FELlV E.

BROWDER

The basic ethos of our society is what one political philosopher has called possessive or acquisitive individualism, the desire to acquire and possess wealth, power, public celebrity and other individual goods held in general esteem. I f scientists were accused of sharing this ethos, it would hardly seem worthy of anyones even casual attention. Yet scientists have been so accused,and what makes the charge noteworthy is that it is almost the opposite of the truth. Academic scientists as a group, indeed academics generally, rarely covet wealth w i t h any great seriousness. would be hard to see w h y they had chosen such careers if they did. Aside from special classes of economists and political scientists they rarely covet power, political or otherwise. Even if their life goals are achieved to the fullest their celebrity rarely extends beyond their professional peers. I f they demand funds from the federal govern me tit (and ma y a re surprising y passive i n doing so), it is almost always funds needed to do their scientific work, or, at very most, to have students or collaborators to do this work with them. Of course, they have to believe that this work is worth doing and that it is important to find out the basic laws of nature or to discover scientific truths. Perhaps society can forgive them this vanity. There are of course issues of social value involved on a deeper level than those reflected in accusations of acquisitiveness. Scientific research, like the structure of our educational institutions and the framework of technological innovation-with both of which it has been so closely linked - is
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an essential part of the infrastructure of our national society. Without it, the work and life of this society will soon prove unproductive and eventually lose its vitality. We Americans have been extraordinarily careless and disregardful of this infrastructure i n recent decades. We cannot afford to remain so much longer. Why speak of science and the future? Why not science and the future of mankind? After all, as a body of knowledge, of theory and of technique, science is thoroughly international. Scientific t r u t h . i f it is valid, must be so by its nature, without respect to national boundaries, or to the races, creeds or national origins of its discoverers. N o nation can hope to monopolize scientific discovery or techIiiyue in any scientific area for very long, whether by intent or merely by accident. Moreover, through a powerful and deeply-rooted tradition that goes back to the very earliest days of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (and can be traced back even to the ancient world) scientists have treated each other as colleagues, without distinction of national origin or allegiance. Even the brief deviations from this principle, as in Western Europe in World War testify to the strength of this principle through the abhorrence they tend to produce i n the scientific witness to their existence. Thus as knowledge and as discovery, science is transnational in its roots in a way that our culture, our political and social traditions, and especially our historical traditions are not. Yet, a primary fact is that we live in a world of nation-states and that the

sphere of life and activity of each human being is bound up with the nation-state in which that person lives and functions. Scientific institutions, scientists, engineers, teachers as people, the tools of science, and especially the social institutions and purposes within which scientific technology is applied -all are rooted in individual nations (or in a few cases in Western Europe, to regional coalitions of nations). One can emigrate from a nation-state with greater or less difficulty; one cannot emigrate from the system of nation-states. When one speaks of the development of science and of its interaction with technology, especially in the domains of economic production or of military power, one is speaking of national policies, strengths, capacities, resources and goals. International scientific institutions are feeble and have scanty resources, where they exist at all. And even political entities like the major states of the American Union or the largest national or niultinational corporations have neither the stable power nor the resources to play a dominant, independent, autonomous role for very long in the rapidly expanding and increasingly intense competition involved in the development of science, technology and scientific and technical education. I f one pays more than superficial attention to discussions of public policy in countries like France, West Germany and Great Britain, one becomes intensely conscious of this fact. Translations of corresponding discussions and wide-sweeping programs from Japan are also centrally featured in the European press. Many of us re-

cognize the centrality of scientific and technical development and training as a policy concern in mainland China and in the advancing countries of the so-called Third World. The central theme of these discussions-is that the national survival, not to speak of national prosperity, for any of these nations depends on high -or scientific - technology. The indispensable prerequisite is a scientific and technical infrastructure which can bring about the scientific and technical advances to sustain the momentum of development of this technology Compared with statements on these themes emanating from policy groups in Western Europe and the Orient with the most diverse ideological origins, the curious relative silence on the U.S. scene is striking. Over the past few years there have been occasional statements of alarm in the business sections of newspapers because the Japanese, after subjecting U.S. automobile manufacturers and steel-makers to a ruinous competition through their technical superiority, have now dared to take over the world market in certain categories of large integrated circuits. They have even challenged in computers. Yet the difficulties this competition might present to our future as a world economic force.seem to have had, until very recently, no major impact on any broad sector of national policy-making in terms of focused public interest in national policy or science and technology. After all, couldnt our competition with the Japanese be resolved by some oldfashioned measure like the renewal of a tariff war, or perhaps through national incantation? Americans have been extraordinarily complacent over the last few years. We ought to have looked carefully at the logic and facts behind these Western European and Japanese discussions and policies and asked ourselves

