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U.S. SCIENCE
AND THE THIRD WORLD (Kettering paper) March
1982
d. Health
The above pattern applies to health as well as population,
agriculture, and energy. Most tropical diseases receive relatively
little research funding. Worldwide funding for schistosomiasis research,
for example, is about 3 cents per case, compared with $30 per case spent
United States alone for research on muscular dystrophy, and $209 per
case of cancer.(22) Schistosomiasis is a debilitating
disease, afflicting an estimated 200 m people in Asia, Africa, the
Caribbean, and Latin America. It is increasing in prevalence, incidence,
and intensity in conjunction with building dams and irrigation projects
which harbor snails, the intermediate host for the schistosome parasite.
This disease, like malaria and others, is unlikely to be
controlled by the discovery of a single drug or vaccine. A range of
efforts will be needed, and the related research agenda is extensive.
Evidence that under certain circumstances the parasitic schistosome is
vulnerable to the body’s immune defenses has improved prospects for a
vaccine considerably. Other positive recent developments include
indications that a new drug, praziquantel, may be effective as a cure,
although it is still too costly for mass treatment of large populations.
The strategy of concentrating treatment on targeted populations who
appear to be prime carriers of the disease——a strategy that worked
well in the successful campaign to eradicate smallpox——is also being
investigated.
As in other fields (perhaps it should be added to our pattern),
U.S. leadership in combating schistosomiasis is in the hands of a
private foundation. The Edna R. McConnell Clark Foundation of New York
has committed a major segment of its development program since 1973 to
supporting work in schistosomiasis. In addition to spending over $2
million per year on research, the foundation periodically produces a
strategic plan for research in the field. The other major private donor
is the Rockefeller Foundation, contributing just under $1 million per
year.
Internationally, the World Health Organization (WHO) Tropical
Diseases Program focuses on five major human parasitic diseases:
schistosomiasis, malaria, filariasis, trypanosomiasis, and leishmaniasis.
It commands an annual budget of about $25 million, of which less than $2
million is devoted to schistosomiasis. In 1979, the U.S. government
spent about $3.5 million for schistosomiasis research, plus its share of
the WHO budget. AID spent just over $8 million on health research
generally in FY 1980, including $4 million for WHO programs.(23)
AID did fund research on treatments for schistosomiasis, with
encouraging results, but research of this sort is the exception rather
than the rule for the agency. AID strategies in the health field have
four key components:
·
Support for broad, community—oriented networks to
provide low—cost primary health care services;
·
Disease control;
·
Water and sanitation; and
·
Planning and manpower.(24)
Of these, AID accords higher priority to the delivery of primary
health services —— a vital area, but not one in which the American
experience is much admired.
Research is an important component of disease control, but most
of the funds are used for control programs rather than research. AID has
had a long—standing interest in malaria, for example, but of the $535
million spent on bilateral assistance for malarial control from 1957 to
1972, only about 0.1 percent went for malaria research. Research on a
malaria vaccine began in 1966, however, and AID is now devoting about
$2.5 million per year to this purpose. Meanwhile, the research agenda
related to malaria has grown. Drug-resistant malaria,
insecticide—resistant mosquitoes, and a dearth of vector biologists
have led to a resurgence of the disease to alarming proportions.
In 1978, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued a report entitled
Strengthening U.S. Programs to Improve Health in Developing Countries,
the result of a study by the prestigious international committee of the
IOM. Its findings are worth noting:
The estimated U.S. funds devoted to international health
activities in FY 1976 were about $408 million, of which almost 90
percent went to technical cooperation on health services and family
planning programs. The balance supported research. AID bilateral
programs accounted for just over half of the total funds expended:
assessed contributions for multilateral agencies 37 percent, and the
Department of Health, Education and Welfare and the Defense Department
together less than 11 percent.
The IOM concluded that there were four major problems with the
pattern of our international health activities:
·
“Inadequate access by the U.S. government to the major
U.S. sources of health expertise, mainly in the medical schools and
public health faculties;
·
“Too little support for research and development on
major health problems of the developing countries;
·
“Inadequate arrangements for U.S. backstopping of
multilateral health programs; and,
·
“Inadequate organizational arrangements for policy
development, planning and coordination of U.S. international health
activities.”(25)
Much of the difficulty is attributed to AID’s statutory
mandate, which is too narrow and too short—term to permit it to
establish stable, flexible relationships with the primary sources of
U.S. health expertise. Also, the statutory mandates of the federal
health agencies in HEW are too restrictive to allow a serious commitment
to the health problems of developing countries. AID can afford to invest
relatively little in research, and the research—funding agencies can
afford little attention to developing countries. Thus our biomedical,
engineering, and social science capabilities are hardly tapped for the
needs of developing countries.
Dr. John Bryant, director of the Columbia University School of
Public Health and chairman of the IOM International Committee, later
joined HEW as its senior executive for international activities. He
organized and chaired an interagency committee on international health,
which improved the policy coordination problem noted in the study.
The general problem of inadequate use of our major health
resources remains much as it was described by the IOM because the
statutory mandates are unchanged and the budget process continues to
frustrate many a good intention.
e. The
Budget Process
While the search for vaccines against schistosomiasis, the
reversible sterilization process, or biological means for greater
nitrogen fixation captivates the mind, the budget process ties the arms.
Simply put, the budget process requires each agency to rank its proposed
activities in accordance with the priorities embodied in the pertinent
legislation. Programs and projects are clustered into categories that
would be undertaken at various levels of funding. The actual funds
received determine where the line is drawn: the programs above the line
are implemented, and those below are deferred.
