-ate a global laboratory network.

3.5. People in science, technology, and policy making

There would be no science and technology without scientists and engineers. Howshould the United States ensure a scientifically literate society and maintain the sup-ply of talent needed to support the country’s highly technological economy and life-style? Jim Tsang expresses industry concerns about the scarcity of U.S. researchers—a scarcity that may be limiting the innovative capabilities of some sectors. The prob-lem shows up at graduate-student level but the number of graduate students in afield is determined by choices made much earlier in students’ careers—choices whichmay be determined by perceptions and lack of opportunity, not by talent or ability.It is in the national interest, according to Daryl Chubin and Willie Pearson, Jr., togive every child an equal opportunity and expectation of studying science and tech-nology; such opportunities have been largely lacking in the U.S. educational system,particularly among minority students.


The career path to science and technology policy is often a serendipitous one, asillustrated by Jane Maienschein’s personal odyssey. She suggests that academics canbring long-range analytical skills and perspective to the short-term activities of policymakers. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) hasfostered good relations between scientists and policy makers for over 150 years. AlTeich describes how the AAAS sets out to influence policy while treading the fineline between maintaining a non-partisan stance and advocating for science.

4. Conclusions

At the dawn of the 21st century federal support for science and technology maybe slowing in all but the defense and health sectors, as signaled by President Bush’sproposed FY 2002 budget. Public acceptance of science and technology as anunquestioned good may be changing as the populace considers genetically modifiedfoodstuffs, access to personal and genetic data, and the environmental impact ofscience and technology. At the same time, many scientists are still ambivalent aboutengaging in social or philosophical dialog on the place of science and technologyin human affairs. The private sector has become the most important source of fundsfor research in many fields. The federal sector is trying to define its role in a changingglobal economy and political landscape. The post-War Bush and Steelman modelsof policy making are breaking down but a new model has yet to be defined.

In this time of change, there are opportunities. Corporate policy making may high-light new paths forward as companies become more sophisticated at analyzing linksbetween science, technology, global events, public relations, and profits. Federal pol-icy makers will need to create new constructs that can accommodate interdisciplin-ary, federal-industrial-private organizational research. They will also have to devisestructures that can incorporate societal input and facilitate open dialog betweendiverse participants. Perhaps federal policy makers need look no further than theirown sector for a model. The federal policy sector is interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary; it is filled with both long-term professionals and accidental tourists; itis attuned to public opinion and to economic conditions. It may, itself, be a modelof how to create opportunities for cross-disciplinary communication within scienceand between science and society.

Organizing U.S. science and technology for the 21st century will be a challenge.An even greater task will be fostering debate on the relationships of science, tech-nology, and society—this is a 21st-century challenge worthy of scientists, artists,humanists, and policy makers!

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the authors of the papers in this issue for their contributions,for meeting very tight deadlines, and for their cheerful acceptance of a few stern


edits. I would also like to thank Carl Mitcham and Murray Hitzman for their activeinvolvement and support.

M.A. BolandDepartment of Geology and Geological Engineering, Colorado School of Mines,

Golden, CO 80401, USAE-mail address: [email protected]

References

[1] White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. A summary of research aspects of thePresident’s proposed budget is available at: http://www.ostp.gov/html/2002rbudget/2002fullrbudget.pdf.

[2] Bush V. Science, the endless frontier: A report to the President by Vanenvar Bush, Director of theOffice of Scientific Research and Development, July 1945. Washington (DC): U.S. GovernmentPrinting Office, 1945.

[3] Steelman JR. Science and public policy. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office; 1947.[4] Blanpied WA. Inventing U.S. science policy. Physics Today 1998;51(2):34–40 [Available at

http://www.nsf.gov/search97cgi/vtopic].[5] Guston DH. Between politics and science: Assuring the integrity and productivity of research. Cam-

bridge (UK): Cambridge University Press, 2000.[6] Kleinman DL, editor. Science, technology, and democracy. Albany (NY): State University of New

York Press, 2000.[7] Sarewitz D, Pielke RA, Jr., Byerly R, Jr., editors. Prediction: science, decision making, and the

future of nature. Washington (DC): Island Press, 2000.[8] Brown GE, Jr. Past and prologue: Why I am optimistic about the future, In: AAAS Science and

Technology Policy Yearbook, 1999. Washington (DC): American Association for the Advancementof Science, 1999 [Text is available at http://www.aaas.org/spp/yearboook/chap3.htm].

[9] Hull DL. Science as a process: An evolutionary account of the social and conceptual developmentof science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

[10] National Science Board. Science and Engineering Indicators—2000. Arlington (Va.): NationalScience Foundation, 2000.

Maeve Boland is a doctoral student in the geosciences and public policy at Colorado School of Mines. Sheworked as a geologist in the minerals and petroleum industries in Ireland, and spent six years in the MineralsDivision of the Geological Survey of Ireland. She worked with the American Geological Institute in Wash-ington, DC, and as an editor for the Society of Economic Geologists in Colorado. She obtained her B.A. andM.Sc. degrees in geology from Trinity College, Dublin.

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