whether the United States has the privilege of ignoring what these other countries regard as the central focus for their future development. Are we so far in the lead in science and technology, as some seem to think, that we can afford to neglect serious consideration of national policy in scientific and technical development? Can we ignore the grave national crisis in scientific and technical education at the precollegiate level? Can we continue not to take seriously the strong thrust of the Soviet system in mass scientific and technical education as a major component in their national security policy? Certainly there are some superficial reasons to justify complacency. The United States still has the largest gross national product, though seven ,or eight countries surpass us in this area per inhabitant. The United States still leads the world in scientific prestige and productivity as it has since World War 11 in most major fields of science, though no longer all. U.S. scientists still win most of the Nobel Prizes in the physical and biological sciences as they have done for the last two decades; still dominates the world market for mainframe computers; the United States has the only rocket shuttle. This is enough, say the complacent. Why. should we want more? The answer to that question raises another, and question for meaningful policy analysis, going far beyond the present discussion. To analyze the effects of any given policy (or th.e lack of one), you dont just ask what the results will be tomorrow morning, or the beginning of next week, or the end of next month, or even the beginning of next year. The real question is what this policy-or its consequences either through continuation or reversal- is going to bring about five, ten, or even twenty years from now..The current state is a relatively small part of the analysis; November 1982

the rate of change-even the acceleration of a trend-is often much more important. Take a simple and very obvious example from economic data: The present population of Japan is about half of that of the United States; its gross national product is about 40-odd percent of ours. The comparison is mildly favorable to the United States, and not drastically alarming. If you pay attention to trends, however, what is alarming is that over the 1970s and continuing today, the average yearly rate of increase of .production in Japan has been about 5 percent higher than in the United States year by year, in good times and bad. Do a little arithmetic and ask where we will be ten or twenty years from now if these trends continue. One surefire way to maintain complacency - and the argument has been seriously presented - is to argue that trends dont exist and that the experience of the last decade is misleading. S o m e h o w , p r o d u c t i o n growth in Japan will disappear next year, and by a miracle of willpower and pious thought, our own production will grow gigantically. Very nice, but not very believable. The Japanese are very hard at work, through their development policy in high technology industries and scientific-technical development, to make sure that the trend continues or even increases. Our national inability to think seriously about the future seems to have some curious roots. Let me offer one illustration. A couple of years ago there was a column in the International Herald Tribune by a former subcabinet-level official about this very problem of economic competition with the Japanese. The writer commented that many observers had credited the Japanese with a very rational approach to their economic development but he did not agree. For example, these analysts gave credit to MITI, the Japanese national planning agenBulletin of the AtomicScientists 27

Felix Browder is Max Mason distinguished service professor of mathematics and chairman of the mathematics department at the University of Chicago (60637). This article is adapted from the authors Woodward Court lecture delivered at the University on February 7. 1982. cy for economic and technical development, for having made the decision more than a decade earlier that the future of the Japanese automobile industry lay in the intensive development of computerized subsystems and robotized production. And this prediction is in fact coming true. However, said our insightful columnist, the agency decision was not rational because it was not based upon the state of the automobile market at that It is a strange view of rationality that divorces it completely from objective consequences. What seems to matter to our U.S. pundit is how the process fits into a formal analysis based only upon the immediate situation. The Japanese had carefully analyzed the future, and this commentator chastised them for not ignoring it. It takes intensive training and indoctrination to think in such a spectacularly misguided way - the sort of social phenomenon that, more than 50 years ago, Thorstein Veblen gave the general label trained incapacity. One suspects a thorough cost-benefit brain washing. Yet it probably cannot be rigorously established that it is cost-effective for any given human being to keep on breathing. The more sensible among us will therefore tend to ignore this learned advice. Suppose that we accept the challenge to be future-oriented, at least in trying to diagnose the central problems the United .States faces in the next 20 or 30 years and the general steps necessary to meet these problems. Can we d o so with any degree of sureness? Probably yes, though this affirmative answer has a significant qualification: barring catastrophes. The most menacing potential catastrophe is the possibility of nuclear war, whose outcome would certainly be the reduction of all civilization to absurdity and chaos. A less absolutely menacing catastrophe, which would prevent the positive solution of any
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major problem, would be the disintegration of U.S. society from within through social or economic convulsions. Drastic discontinuities like these cannot be meaningfully predicted. And in certain domains, like the course of the economy from year to year, apparently no predictions that have any degree of consensus or sureness can be reached. The scientific and technological domain is one of the few arenas of human action in which large-scale phenomena can be forecast with some degree of real security. What is technically a n d scientifically feasible (though certainly not its detailed form nor the precise time-scale for its achievement) can be roughly guessed with a reasonable degree of confidence. Many of the problem areas are apparent without expert knowledge: Energy resources: Whatever the time table for the depletion of available fossil fuels and their synthesizable variants as well as of processable uranium, the only possible stable source of large-scale energy in the long run is nuclear fusion-if and when the latter can be put to effective operation. Implementation of the computer revolution in U.S. industrial production and in the organization of U.S. society. Effective use of bio-engineering techniques in industry and medicine and particularly in agricultural food production. Reorganization of industry on a more technologically innovative basis. Reconstruction of the bases of our primary and secondary education to produce a scientifically and technologically competent population. These are heterogeneous problems. The first three involve scientific challenges; the latter two, drastic changes in institutions. All five are focused on the scientific-technological thrust of the future development of U.S. socie-