This logical process works reasonably well for domestic
activities, but is seriously flawed on international matters for two
reasons: the international constituency lacks political leverage, and
the policy objectives to be served often exceed the mandate of a single
agency.
The constituency issue is straightforward. Agencies considering
the uses of limited resources are naturally under pressure from U.S.
institutions and members of Congress to favor domestic activities, even
when international action might contribute more to the objectives in the
statutory mandate in the long run. The mandates themselves are heavily
weighted toward domestic purposes by members of Congress who choose to
serve on the authorizing and appropriating committees governing the
agencies. Members with international concerns serve on foreign relations
committees, and these do not deal with the affairs of the
science—based agencies.
The issue of policy objectives is more complex. International
scientific or technological activities, carried out or supported by
government funds, can serve a variety of objectives. The department or
agency proposing such activities can take into account only its own
statutory objectives in ranking them. This means, in effect, that the
potential contributions to foreign policy aims or development from an
international project by DOE or USDA are largely ignored in the
departmental rankings. Consequently, some activities that would merit
funding if the composite national interests were counted will not be
undertaken. Also, projects that the agency does undertake tend to
be structured with only the agency’s needs in mind and may miss
opportunities to achieve foreign policy or development objectives.
All of this sounds abstract, but the significance is that there
is no budget for science and technology for foreign policy purposes and
no effective way to build foreign policy considerations into the
international activities of other departments.
Our system for allocating public research and development
expenditures is archaic. Our huge national research establishments are
confined to the domestic stage, while virtually every one of their major
problems is international or even global in scope. The global dimensions
of problems are assigned to our dwindling foreign aid program, as though
addressing these problems would only benefit other countries. But the
aid program has other, more immediate, problems to deal with. So very
little is done about the long—range threats to the quality of life on
earth —— the very problems with which we are best equipped to deal.
4. REMEDIAL EFFORTS
The deficiencies of America’s international performance in
scientific and technological activities have not gone unnoticed, and
there have been attempts to remedy the situation. Reviewing these
efforts illustrates how difficult it is to change established patterns
of government behavior.
In 1961, the president’s Science Advisory Committee recommended
that $100 million per year be devoted to research related to foreign
assistance.(1) This led David Bell, then administrator of the
newly reorganized AID, to create the Technical Assistance Bureau (TAB)
in the agency. By 1966, however, TAB was spending only $9 million on
research.
TAB has been renamed and redirected at least twice since then.
Its designation as the Development Support Bureau (DSB) reflected a
turning away from longer—range research projects in favor of research
in support of field operations. This was consistent with the New
Directions legislated in 1973, which directed AID to focus its efforts
on the direct alleviation of poverty. New Directions not only lowered
expenditures of development-related research in the United States, but
also cut back projects in the field that were designed to strengthen the
institutional capacity of developing countries to solve their own
problems.
New Directions was in some ways a needed corrective to AID
policies, which often benefited the relatively well-off persons in
developing countries, but its interpretation and implementation overshot
the mark. AID objectives have become even more short-term than in the
past as a result.
In 1981, Dr. Nyle Brady was appointed senior assistant
administrator of DSB, the “senior” denoted both his personal
prestige and the new importance to be assigned to the unit. Brady was a
distinguished director of IRRI, where he pioneered the new cooperative
relationships between IRRI and the national agricultural research
systems in Asia, before his appointment to DSB.
One of his first moves in AID was to rename the unit the Science
and Technology Bureau. He then sought to gain professional and
administrative control over the technical support staffs in the regional
bureaus. Failing in this, he organized technical committees on major
problems, in which regional staff members sat with his bureau
specialists and mapped strategies. Brady has recently drawn up plans for
major new research initiatives on persistent development problems,
requiring an estimated $100 million in additional funds. Not surprising,
his rationale is strikingly similar to that put forward for research and
capacity-building by the planners of the ISTC.
In addition to overcoming the anticipated objections of budget
chief David Stockman, Brady and his colleagues will need to confront the
serious difficulties encountered by his predecessors in making AID a
competent research agency. AID’s deficiencies as a research agency
have been analyzed in a number of studies dating back to the Gardiner
Report in the mid-1960s. These deficiencies include the limited
technical qualifications of AID staff; the inhospitable climate an
operating agency offers to highly trained scientists and technical
personnel; the operational procedures of the agency, many of which have
been forced upon it by an unsympathetic Congress; its lack of contact
with the middle-income countries, where cooperative scientific
relationships could be most fruitful; and the limited ability of the
Agency to tap the main scientific strengths of other agencies and the
private sector.
None of these defects is inherently beyond remedy, but the remedy
could fundamentally alter the nature of AID, which is now performing a
valuable development function. Indeed, to deal with global problems
under the development rubric leads to a confusion of objectives that can
do damage both to the foreign aid program and to our ability to respond
to impending threats to our own quality of life. Funds for research will
appear as diversions from resources desperately needed to alleviate
poverty, and will be kept at a level well below what is needed as long
as Congress and the American people regard them as handouts to
foreigners. Development and research are both frustrated by an
unsuitable marriage.
The Gardiner Report, recommending that a separate institute be
created for higher education and research, was quietly ignored. Two
later efforts, the Pearson Report of 1970 and the Brookings Study of
1977, received more serious attention, but ultimately neither was
accepted.
