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The US State Department, criticized in recent years for paying insufficient attention to science and technology, has turned to the National Academy of Sciences for advice on how it should best integrate science policy with foreign policy.

In a letter sent to the academy last month, legal counsel to the department, Wendy Sherman, requested that it conduct a study of the department's science programme. The academy's governing board will consider the request later this month.

Sherman's letter conceded that the State Department “may not be doing as much in the science, technology and health areas as we can”. One reason, says Melinda Kimble, Acting Assistant Secretary for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, is a belt-tightening throughout the department that occurred in the mid-1990s.

Funding for science, technology and health is only now beginning to make a modest comeback under Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Historically, scientific agreements with other countries were associated with Cold War strategy, says Kimble, and became lower priority when the Cold War ended.

Only recently, she says, have senior officials at the department, such as Timothy Wirth, until recently the Under Secretary for Global Affairs, and Stuart Eizenstat, Under Secretary for Economic and Business Affairs, begun promoting science as integral to US environmental and trade strategy.

A 1992 report by the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology and Government called for “deep-seated reforms” in the way US international science policy is conducted. These included the creation of the post of Counselor for Science and Technology at the department, and a boost to funds and staff for science, technology and health.

But James Watkins, president of the Consortium for Oceanographic Research and Education, says the reforms have not happened, and “if anything, the situation has worsened”. Watkins and other witnesses at a congressional hearing last week said that US international science policy remains disjointed. They argued that agencies such as the energy and defence departments and the space agency NASA are left to negotiate their own deals, with little coordination from the State Department or anyone else. The hearing was part of the House of Representatives Science Committee's review of national science policy (see Nature 386, 100; 1997).

Watkins, a former energy secretary under George Bush, complained that ‘mega-projects’, such as the Superconducting Super Collider and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, have suffered from the department's lack of involvement. Climate research and oceanographic studies will be similarly impaired, he says, unless there is “radical surgery on today's ineffective system”.

His suggestions include placing scientists in US embassies and for congressional science and foreign relations committees to hold meetings with Albright to emphasize the importance of science to foreign relations.

But Thomas Ratchford, a science policy analyst at a research centre at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, suggested looking outside the State Department for answers. Efforts at reform “have in general failed,” he said. “It is time to quit trying to fix the system directly through State and to enable the technical agencies to partially fix the system.”

Ratchford said other countries often fill diplomatic science posts with people borrowed from technical agencies — a practice the United States may want to try, as career foreign service officers tend to be generalists without scientific expertise. The National Science Foundation would be the logical agency to supply or screen these scientific staff, he said. Kimble hopes the academy study will consider how the department can work with other agencies to help achieve its own objectives.

The witnesses disagreed about how effective international scientific agreements have been. About 3,000 US projects funded in 1995 had some international component, according to a study completed last year by the Rand Corporation at the request of the White House science office. But fewer than 10 per cent were coordinated through the State Department, says Caroline Wagner, a senior policy analyst at Rand. The smaller agency-to-agency agreements tended to be the most effective, she said, and have had a “substantial benefit to thUnited States”.

Ratchford, however, criticized the kinds of cooperative agreements often signed during state visits. “In general these agreements have not been very productive scientifically or diplomatically,” he said. “There is the diplomatic and public relations benefit of the initial signing ceremony, but the scientific and technological results have often been nil or close to it.”

One reason, Ratchford said, is that “it is difficult for diplomats and White House staffers with little experience in research to construct the framework for a viable research effort in the short time available for planning a presidential trip”.