Science and the World's future
Bruce Alberts
President, National Academy of Sciences
Washington, DC
The following extracts are taken from Bruce Alberts' presidential address to the annual meeting of the US National Academy of Sciences, delivered in Washington on April 26 1999. The full text of his address can be found here.
How can our academy move more assertively into the international arena to ensure that the type of science and technology advice that so wisely informs policy at home can help inform decisions abroad?
Four years ago, we took a first step in global collaboration when we joined with other scientific academies of the world to create the InterAcademy Panel on International Issues, or IAP, an informal network now totaling 80 academies. And we have developed a web site
to promote rapid communication between these academies, as they prepare for a May 2000 Conference of Academies in Tokyo. The conference will address the many opportunities and challenges for scientists as the world accommodates an estimated 10 billion people in the 21st century.
As our next bold step in global collaboration, we hope to create an international version of our National Research Council. We plan to help establish an InterAcademy Center, with a multinational board, as a flexible mechanism for organizing special panels of top-level scientific, engineering, and health experts.
These panels of experts would be set up on demand to advise global institutions -- such as the United Nations and the World Bank -- on issues of critical importance to them.
Why this, and why now? In the years ahead, policy-making institutions all over the world will face increasingly complicated issues involving questions of scientific validity and balance. The world badly needs an impartial mechanism, based only on science, to promote smarter decision-making on such issues as agricultural strategies for Africa, safe drinking water in Bangladesh, and energy options for Asia.
The world's academies and their counterpart organizations are the ideal institutions for providing independent, credible, timely, multinational advice on a broad range of such issues -- and we are presently working to help them accept this important responsibility.
Humans are probably hard-wired by evolutionary selection to expect the future to be just like the past. Perhaps this explains why we are so haunted by history in many parts of the world today. In a period of rapid technological change like the one we are experiencing, the academies of the world are needed to help all societies envision a different future: one that will be focused on improving the human condition and on scientific values.
These values are so fundamentally important they bear repeating -- honesty, generosity, a respect for evidence, and openness to all ideas and opinions irrespective of their source. These are values necessary for making our enterprise work -- values that most scientists take for granted. But any look at the history of the world in this century would show that they, unfortunately, are not universally shared.
I continue, however, to be inspired by a book written more than 40 years ago about science, Science and Human Values, by Jacob Bronowski. His book, triggered by the trauma that he experienced visiting Nagasaki in 1945, includes this passage:
"The society of scientists is simple because it has a directing purpose: to explore the truth. Nevertheless, it has to solve the problem of every society, which is to find a compromise between the individual and the group. It must encourage the single scientist to be independent, and the body of scientists to be tolerant. From these basic conditions, which form the prime values, there follows step by step a range of values: dissent, freedom of thought and speech, justice, honor, human dignity and self respect.
"Science has humanized our values. Men have asked for freedom, justice and respect precisely as the scientific spirit has spread among them. "
As we enter a century that will be dominated by continual advances in science and technology, the world's scientists must work together to create a communication network that is specifically designed to empower individual scientists and scientific organizations with valuable knowledge and skills.
I suggest that the world's major scientific organizations cooperate to focus on the following two-part strategy: Connecting all scientists to the World Wide Web, where necessary by providing subsidized Internet access through commercial satellite networks.
Taking responsibility for generating a rich array of scientifically validated knowledge resources, made available free on the Web, in preparation for a time when universal Internet access for scientists is achieved in both developing and industrialized nations.
By connecting all scientists in the world to each other and by providing them with rapid access to invaluable information stores, we aim to increase both the potential value of scientists to their societies and their status in the eyes of their governments and fellow citizens.
As Bronowski emphasized, we will thereby also promote the world-wide diffusion of scientific values. And with scientific values we shall spread tolerance and democracy, until they encompass all of the people on this globe.
If we are to reach this goal, connecting scientists to each other is only the first step. Scientists everywhere must use these initial connections as a tool for spreading their knowledge, skills, and values throughout their own nations, including their local communities.
By taking full advantage of new information technologies, the scientific community has an unprecedented opportunity to close the vast "knowledge gap" between all peoples. How might this be possible? One wonderful example that points the way forward is the way that the M.S. Swaminathan Foundation has established an experimental network in India that will soon connect more than 20 isolated rural villages to a wireless Internet service. About half of the population in most of these villages has a total family income of less than $25 per month.
The project is designed to provide knowledge on demand to meet local needs using the World Wide Web, and it does so through a bottom-up process. The process starts with volunteer teams that help poll the villagers to find out what knowledge they want.
Particularly popular thus far are women's health information, advice on growing local crops and protecting them from diseases, the daily market prices for these crops, local weather forecasts, and clear information about the bewildering array of programs that are provided by the Indian government to aid poor families.
To participate, each village must provide a public room for the computer system, as well as the salaries for a set of trained operators. In return, the village receives the needed hardware and maintenance for the communication system, specially designed Web sites in the local language that convey the requested information, and training programs for those villagers who have been selected to run their local knowledge system.
Drawing on this concept, I envision a global electronic network
that connects scientists to people at all levels -- farmers' organizations and village women, for example. The network will allow them to easily access the scientific and technical knowledge that they need to solve local problems and enhance the quality of their lives, as well as to communicate their own insights and needs back to scientists.
Most of the system operators and volunteers in the project in India are women. For this reason, this "Information Village" program also increases the status and influence of women by making them the primary local knowledge providers.
The program has been set up as a scientific experiment with computer system location, association with a preformed community group, and so on, being used as input variables. I am enormously impressed with the quality of thought that has gone into this project, as well as by the energy, dedication, and skill of the young Indian scientists who are carrying it out.
We have been struggling in our own Academy with the question of how we might help to catalyze programs that bring the benefit of information technology to our inner cities. In the United States, we generally design such experiments from the top down, deciding what services we will deliver to communities or schools, and then searching for a partner who is willing to accept those services.
My experience in India has made it clear to me that our nation would be much more successful in such endeavors if we were humble enough to incorporate the potential beneficiaries of a service into its initial planning.
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Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 1999 Registered No. 785998 England.