Pearson recommended that an International Development Institute (IDI)
be created to handle the scientific side of the foreign aid program. The
National Academy of Sciences examined the idea and gave it strong
endorsement. President Nixon proposed the IDI to Congress in 1971, but
Vietnam and Watergate prevented him from pressing the issue. Congress
neglected even to hold hearings on it.
The Brookings Study, for many of the same reasons cited in
previous reports, also recommended a separate institution for science
and technology. It proposed an autonomous public foundation with its own
board of directors to work with both the public and private sectors on
research problems and technical cooperation with developing countries.
President Carter was attracted to the idea and announced the
creation of the foundation, rather prematurely as it turned out, in a
speech in Caracas in April 1978. A planning office set to work drafting
a presentation to Congress later that year. In the eighteen months that
the idea was alive, it was reshaped to meet the presumed wishes of
Congress. The autonomy of the unit was diluted by placing it under IDCA
as a parallel agency to AID and Overseas Private Investment Corporation.
It was called an institute rather than a foundation. And its rationale
was oriented to the scientific aspects of problems afflicting the
poorest of the poor.
The Institute for Scientific and Technological Cooperation (ISTC)
was authorized by both houses of Congress in 1979, but authorizing and
appropriating committees for a given activity have different members.
The Senate appropriations subcommittee overturned the work of the
authorizing committees by refusing to vote funds for the new institute.
The ISTC had a number of friends in Congress, but the issue was
so obscure that few voters would know of its passage or defeat. When
Senator Dennis deConcini of Arizona, abetted by William Jordan, head of
the subcommittee staff, fought hard against creation of the ISTC, his
determination carried the day. Senator deConcini makes his reputation
for fiscal soundness by picking out minor issues such as U.S.
participation in the United Nations University or the International Year
of the Child, and blocking their passage. His attack on the ISTC ignored
the purposes of the institute and concentrated on the folly of creating
yet another federal agency. He read into the record detailed staffing
plans, with salary levels attached, neglecting note that all positions
would come under existing personnel ceilings.
The administration, with unseemly haste, scurried to find an
acceptable compromise. As a result, a cut—down science program was
grafted on to AID, under legislation that insulated it from the rest of
the agency. There it remains, with a staff of three, side by side with
Brady’s Science and Technology Bureau. The compromise in effect threw
out the baby, and kept the bath water.
It was a Catch—22 situation. By tailoring ISTC to fit the New
Direction’s mandate of AID in order to get Congressional approval, the
institute’s planners, including myself, left themselves vulnerable to
the charge that what they planned to do was really AID’s business.
Two other failed initiatives of the Carter administration deserve
mention: the attempt to formulate a national policy on science and
technology for development, and The Global 2000 Report.
Prompted by the impending UN Conference on Science and Technology
for Development (UNCSTD), the National Security Council in early 1978
set about preparing a presidential review memorandum, an interagency
effort to provide policy options to the president on international
science and technology activities. By February 1979, an options paper
existed in draft. Most agencies concurred that more science and
technology activities were needed for a variety of purposes, but they
did not agree on what should be done. The Department of Labor opposed
any new programs because they might promote export-oriented industries
in areas where excess world capacity already existed, and OMB thought
that more analysis was required and further action should await the
creation of the ISTC. There the matter rested.
The U.S. delegation went to UNCSTD in Vienna in August 1979,
armed with the ISTC as the principal U.S. contribution to the conference
objectives. Not only did we fail to come through with an ISTC, but, as
noted earlier, we helped engineer the creation of a UN Interim Fund for
Science, Technology, and Development, to which we later refused to
commit funds.
The U.S. record in international affairs of this sort would be
amusing if it were not so embarrassing. In this case, embarrassment was
muted by the fact that no major U.S. newspaper bothered to cover the
conference, although it was front-page news in most of the rest of the
world.
The Global 2000 Report to the President was prepared by
the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the Department of State,
with the cooperation of eleven other agencies. It was done in response
to President Carter’s request for a one-year study of the probable
changes in the world’s population, natural resources, and environment
through the end of this century. The study took three years instead of
one and was issued in July 1980.
The report did not impress the scientific community in this
country. The year 2000 is an arbitrary date —- a round number that
suggests a milestone in human history. But it is too early for the worst
dangers of current trends in population, resource use, and environmental
deterioration t have been realized. The data used were sometimes out of
date or inaccurate, and the interactions among variables less complete
than in other available models, such as those designed by the Club of
Rome team at MIT or the UN model of Leontief. The weakness of the
relationships of variables was recognized by the authors who found, by
de-linking other models to a comparable extent, that their results were
likely to be more optimistic as a consequence (The Global 2000 Report,
pp. 43—44).
The significance of the report was not in its findings, which
closely paralleled those of earlier models, but in revealing how
unprepared our government is for anticipating and dealing with serious
threats to the globe. Different agencies were using differing, and
sometimes incompatible, assumptions in their forecasting methods; no
agency had the capacity to anticipate global crises and map appropriate
strategies; the government as a whole lacked the information and
analytical capacity to take global resource and environment trends into
account in decision-making; and mechanisms weren’t and still aren’t
in place for adequate cooperation with other countries on these
long—range problems.
No sooner had the report been issued than the president ordered
an interagency follow-up study, again led by CEQ and the State
Department, to review current government programs related to these
global issues and to recommend improvements. It was a hurried job,
spurred on by the results of the November election, and resulted in the
publication of Global Future: Time to Act in January 1981, only
days before the inauguration of President Reagan.
