Hyman Field
I’m Hyman Field and over the last eighteen months I’ve had the pleasure of working with my colleagues JoAnna Baldwin Mallory and Graham Farmelo in putting this conference together, and we would like to thank all of you for joining us for these few days. It’s been wonderful having you here. We are interested in what your reactions are and you will all get an email with the evaluation in it and we would like your feedback. Anything that we don’t ask you that you want to say, we’d like to hear that as well.
I didn’t plan to do this but after hearing the last panel I have a personal reaction to it. I don’t think the public always needs—and the press may not agree with me about this—but I don’t think the public always needs to hear just about big breakthroughs. I think if the public heard what these people had to say today they would be fascinated. If they saw the enthusiasm about what’s happening and what the potential is, this would greatly narrow the gap. So I hope you can find a way to bring that kind of message to the public.
Now it’s my pleasure to introduce Rita Colwell, who will give us some final thoughts before we leave. Most of you probably heard her introduced the other evening. If you didn’t happen to be there, very briefly she is Distinguished Professor at the University of Maryland in College Park and at Johns Hopkins Bloomsbury School of Public Health. She’s also chairman of the Canon U.S. Life Sciences, Incorporated. Before that, she was the director of the National Science Foundation and was my boss for a long time. I think I was really blessed with the fact that Rita understood and supported public science education. She understood the importance of it and was a champion for it in more ways than I sometimes realized, I think. One other thing that I didn’t know about her until last night was that several years ago, she decided that she needed to make a film to help in her work. Since she knew the content, she found a very creative producer and a creative writer and they made a half hour film on biology and it won the Cannes Film Festival as the outstanding documentary. For those who are in production, she set a challenge for you, however, because I also learned that her budget for out-of-pocket production expenses for that film was $3,000. So you’ve got a hard act to follow. Rita Colwell.
Rita Colwell
Thank you, Hyman. I have had an impossible task. It was to summarize this wonderful meeting and to make some comments about going forward. I’m not going to summarize the entire meeting. I’m going to make only a few points and challenge the audience. Science + Society: Closing the Gap, the conference that we participated in over the last couple of days, was organized to consider the pervasiveness of science in national and international issues and to examine strategies for engaging the public more clearly and more closely with a scientific agenda.
On Friday night JoAnna Baldwin Mallory stated the goals of the conference more succinctly; to understand better the importance of science and to share science and its benefits amongst all stakeholders, including the public. Also, to take a critical look at how science is communicated to the public; to learn how to do that better; and thirdly, to create an event that crosses academic disciplines, diverse professions, and transcend the public divide; in a word, to foster public understanding of science.
On Friday night the enormous benefits of science, engineering, and technology were cited by Joseph Hulihan. He gave us a strong exhortation to improve the understanding of science and to stimulate interest in young people to follow careers in science.
Shirley Ann Jackson set the stage for us. She was highly articulate and illustrated very well the metaphor of the marketplace, the agora, the societal nexus of the ancient Athens society. It was a fitting metaphor because in ancient Athens it was where the religious and cultural center existed; and translated today, it’s the professional societies, a meeting like this, the unions, the media, the entertainment industry, and the pervasiveness of the Internet. So Shirley spoke to us, stating clearly that we are the voices in the agora making ourselves heard. It is for us who must assist the public to select its truths, the leaders to help them make public decisions.
Since World War II, science in the U.S. has been predicated on the model of Vannevar Bush. No, he’s not related to George W. Vannevar was brilliant, articulate, and left a legacy of a strong bond between the government and the research universities. He understood that basic research leads to innovation, to discovery. He knew that the source of discovery could not be predicted and that investment in human capital paid off. We have a legacy of U.S. domination in science and engineering since the end of the World War II. It’s a rich period of sixty years during which we saw the development of atomic energy, jet-rocket propulsion, laser optics, nanotechnology, and much more.
Science is the root of our success. It is perhaps so imbedded in our culture today that we take it for granted. Dr. Jackson spoke eloquently on other topics, including energy, but she really left a very powerful message. Education is the key, but we are in the midst of a quiet crisis in science education. Vice President Gore was relaxed, witty, articulate, learned, and quoting philosophers, scientists, and volumes of data. Where was that Al Gore when we needed him during the year 2000? Well, he did carpet bomb us with the inconvenient facts of climate change and the fate of planet Earth, the Goldilocks planet of Carl Sagan, not too cold, not too hot, just right, but ominously painting the future to include a warmer planet, with the potential for a lot of unintended consequences. This morning on CNN, a 7.5 earthquake was reported to have occurred in Indonesia and probably another tsunami is on the way. It would be hard to ignore the horses of the apocalypse that are rampaging this wonderful blue planet of ours; severe storms, unusually mild winters, unseasonal blooming of flowers, and more. You can recite these changes as well as I, if not better.
There’s another climate that has changed and it was expressed very well by the Vice President. That’s the climate of learning, of education, the "information ecology " of our time. The age of print, as he said, ended forty years ago. TV is now dominant. The average American—it is hard to believe this fact—watches TV four-and-a-half hours each day, the Japanese five hours a day. I can barely stand watching it for twenty minutes, I must say. But most dangerous is the lack of support for science and science education; closures of libraries, cuts in American science education.
