0.2 Introduction  (Page 6/6)

During the approximately two decades following the end of World War II, when the United States was the most powerful and influential nation on earth, its military and industrial capabilities unsurpassed, Bush’s industrial policy made sense. However, during the 1970s, the international competitiveness of U.S. industry was weakened by the reemergence of Western Europe and Japan, both of which had been devastated during World War II. As a consequence, the Bush report’s assertion that the federal government should play no role whatsoever in industrial research and development came under reexamination. Did the United States require a broader science policy than Bush had advocated? In particular, could it define and implement elements of a technology policy linked with its science policy? This issue was debated by several key organizations, including the National Academies of Science and Engineering, and was addressed seriously during the first Bush administration.

During the 1980s, a select group of economists began to examine the question of whether Bush’s assertion that science and technology in and of themselves could provide the basis for US prosperity and competitiveness was sufficient. Several scholars advanced the concept of a national innovation system, including not only science and technology but also economic factors such as legal and regulatory regimes, and venture capital firms. Since the early 1990s, then, the question of whether the United States can formulate and implement a coherent national science policy has been expanded to include the question of whether the nation can formulate and implement a national innovation policy.

Despite the absence of a coherent national science (or innovation) policy during this first decade of the twenty-first century, the U.S. science and technology systems continue to outpace those of other nations. Largely as a result of legislation enacted in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the U.S. research university system is universally acknowledged as the best in the world. See, e.g., Richard C. Atkinson and William A. Blanpied, “Research Universities: Core of the US Science and Technology System,” Technology-in-Society 30 (2008), 30-48. The United States remains the world’s leader in industries such as information and communications technologies, biotechnology and nanotechnology, which are often cited as examples of industries based on the university-based knowledge economy, although other nations—particularly China and to a lesser extent India—are bidding to close the gap.

There are, of course, many significant technology-related problems that the U.S. government is only now beginning to address, including environmental problems, with an emphasis on global climate change, over-reliance on petroleum, the development of alternative, sustainable energy sources, significantly rising costs of adequate health care, and woefully inadequate K-12 education. Perhaps some of these problems could be more adequately addressed if the United States had a coherent science policy.

The conviction that scientific knowledge and process are both important for governance predates World War II by at least 150 years. It is evident in the debates in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and in the careers of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, for example. But something more than private conviction was required before the concept of a feasible national science policy could begin to take shape. What was required was the idea that the federal government has legitimate responsibilities for the national scientific enterprise extending beyond its own internal agencies and bureaus, and that discharging those responsibilities would be essential to its own capacity to govern and promote the national welfare. Those related concepts, which began to emerge during World War I and became pronounced during the early years of the New Deal, were articulated—if hesitantly—by both the Brownlow and Bush proposals.

Science has increased enormously in its capabilities and institutional complexities during the three-quarters of a century since those proposals were developed, even as the issues it has been called upon to address have proliferated—and its limitations in addressing them have become more clearly understood. The complexity of the external environment for U.S. science has likewise increased concurrently with the expansion of government, its responsibilities, and recognition of its limitations. As a result of these and other factors, the scope of what a coherent national science policy ought to entail has broadened and become significantly more complex.

Yet to a remarkable extent, the precedents that shaped the Bush and Brownlow perspectives persist in discussions and debates about the appropriate nature and scope of science—and innovation—policy today. One likely reason is that they reflect persistent themes in American intellectual history. How—or whether—those distinct sets of themes might have converged to yield a different kind of science policy in the absence of the overriding obsession with national defense that has been the dominant theme in postwar policy-making remains a fascinating question.

However, it is consistent with the implied assertion of Science—the Endless Frontier that science depends on its prosperity and its ability to serve the national interest in large measure with the changing political environment and, therefore, the broader policies of the federal government. Despite what many scientists would prefer to ignore, the advancement of science is dependent on politics. Examples abound since the establishment of the republic: the failure of Franklin and his colleagues to provide the federal government with broad authority for science in 1787; the establishment of the Land Grant Colleges and creation of the National Academy of Sciences during the Civil War when advocates of states' rights were sitting in the Confederate Capital at Richmond; the creation of the National Research Council during World War I; and the response of the Roosevelt administration to the successive crises of the Great Depression and World War II. This book highlights the increasing dependence of science on its relations with government—and vice-versa—starting with the responses of both science and government to the politics underlying those latter two crises.