Global Future received much less attention than The
Global 2000 Report, but it made the greater contribution to our
understanding because it dealt with measures we could take to change the
threatening trends. CEQ organized working groups drawn from nineteen
federal agencies and solicited suggestions from hundreds of citizens and
private organizations.
The results were a hodgepodge, so much so that the
recommendations were not ranked or stacked up against budgetary
resources. Even CEQ and the State Department reserved the right to amend
their conclusions at a later date (Global Future, p. ii).
The recommendations nevertheless represent the most coherent
thinking available on how the government should prepare itself to deal
with these issues. They emphasize the need to tap public and private
science and technical know-how to help other nations inventory, assess
and manage natural resources, and to build institutional research
capability, as well as to conduct scientific research ourselves.
Of the hundreds of suggestions CEQ received, the most frequent by
a large margin concerned institutional changes to assure enduring and
effective attention to long—term global issues (Global Future,
p.15). CEQ and the State Department responded by placing greatest
emphasis on two recommendations:
·
“to centralize authority for fostering the development
of an integrated U.S. strategy on global resources, environment, and
population in a single government institution, preferably located in the
executive office of the president; and,
·
“to establish a hybrid public-private institute to
supplement governmental effort, to stimulate independent analysis, and
to involve private groups -- industry, labor, environmental, academic --
in a creative dialogue with government.” (Global Future, p. 15)
These and other recommendations in Global Future deserve
serious consideration, but there seems to be little chance of that. A
Republican administration is unlikely to seek its agenda for action in a
document issued by its predecessor. In fact, one of the early acts of
the new administration was to cut the CEQ budget in half, fire all
professional staff, and threaten to disband the organization entirely.
On the legislative side, the House Foreign Relations Committee
sponsored a mammoth study entitled Science and Technology and
American Diplomacy, which was published in three volumes in 1977.
The study found that the number of diplomatic problems having
substantial technological content is large and growing.(2) It
identified opportunities as well as difficulties, concluding that the
United States, a nation excelling in technological achievement, ought to
accept the responsibility for leading the way in the application of
technology to achieve goals shared with other nations of the world.
To use science and technology effectively in diplomacy requires a
long time-horizon, however, and the study emphasized the need for a
sustained and systematic search for future trends in the world outlook,
a sustained effort to formulate U.S. goals, and a broad-gauged attempt
to discover organizing principles to bring greater coherency to U.S.
foreign policy (STAD, p. 1913).
In stressing the need for integrated planning, the study
anticipated the conclusions of Global Future. The principal
author, the late Franklin Huddle, recognized that the sheer complexity
of scientific and technological problems stands in the way of
congressional action (STAD, p. 1611). He noted that
responsibility is scattered through both the legislative and executive
branches, and nowhere is there a unit capable of an overview; nor is
there any mechanism to mobilize and apply the two pre-eminent strengths
of the United States: technological skills and managerial expertise.
Huddle recommended that long-range planning be accomplished by a
unit close to the Secretary of State or the White House. The unit should
monitor technological trends, assess technologies, predict their
economic and social consequences, and provide thorough policy analyses
and long-range planning for national efforts (STAD, p. 1873).
One interesting element of the Huddle study was its attention to
regional arrangements. Case studies were done on the Mekong Project, an
attempt to use technological cooperation as an inducement to peace in
Southeast Asia; international cooperation on the Sahel region of Africa;
ASEAN, an association of Southeast Asian nations for joint scientific
effort; the Organization of American States; and the Andean Pact.
Regional agreements were found to be attractive because they could
partially insulate scientific and technological activities from the ups
and downs of bilateral relationships. Huddle strongly believed that
foreign policy benefits accrue from cooperation in science and
technology even when bilateral relations are strained. He also warned
that purely political science and technology activities generally fail
to produce desired results; that is, if the science is poor, the
political rewards are also poor.
Despite many valuable insights, the net results of the 2000-page
study were disappointing. By focusing on diplomacy and directing many of
the recommendations at the State Department, the authors missed the
central importance of bringing the scientific capacities of the
technical agencies of government to bear on global problems. Concretely,
the study resulted in Title V of the Foreign Relations Act of 1979,
which gave the Secretary of State and his Office of Oceans, Environment
and Science (OES) the responsibility of coordinating U.S. international
science and technology activities. OES compiles an annual report and
submits it to Congress, and a Committee for International Science,
Engineering and Technology (CISET) meets infrequently under OES
leadership, but little coherence and no additions to quality are yet
apparent from the procedures. Foreign service officers, selected as
generalists with no particular scientific qualifications, can hardly be
expected to offer the leadership our national efforts require.
A more modest congressional initiative, but one containing
interesting possibilities, was the Waxman Amendment of 1979. This
requested the president to prepare within one year a plan for trilateral
scientific and technological cooperation to “build the structure of
peace” in the Middle East. Unlike the Mekong Project, the Waxman idea
did not assume that the prospect of scientific cooperation would lead
hostile parties to the peace table; instead, the congressman suggested
that once a fragile peace agreement had been achieved, collaboration on
projects by the parties involved (Israel, Egypt, and the United States)
could help to cement the peace process by providing concrete benefits to
all participants.
A report was duly produced in response to the amendment, a few
months beyond the deadline, coordinated by OES. It contained a mixed bag
of proposals gleaned from the technical agencies without much regard for
their feasibility or for Israeli or Egyptian desires. The critical
chapter was a brief two—page submission by OMB which said quite
clearly that no new funds would be requested for the purposes suggested
by the amendment. A prior authorization of $5 million was available for
trilateral cooperation. Beyond that, the agencies could use their own
funds to support cooperation in service of peace, but they would need to
take them from some other planned activities.