ty. I t is a thrust we can reject only by rejecting the possibility of national survival and prosperity in the foreseeable future. Science is not a problem. It is almost certainly our most important national resource in the coming historical period. is a resource that needs to be maintained, possibly even improved, but certainly guarded against deterioration. The core of the U.S. scientific enterprise is our system of research universities. They are the envy of the world, and they must be preserved at the highest possible qualitative level. This is not a matter of the self-interest of the universities which, if they were foolish, might be content to survive comfortably at a much lower level of achievement and intellectual contribution than they make today. I f the possibility of finding real solutions to our whole complex of scientific-technological problems is to be realized, the survival of strong research universities as the worlds leading centers of scientific activity must become a central principle of national policy. This whole complex of institutions and resources is a national system. It was built up since the end of World War by an intelligently organized system of federal incentives and support for initiatives by individual scientists, groups of scientists, and scientific and academic institutions. Despite its detractors, it represents one of the major areas of federally sponsored activity run almost solely on the basis of critical assessment of quality of achievement rather than private interest or political or ideological criteria. I t was built over a relatively short period of time, and is one of the glories of our society. It has great momentum today, but could easily be torn down or allowed to dwindle into mediocrity. In the short run, its broadest problem is that of recruitment of new talent. Because U.S. graduate schools of

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science are the wonder of the world it is not surprising that they attract foreign students of great talent and motivation. But one ought to be surprised to find that close to half their students in many fields of science come from abroad. The situation is even more apparent in the engineering field, and is sometimes represented by federal spokesmen as a threat to national security. The reasons for the dwindling numbers of U.S. graduate students in both science and engineering have common elements as well as sharp differences. The most important common element is the rapidly deteriorating situation in the past few years with respect to the mathematics and science education of the mass of students in the primary and secondary schools nationwide. This has clearly generated an increasing percentage of students entering college without the background and motivation to go into science or technology. In the engineering field, difficulties in recruiting for graduate work among U.S. students who have completed engineering undergraduate programs is a consequence of the tremendous market for such graduates on the bachelors degree level, particularly in computer-related fields, as well as the relatively weak economic incentives for doctoral study. In science and mathematics, the basic factor is undoubtedly the much higher valuation placed on personal affluence as an individual goal by recent college generations and the accurate perception that academic and scientific careers are not a reasonable path to such affluence. Whatever the causes, the figures are in and the trend is drastically unfavorable. Including both domestic and foreign graduate students, the numbers of PhDs likely to be produced a couple of years from now in either physics or the mathematical sciences (excluding computer science) .will be less than in the 1950s before Sputnik.

Recruitment of engineers and technicians is one of the prime difficulties to be faced by U.S. high technology industries. Another is the lack of any focused national effort comparable to the massive efforts of the Japa.nese planning agency. The scale and imagination that go into the Japanese projects are difficult to envisage unless you have heard the details of such audacious projects as the Japanese Fifth Generation of Computers, designed to begin shortly and run over the next decade. Comparing the details of this published plan with the fragmentary and short-range effort in the United States, one begins to think we are living in the horse-and-buggy age. Even IBM, freed of anti-trust worries, may not be able to compete, in the long run, on an equal level with the resources mobilized by MITI from the Japanese economy. There is a hint that the IBM people are not sure they can either. There have been sugges-