Democracy itself really is in trouble. This leads me to my major message as this conference closes. There have been many words of praise for the National Science Foundation and I believe firmly that is deserved for the way NSF funds science, mathematics, informal science education, K-12, undergraduate, graduate, and continuing science education. I’ve heard no one express concern that this administration has moved funds out of the NSF education directorate and transferred those funds to the Department of Education, almost $200 million. NSF was judged "the best managed agency in the entire federal government, " in the words of Mitch Daniels, the former head of OMB. He said that at the National Press Club, "NSF is the best managed agency in the entire federal government. " And this was during my tenure. The NSF budget increased approximately seventy percent, from 1998 until 2004. When I left NSF, finishing my term in 2004, the budget decreased five percent immediately thereafter and has gone down since. This should not be happening. NSF, during that period of time from 1998-2004, saw $240 million a year for those five years invested in nanotechnology, and you’re seeing some of the fruits of the investment. We invested over that period of time a billion new dollars in information technology. We established bio-complexity. We doubled the math budget, but we also analyzed the budget and determined that what the NSF budget should be truly is nineteen billion dollars, not six billion. So I challenge you, as citizens, to work toward increasing the budget, but more than that, to fight for returning the nearly $200 million back to NSF for science education.
What happened in that period of time was that ideology stepped in. "Discovery-based science " was not popular with the current administration. Yet for the last two days what we have been hearing that is dearly needed is to teach children to think, to challenge children to work out for themselves and in their own way, understanding of science.
We also discussed controversies, a very interesting discussion of science, ethics, and religion. The statement was made that we need to seek allies in the religious communities. Just this week, E.O. Wilson and Eric Chivian at Harvard, with Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals, organized a meeting that brought together scientists and evangelicals. I was able to participate along with Gus Speth, Jim Hansen, Peter Raven, and other scientists. It was a very interesting meeting. We found we had common ground, namely a need to reverse climate change and preserve biodiversity. At the National Press Club, we released a public joint statement from the scientists and evangelicals asking that we work as a nation to reverse climate change and preserve biodiversity, to reverse loss of species. Andy Dobson spoke beautifully of the integrated web of nature on this planet.
There were things we learned in this meeting, through Lawrence Krauss’s wonderful discussion. He said, "You know, being scientifically illiterate has become a badge of honor in our culture. we have got to change that. " And as he and many other speakers pointed out, we need a scientifically literate workforce. We must teach science and mathematics to our children. As Eugenie Scott pointed out, science is a way of knowing. It may be limited to explaining the natural world and natural processes, but the ways of knowing include science, personal insight, intuition, and authority—a subdivision of authority might be revelation—but in any case, as Gerry Wheeler said, "We’re on the wrong track. We’ve been emphasizing national standards. We’re teaching to the test and that appears to be all that counts. " Well, from the audience came questions that pointed out that we have to get teachers to teach how to think about what’s true and what’s not true. We can find all the facts we want on the Internet; but thinking we must ingrain in our students. It’s important for our students to know how to think—not to just repeat factual information. Then, of course, one sound bite that is memorable was spoken by Jeffrey Brown, who told us of a museum in Kentucky that displays a dinosaur with a saddle on it! It represents the belief of that community that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. It epitomizes the very real problem that we have facing us.
Now let me also mention that the media, journalists, and TV representatives speaking today who were terrific in presenting some serious problems. Deborah Blum pointed out that the amount of science covered by the print media is shrinking. She mentioned the Dallas Morning News which had one of the best science sections in the country. Tom Siegfried was the editor of that section and it was folded into a lifestyle section. Tom and his staff were let go and the focus now is on "news you can use, " mainly health-related. The media speakers strongly stated that it was hard to get scientists to speak to them, but it is important to understand that, in the culture of scientists, it is more meaningful to a scientist to be published in Nature, Science, Cell, Phys Rev Letters, PNAS or the Journal of the Royal Society. (They would give an arm or a leg for publication in those journals, but not for an article in The New York Times or The Washington Post.) In fact, peer pressure is so fierce that presentations on TV or in newspapers do carry a kind of negative reaction from peers. That’s a barrier we must work together to overcome. Young scientists who are not tenured cannot risk losing funding if considered to be "too public. "
We also learned in this meeting that there are many ways to present science and some are very successful.
In summary, this has been a very powerful meeting. A meeting of the minds of sympathetic souls from all aspects of public education: formal education, the arts, the sciences, and a wonderful session on both art and science. I would not attempt to summarize the beauty and soulfulness of the morning session except to say that we are perhaps changing C.P. Snow’s two cultures to a gradient between the arts and sciences. Perhaps a little more intense at each end of art and of science, but still a connection that is forming and becoming stronger.
There is such beauty in science; just think of fractals, chaos theory. There’s a wonderful program at MIT funded by NSF on science and art. Some might say that an art program at MIT is an oxymoron, but that is not true. The National Academy of Sciences offers spectacular displays of art, focused on the beauty of science. The challenge for us now is a scaling problem. How do we take the wonderful ideas that we’ve heard—the new ways of presenting science to the public, of how to work effectively with children to develop programs that work for one on one, or perhaps for a dozen students—and scale them to 300 million people? How do we bring this beauty, this understanding of the fundamental nature of science in our lives to the larger public?
Some have said here at this meeting that it is a marketing problem. We need to find a way to bring science to the larger middle. Those of us who are the elite because we’re here at this meeting must understand that we need to interact with those who don’t understand science. As one teacher whom I met at this meeting asked, "What do you do about young children, four or five years old, who didn’t even know what a book is, and when given a book didn’t know what to do with it, didn’t have any idea how to hold it, let alone read it? " It is an economic chasm, the privileged versus the under-privileged. We’ve got to bring together these communities. It’s a scale-up problem, it’s a marketing problem, and also it’s a business community problem. All must work together to be part of the consilience Ed Wilson has described.
Let me close by thanking our organizers who were fantastic in bringing together this marvelous gathering of minds to focus on the future and on the precariousness of our civilized society, and also to thank them for their hospitality. My wish is for a safe journey home for all of you and, in the note of consilience, Godspeed.