Budgetary strictures curtail the benefits of another potentially
useful device for fostering international cooperation. President
Carter’s science advisor, Dr. Frank Press, was unusually active in
generating bilateral agreements for scientific and technological
cooperation. His most notable achievement in this regard was the
cooperative agreement with China, signed during Teng Shao Ping’s visit
to the United States in 1979. Twenty memoranda of understanding were
signed on the African trip that Dr. Press took in 1980 with senior
executives from a number of technical agencies. Other important
bilateral accords were signed with Japan, Brazil, and Mexico during his
tenure.
Here again, OMB had no objection to bilateral agreements provided
they didn’t demand new money. Participating agencies are expected
either to cover their expenditures from existing budgets, or be
reimbursed by the other countries, as in the case of the Chinese. The
State Department, which coordinates the agreements, can indicate foreign
policy interests in the proceedings, but has no funds with which to make
its views effective.
In practice, many bilateral agreements atrophy from lack of funds
or interest on the part of U.S. agencies. A change in executive
leadership often results in the neglect of the passions of the
predecessor, so one can predict hard times ahead for the newly minted
accords with the Chinese, Mexicans, and others.
5. RECOMMENDATIONS
Soedjatmoko, the Indonesian sage who now heads the United Nations
University (UNU), said recently, “In facing the future, both the
developed world and the developing world are, essentially and in
different ways, equally unprepared.”(1)
He is seeking to broaden the UNU’s intellectual scope to
include global problems: not to ignore the development issues to which
his institution has been oriented since its founding, but to go beyond
the North/South dichotomy to the realization that a common destiny
awaits humanity. In his words, “In the world’s enveloping crises, if
there is to be a future at all, it is going to be a shared one for all
nations.”
A similar shift in perspective is needed in the United States.
Our responses have been feeble in recent years to the global crises that
threaten our planet; we tend to sweep all international problems that
lack burning urgency under the rug of foreign aid and then hack away at
the AID budget because charity begins at home. Somehow we need to
relearn the meaning and uses of power in a plural world, one in which we
are no longer preeminent but are still the most important single nation
shaping the future of the globe; and one in which the main threat to
well being may not be another country, but the peaceful abuse of our
globe by all.
We hear much about a “window of vulnerability” threatening
our national security in the remaining years of this decade, and we are
apparently prepared to devote hundreds of billions of dollars to
armaments to close that gap. But the truly heroic challenges so clearly
visible on the horizon -- the great barn doors of vulnerability that we
are leaving for our children to close, if they can -- receive little
political rhetoric.
Soedjatmoko’s list of global problems goes well beyond those
considered here. He is concerned with peace and human survival, with the
world economy and unprecedented rapidity of social change, with the
moral and ethical abilities of human beings to grapple with the problems
of the twenty-first century. I applaud and admire the breadth of his
vision and deeply regret our persistent refusal to bear our share in the
funding of his institution. But in these pages I focus more narrowly on
those matters where the United States has a unique capacity by virtue of
our scientific and technological development to enhance the world’s
ability to survive with dignity in the coming century. In that century
the world must learn to feed, clothe, house, and employ nearly three
times its present number while simultaneously giving up its dependence
on petroleum.
It must be a century of unparalleled innovation and invention in
the United States and elsewhere in the world.
Our responsibility is great not because we have a monopoly on
inventiveness, but because we are the inheritors of much of the
world’s scientific advancement. Abdus Salam, the Nobel laureate who
heads the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste,
reminds us that scientific leadership through the ages has had many
homes. For centuries after Aristotle and Archimedes, the names of the
leading scientific thinkers were Chinese, Arab, Turk, Afghan, and
Persian. Only after 1350 did the light shine most brightly in Western
Europe.(2) We carry the torch now, partly through our own
efforts and partly because of the emigration of so many eminent
scientists from Europe in this turbulent century. For mankind to emerge
from the next century with a sustainable civilization, the bonfires of
invention must be rekindled around the globe.
Is it in our national interest to dedicate a greater share of our
talent and intellectual resources to the global challenges? How could it
not be? Not only do we have a stake in the quality of the earth’s
environment, but we materially benefit from advances in food production,
energy creation, health, and even industrialization abroad. In addition,
nothing would do more to improve our national image abroad and add
luster to our style of economic and political freedoms than vigorous
leadership in attacking global problems. Our reputation of indifference
and selfishness, stemming from positions taken at the Nairobi Energy
conference, the Vienna science and technology conference, and the Law of
the Sea negotiations, is unworthy of our country and wholly unnecessary.
To recapture the constructive dynamism of our nation that
typified two decades after the Second World War will be no easy task.
Profound changes of attitude, policy, and institutions are involved, and
many vested interests will tenaciously resist, as Lester Thurow has
noted in The Zero Sum Society. Some first steps seem necessary:
1. The first, indispensable, requirement is
for high-level leadership. Only the president can provide it.
He must set the sights of the nation and direct the machinery of
government to broader aims. President Reagan set a firm course at
Cancun, where he advised developing countries to rely primarily on
private enterprise in dealing with their development problems. For many
countries this is good advice, which they are already following. Hong
Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Korea have booming free- enterprise
economies and are well on the way to developed-country status.