tions that a federal agency to mobilize U.S. efforts in scientific-technological development should be established, but the Reagan Administrations prejudice against a federal role in the economy makes it unlikely that such initiatives will soon be carried forward. Yet, in todays world, our principal competitors are organizing their resources on a national basis and, in the case of Japan, have succeeded in wiping the United States out of the lead in major high technology industries and markets. It is therefore suicidal to allow the U.S. response to be guided by ideological considerations which make no practical sense in the world environment where we must compete. Similarly, there is a massive contradiction between the widely recognized inadequacy of current U.S. pre-collegiate education for producing a scientifically and technologically literate population, and the Administrations clear lack of interest in any kind of federal role in science education. Professor Izaak Wirszup, my colleague at the University of Chicago, has spent much time and energy in publicizing the contrast between science and mathematics education in the United States and the enormous efforts made in these fields in the Soviet school system since the educational reform of 1966. These efforts were first directed at the need for trained military and industrial personnel in the- Soviet Union, a nation which remains our major potential military adversary. ., Wirszups analysis was confirmed by a similar comparison of trends in pre-collegiate education in Japan and West Germany, published in a National Science Foundation Report to the President in August 1980. Reaction to these facts, however, has been both confused and confusing. The confusion resulted from empty talk to the effect that, by recognizing the existence of the problem, we would commit ourselves to emulating many

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of the undesirable features of the Soviet system of education. How empty this talk is can be seen i f one asks whether recognizing an even less favorable comparison with Japan would force us to adopt Japanese customs or styles. Perhaps the National Science Foundation Report merely went to the wrong President. The present Administration has chosen to abolish science education as a concern of the Foundation; and after the Department of Education made some feeble efforts of its own to consider the problem, that whole Department was dismantled. To transform and improve the massive and unwieldy system of U.S. primary and secondary education involves difficulties that beggar the imagination. My own acquaintance with the details of the problem came during a recent period of service on National Research Council Committee which was asked to survey and make recommendations on national policy for science, mathematics and engineering education. The Committee report reached the National Science Foundation just at the time the Office of Management and Budget first signaled its interest in abolishing the Science Education section of the Foundation. The Report asked for a National Council on Science, Mathematics, arid Engineering Education similar to the Presidents Council of Economic Advisers. No such Council seems likely to appear i n the near future, but it should be held to the honor of the National Science Board, the governing council of the Foundation, that in spite of marching orders from David Stockman and his cohorts to march out of science education, they have taken the rebellious initiative of founding a Commission on Science Education under the direct sponsorship of the National Science Board. This is probably only a gesture in present circumstances. but one that de30

serves public attention and praise. The zeal of the Office of Management and Budget to cut science education out of the federal structure is probably not a simple consequence of the budget-cutting mood, nor even of the passion for states rights and localism invoked in the New Federalism progam. more likely and more important explanation lies in the connection of science education with the ideology of one of the major political clan:; gathered under the banner of the present Administration- the Moral aj ori t y . For several decades, the fundamentalist religious movement now gathered under this name has been carrying on guerrilla warfare with the school systems of the nation, and with the National Science Foundation in particular, over their desire to have biology and cosmology taught from the test of the Bible, or simple paraphrases thereof. Since it is illegal under the U.S. Constitution to teach religious doctrine in the public schools, the movement has taken the name of scientific creationism. As an Arkansas judge recently ruled, there is nothing scientific in taking the date of the creation of the Earth and all living species as 4003 B.C. or 6000 B.C. or 20,000 B.C. on the authority of Genesis, Bishop Ussher, or his somewhat less learned epigones of recent times. (One might even comment that there is something very odd from a religious point of view in labelling the Deity a systematic faker in creating the fossil record to make it look. as though the Earth is several billion years old.) I t appears that responsible people are beginning to realize the gravity and importance of one or another aspect of this whole complex of problem:;. Thus, i n one mornings newspapers a writer recently emphasized the importance of technological innovation and its role in the increase of

U.S. productivity; another, the importance of technically educated and literate personnel in industry and the military; a third, the importance of improving pre-collegiate mat hematics and science education; a fourth, the importance of stable, well-organized, adequate funding for scientific research; a fifth, the importance of maintaining the research universities as a major national resource. The crucial point is that these problems cannot be attacked singly because they are inseparably linked. We must achieve national realization that we live in a world dominated by science and science-based technology and must organize our policies around that central fact. essential step in the formulation of such policies is an explicit recognition that our problenis in this domain are national and therefore can be tackled adequately only at the national level by leadership from the federal government. How such leadership can be exercised to achieve significant positive results within our political and economic system demands careful study and analysis. The growing chorus of voices demanding such analysis and policies gives hope that before too long the issue will actually be met. Alfred North Whitehead was one of the most penetrating of this centurys thinkers. Some of his words, written in 1916, are pertinent to my theme:

In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed. Not all your heroism, not all your social charm, not all your wit, not all your victories on land or at sea, can move back the finger of fate. To-day we maintain ourselves. To-morrow science will have moved forward yet one more step, and there will be no appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the uneducated . 0