The U.S. private sector has been operating at a disadvantage
compared with firms from Japan, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany
in working with and in developing countries. The Reagan administration
eased the problem by greatly increasing the tax exemption for Americans
living abroad, but official mechanisms for sharing risks still trail
those available to firms from competing countries.
Private enterprise, although very important, is an inadequate
response for the United States to make. Many countries are too poor to
be attractive to the U.S. private sector and lack indigenous capital and
skills. And, as we have seen, many global issues of concern to ourselves
and the developing countries require government-sponsored research and
technology development. The U.S. has the pre-eminent capacity to take
the lead in dealing with these problems, but the President must set us
the task.
2. A single governmental unit capable of
anticipating and responding to global issues is clearly necessary.
In OMB we have an integrated central control mechanism, but OMB can only
curtail action, not initiate it. It would assist OMB greatly in the wise
performance of its functions to have a unit monitoring global trends in
the resource, environment and population fields; analyzing alternative
courses of actions; and setting U.S. priorities.
This function could appropriately fall to the Office of
Scientific and Technological Policy (OSTP) headed by the president’s
science advisor. OSTP would need to be strengthened a great deal if it
were to undertake the role. Under President Carter, OSTP had a staff of
sixteen, most of whom were busy with domestic issues. President Reagan
cut the staff by a third and delayed six months in naming a science
advisor. The Council on Environmental Quality would also be a possible
home for the unit, but it has suffered even greater reduction than OSTP.
In any case, the unit should be a part of the executive office of the
president.
3. The budget process needs reform. We
should have a separate budget for international scientific and
technological activities, assembled and evaluated by the executive
office unit proposed above, from the submissions of the technical
departments and agencies of government. This would mean in effect that
the departments would have two budgets: domestic and international.
Activities in the international budget would compete against other
international opportunities, not against the domestic functions of the
department. This would allow the administration and the Congress to
comprehend the totality of our international concerns and the
interrelationships of the problems. It would avoid the problem of
competition between domestic programs, with a host of entrenched
constituents, and international programs. And, it would permit
international budgets to be reviewed by congressional committees with
international interests. At the same time, it would separate science and
technology cooperation with developing countries from the foreign
assistance budget, placing them in the broader context of U.S interests,
in which development is only one strand.
4. A federally-funded research institute is
needed to integrate public sector, private sector, and multilateral
research on global scientific problems. The technical
departments will need time to adapt their procedures and personnel to
the international dimensions of their mandates. A tightly integrated
research unit with ties to private foundations, universities, and
industrial research organizations, and with responsibility for the
technical content of U.S. participation in multilateral research on
food, population, energy, and other areas, could bring greater coherence
to our national effort than ever possible in the past.
The institute could be modeled on the original Brookings
recommendation for an autonomous federal foundation, not wedded to the
foreign aid program, or could be patterned on the Global Population,
Resources, and Environmental Analysis Institute suggested in Global
Future (Global Future, pp. 227-8).
5. The international interests of the private
foundations need to be rekindled. We noted the leadership shown
by the foundations in developing the first oral contraceptives, building
the international agricultural research centers, and mapping strategies
for combating schistosomiasis. Other examples are numerous, such as
Kettering’s leadership in biological nitrogen fixation and
photosynthesis. For a variety of reasons, the record of the foundations
on international matters is likely to be less impressive in the future.
Most have suffered portfolio declines as a result of the tax act of 1969
and the fluctuating stock market. International programs became less
attractive as the value of the dollar declined and the Internal Revenue
Service declared housing, education, and home-leave travel to be
ordinary income. The democratization of foundation boards of trustees
led their programs to become more immediate and trendy than farsighted.
And the two leaders in the international field, the Ford and Rockefeller
Foundations, are in transition under new leadership.
The loss of the creative and innovative capacities of our
foundations in international scientific affairs is something we should
not permit to happen. We need their independence of view, their
willingness to take risks, their ability to act quickly with a minimum
of red tape, and their capacity to cooperate with nongovernmental
institutions abroad.
Two courses of action should be explored, both of which involve
making public funds available for private action. One is to make grants
for international programs by the foundations. The German government
follows a formula for funding private foundations associated with
political parties in amounts related to the percentage of votes received
by the sponsors in general elections. The political tie is not
attractive in the American context, but the formula-funding notion has
merit. A modest precedent in this country is the federal grants received
by the Kettering Foundation in partial support of its laboratory work on
biological nitrogen fixation and photosynthesis. Few foundations have
their own laboratories, however; some system permitting the regranting
of funds would be most desirable.
The second possibility would be the pooling of resources from
several private foundations to establish a new international scientific
and technological cooperation foundation, which would be eligible to
receive federal funds. In this way, private management would be
retained, and programs would receive both public and private funding.
The Population Council of New York may be a model for this idea. It was
founded by John D. Rockefeller III and receives governmental,
multilateral, and private grants. The level of funding from government
must be substantial and assured to induce foundations to create the new
vehicle in these austere times.
A modest first step has been taken by a loose coalition of
business and foundation representatives concerned about expanding the
number and effectiveness of grants for international purposes. They have
established Grantmaking International, an organization so far without
staff or substance, to share experience in the international field. At
this point, it is not anticipated that the organization will itself have
granting powers, or that it will be in a position to utilize Government
funds. Grantmaking International will initially operate as an affiliate
of the Council on Foundations in New York.
6. We need to devote more resources to
training foreign students. This is a vital contribution to
building the capacity of other countries to deal with their own
development and to cooperate internationally on global problems. The
U.S. record in training foreign students is very strong, but
unfortunately we are now moving smartly in the wrong direction.
According to the Institute of International Education’s Open
Doors 1979/80: Report on International Educational Exchange, in
1979-80, 286,343 foreign students were enrolled in nearly 3000 American
institutions. Half of them were studying engineering, business, or the
natural sciences, and nearly half were at the graduate level. Sixty-five
percent of these students were supported primarily by family funds, and
another 13 percent were financed by their governments. As a result, most
of the students came from developed countries, particularly Canada and
Japan, or middle-income countries, with Iran leading the list. Hong Kong
and Saudi Arabia each have more students here than India.
The U.S. government finances only 2 percent of these students,
but even this modest contribution is in jeopardy.(3) The U.S.
International Communication Agency (USICA), which administers the bulk
of official exchange funds, has reacted to a 12 percent cut in FY 1982
funding by allocating two-thirds of the reduction to cultural and
educational exchange programs, in order to keep intact its staff
resources, field offices, Voice of America, and other information
services. As a result, the Fulbright Program will effectively end in 61
of 120 countries, most of them developing nations. According to the
USICA release, “Detailed Impact of 12% Across-the-board FY ‘82
Cut,” other exchange programs are similarly curtailed and support for
private-sector programs will be reduced by 70 percent. The impact on
AMIDEAST, according to an America-Mideast Educational and Training
Services release, 30 October 1981, will be to force the closing of four
of its seven offices in Middle Eastern countries, even though U.S. funds
accounted for less than half of the organization’s overseas budget.
In contrast, the Soviet Union supported about 55,000 foreign
students in 1979 at an estimated cost of $2 billion, ten times the
number of students supported by U.S. official sources even before the
cut. Britain, France, West Germany, and Japan also exceed the United
States in the percentage of their national budgets committed to
international educational exchanges.(4)
The current cuts are damaging not only in terms of diminishing
the developing countries’ capacities, but they are harmful to our
foreign policy. A score of leading historians associated with the
Woodrow Wilson Center at Washington’s Smithsonian Institution were
polled as to what have been the greatest successes and failures of
United States foreign policy since the First World War. The two
initiatives they judged most successful were the Marshall Plan and the
Fulbright-Hays educational exchanges. President Derek Bok of Harvard
states that “dollar for dollar” there is no better investment than
the exchange of scholars.
7. A continuing process of public education is
needed. We are victims of C.P. Snow’s two cultures:
communication between scientists and laymen is poor. Part of the problem
lies in our education system, which permits children to avoid all
scientific learning beyond the modest basics taught in secondary school.
Part rests with the media, which prefers the simple and the sensational
to the complex and analytical. Zbigniew Brzezinski complained after
leaving the National Security Council that the mass media tended to
ignore his analytical pronouncements in favor of “either-or
presentations of world issues, ‘good guys’ versus ‘bad guys,’
‘hawks’ versus ‘doves,’ and personal gossip and power
plays.”(6)
Another serious part of our two-culture problem is in our
political traditions. An estimated 45 percent of the leaders of the
Soviet Union have technical educational backgrounds; perhaps 5 percent
of our leaders are so trained. The Soviet leaders have less difficulty
understanding scientific and technical issues than do our leaders. One
observer noted that the Reagan administration determined its budget cuts
of the scientific agencies without having a single qualified scientific
or technical person at the policy level of the administration.
None of these defects can be corrected in a short time, but we
need to begin the process of better educating our citizens, media, and
politicians in the scientific dimensions of our complex world. This
could be a central operating theme for one or more private foundations,
where programs could be pursued over the course of a decade or two.
Where, in the long run, is the money to come from for the
expanded attention to international scientific problems urged in this
essay? The obvious answer is from defense expenditures. The Brandt
Commission noted with dismay that 51 percent of the government funds
spent on research in the industrialized countries goes for military,
nuclear, and space research, while less than 1 percent is devoted to the
problems of developing countries. This can’t be in the interest of any
nation, or humanity. Defense expenditures are not just dollars spent;
they represent the devotion of a heavy proportion of our scarce natural
resources and our best scientists to purposes that contribute nothing to
the well-being of humanity.
The Soviet Union is clearly the most to blame for the upward
spiral of military expenditures in the world and cannot be allowed to
succeed in achieving military superiority. But even in the Soviet Union
there are forces opposed to its massive wasteful investments. Peter
Kapitza, a Nobel laureate member of the Academy of Sciences of the
U.S.S.R., is one Soviet voice expressing such views. In an article from
his book Experiment, Theory, Practice, which appeared as
“Global Problems, International Solutions” in the January 1981,
issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, he states that
time is running short for mankind: ”We have less than a century to
prevent ecological crisis.” Kapitza thinks that in order to be able to
devote its best energies to the solution of these problems, humanity
must first realize the magnitude and implications of the global crisis
and that it is the task of scientists to show the way to avert the
crises.
Kapitza believes that the need to solve global problems on an
international scale will assist in finding ways for peaceful coexistence
and disarmament because it will gradually become clear to all that the
risk of death from aggression is becoming less real than the dangers of
resource shortages and environmental pollution. He calls for “the
participation of the best cultural forces of all countries” in
directing attention to the seriousness of the situation. This may be as
clear a denunciation of present Soviet leaders as is possible within the
Soviet Establishment.
The next century will be difficult for ourselves, our children,
and their children, but there is no need to despair. We must rally our
“best cultural forces” and gain a more mature view of our national
interests and responsibilities. We have the human resources and public
institutions to meet the challenge, and our struggle will at least be
less onerous and dangerous than that of poor Peter Kapitza.
These pages have been filled with the niff-naff of organizations
and budgets. Perhaps the purpose of the document would have been better
served by uplifting examples of the wonders our scientists could produce
if only they were given wider scope. Yet it would be as misleading to
gloss over the tough bureaucratic and financial impediments to greater
effectiveness as it would be to portray the future as bleak and
irredeemable. A realistic, concerted effort is needed to broaden the
tasks of our scientific and technological institutions.
It is within our power to significantly alter many of the adverse
trends in the global environment that threaten the quality of life. With
power comes responsibility. It is a responsibility we should welcome. A
great nation such as ours deserves a more noble role in world affairs
than mere opposition to the Soviet Union and promotion of free
enterprise. We deserve, indeed we must demand, the opportunity to make
our full contribution as a nation to human quality.
NOTES
Chapter 2
(1) World
Development Report, 1981, p. 111. Subsequent references to this
edition will appear in the text as WDR 81.
(2) Agenda
1980, p. 27. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in
the text.
(3) Interdependent
Commission on International Development Issues, Willy Brandt, Chairman, North—South:
A Program for Survival (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), p. 238.
Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text.
(4) WDR
81, p. 111. And The United States and World Development: Agenda 1979, pp. 45-76.
(5) Peter
F. Drucker, Managing in Turbulent Times (New York, N.Y.: Harper
and Row, 1980), p. 75.
(6) Mabub
ul Haq, “Negotiating the Future,” Foreign Affairs, Winter
1980-81, pp. 416-7.
Chapter 3
(1) Council
on Environmental Quality and the Department of State, Gerald 0. Barney,
Study Director, The Global 2000 Report to the President, Vol. 2, The
Technical Report (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1980), p. 608. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the
text.
(2) Aurelio
Peccei, The Human Quality (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1977), p. 78.
(3) Herman
Kahn and Ernest Schneider, “Globaloney 2000,” Policy Review, p. 146.
(4) George
Zeidenstein, “Strategic Issues in Population,” Population and
Development Review, September 1977.
(5) Ibid.,
p. 10.
(6) Kendall,
“The World Fertility Survey: Current Status and Findings,” Population
Reports, Ser. M, No. 3 (1979).
(7) World
Development Report, 1980, p. 69. Subsequent references to this
edition will appear in the text as WDR 80.
(8) Greep,
M.A. Koblinsky, and F.S. Jaffe, Reproduction and Human Welfare: A
Challenge to Research (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976).
(9) ”UN
Group Urges World Food Plan,” New York Times. 24 November 1980.
(10) World Development Report, 1979.
(11) Nick Eberstadt, “America and World Hunger,”
Wilson Quarterly, Summer 1981, p. 30.
(12) ”America’s Farmers: Theirs Is a Growing
Business,” Christian Science Monitor, 2 January 1981, pp. 4-5.
(13) ”The New Critics of Big Farming,” New York
Times.
(14) World Food and Nutrition Study: The
Potential Contributions of Research (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1977), p. 26. Subsequent references to this
edition will appear in the text as WFNS.
(15) David E. Bell, “The International
Agricultural Research Centers and the Ford Foundation,” paper
presented at the Ford Foundation, 25 August, 1981.
(16) Council on Environmental Quality and the
Department of State, Global Future: Time to Act (Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1981), p. 65. Subsequent
references to this edition will appear in the text.
(17) Energy in a Finite World, p. 171.
Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text as EFW.
(18) David M. Burns, “Climate and CO2,” New
York Times, 17 April 1981.
(19) lnterfutures, p. 36. Subsequent
references to this edition will appear in the text.
(20) New York Times, 13 August 1981.
(21) Robert M. Press, “New Techniques Help Save
Shrinking Tropical Forests,” Christian Science Monitor, 5 March
1981.
(22) ”The Strategic Plan,” The Edna McConnell
Clark Foundation, June 1979, New York, p. 2.
(23) Joseph A. Cook, M.D., “Sources of Funding for
Training and Research in Parasitology,” paper presented at the Macy
Foundation’s Conference on the Present Status and Future of
Parasitology, 20-22 October 1980, New Orleans, La.
(24) ”Science and Technology Cooperation with
Developing Countries,” a supplement to the IDCA FY 1982 budget
submission, 8 October 1980.
(25) Strengthening U.S. Programs to Improve
Health in Developing Countries, pp. ES 5-6.
Chapter 4
(1) Eugene
Skolnikoff, Science and Technology and American Foreign Policy, p.
206.
(2) Science
and Technology and American Diplomacy, p. 1611. Subsequent
references to this edition will appear in the text as STAD.
Chapter 5
(1) Soedjatmoko,
“The UN University’s Next Stage,” paper presented to the Sixteenth
Session of the UNU, 1 December 1980, New York, N.Y.
(2) Abdus
Salam, “From Toledo to Trieste -- Renewing Our Commitment,” Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists, September 1980, p. 35.
(3) Open
Doors 1979/80: Report on International Educational Exchange, p. 26.
(4) ”Budget
Cuts Curbing U.S. Exchange Programs,” New York Times, 28
November 1981, p. 6.
(5) Walter
C. Clemens, Jr., “The Fulbright Program: It’s a Bargain,” Christian
Science Monitor, 18 November 1981, p. 22.
(6) “Talk
with Brzezinski,” New York Times, 22 April 1981.
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