 Now it's my great pleasure to introduce to you Dan Sarowitz. Dan is the Director of the Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes at ASU. He's Associate Director of the University Center for Nanotechnology and Society. Dan has been an invaluable intellectual partner and member of the Future Tense team and took the lead in conceptualizing and framing today's event and as such is going to set the table with the first presentation and will then MC us throughout the day. Thanks Andreas. I love it when you say architecture of the knowledge enterprise. That is so cool. So, let's see, can I have the first slide here? Beautiful, okay. So once upon a time there was a golden age of science. It was an age when having helped America win World War II scientists were rewarded with ample budgets to pursue their curiosity about nature wherever it might lead them and where the nation and society benefited immeasurably through economic growth, military superiority, health, employment, and social well-being. This is a picture of Vannevar Bush who is the perhaps last and only true hero of American science policy. He was the Director of the Science and Technology Enterprise during World War II including the Manhattan Project and the projects that led to the development of radar. But more importantly, he was actually the author of the narrative that we've all kind of internalized about how it is that science works and science leads to social benefit. A narrative that whose utility has perhaps come to the end of the line and yet which still continues to hold a pretty powerful hold on our imaginations. So I mean the place to start I think with this event is simply to declare what I hope is intuitively obvious, which is that science and technology and their advance are incredibly powerful forces for social transformation for better or for worse. In fact, probably the most powerful forces that humanity has ever known. And one can think about something as modest as the ear of corn which is in fact an extraordinarily sophisticated piece of technology and think about corn productivity which is just the number of ears of corn you can grow on an acre and how it's risen radically since over the last 50 years or so. And this is a product of decisions made about what type of science to fund and also how those institutions ought to be organized. But of course there's a lot more to this story because there's a lot more to corn than simply productivity. There's the increasing agricultural productivity worldwide that's really allowed us to continually escape the Malthusian trap of starvation as a result of insufficient food supply but there is also the destruction of rural communities as we turned agriculture into an industrial activity. There's the many environmental impacts, many of them negative from the chemical inputs necessary to drive this increasing productivity. There's the changes to our diet because we're all now addicted to high-fructose corn syrup. And there's the instabilities that it creates in, for example, global food supply because of subsidies to grow corn for ethanol rather than for food sources. So the point being that even this apparently simple, modest little plant has grown up a long way from its origins in Mesoamerica centuries ago. Now the way we think about science, the kind of golden age myth starts with really the kind of benign presence of Albert Einstein. Here's a statue of him that adorns the front of the National Academy of Sciences so it's also their statement about sort of what science is and how it's most embodied. And from the brain of Einstein sitting in the patent office in Switzerland thinking about time and space and how the universe ought to be reconceptualized from the ground up, we end up directly with something like this, the first nuclear weapons test at Alamogordo, New Mexico prior to dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So the story is from the brain of the scientist to the impact in this case ending World War II. And it's a really easy story and because it's so easy, it's very powerful and very difficult to move away from. Here's a slide presented by the director of the National Institutes of Health to Congress in defense of the NIH budget a couple of years ago. The idea being that we fund Albert on the left side, the knowledge moves across the bridge to application and in the end we accomplish what it is that we want to accomplish. And even though we all know that the story is oversimplified, still as I say governs both the language and the imagination that we bring to these issues and questions. And so embedded in this kind of golden era myth are a number of assumptions and what I first want to do is quickly go through some of these assumptions, make clear why they no longer hold and then suggest some different ways that we need to really think about what's going on with science, technology and social change as a setup for all of the discussions that will come afterwards from the people who actually know things about these issues. So the first obvious idea is that the more money you put into the system, the more benefit that comes out of it. So here's basically the war on cancer, the billions spent since 1971 and here's rates of breast cancer mortality. And the obvious point is it's hard to see how those two might be connected to one another. Scientists working, pursuing their curiosity wherever it might lead, those are Vannevar Bush's words. Here are U.S. Nobel Prizes which are awarded to scientists pursuing their curiosity wherever it may lead, especially the most brilliant of them. And here's the U.S. advanced technology balance of trade. So again, the connection between the unfettered science and the things that we ask from science are unclear. Accountability, this is actually really difficult one. The notion that science can only be accountable to itself, otherwise it risks being politicized and ruined. So that we have peer review, we have reproducibility of results, we have what the philosopher of science, Carl Popper, called conjecture and refutation as a way that science can maintain its quality. And yet we are finding, here's a provocatively titled article by a very serious scientist named John Ionides, now at Stanford, we're discovering systematic, discipline-wide biases in particular directions that make it very difficult to know whether or not the mechanisms of internal accountability for science are actually functioning. Here's an obvious one, a no-brainer. When we have a problem, we do research. That research informs the way we take action. It turns out to be much more difficult. This is, I suppose, a slightly irritating slide, but it shows a number of pages of climate change science summarized in the quadrennial intergovernmental panel on climate change and carbon emissions over the same period of time. Again, I don't want to claim a causal relationship, but on the other hand, one was supposed to help make the other better. Finally, and maybe most importantly is this notion that science and society operate according to an unspoken social contract. And the idea of the social contract is that we provide the resources and institutions for science, and science provides us the tools to make society a better place. And I think it's obvious to everyone that there are all sorts of assaults on this notion. Just one recent example is the work that was done on the H5N1 avian flu virus in the Netherlands and the U.S., where there is a very difficult device of debate over whether or not A, the science ought to be carried out, and B, if it ought to be carried out, it should be published because it can be used perhaps as a weapon as bioterrorism, as well as a public health tool. And you can think of many types of science where society pushes back, again, for reasons that you may or may not be sympathetic with, from nuclear power to genetically modified organisms, to feudal stem cell, tissue to the geoengineering of the climate. But the point is that the simple idea of a social contract for science doesn't stand. So the idea here today is to engage in a kind of active opening up of these questions. And again, as Andrea said, a beginning of what needs to be a much more open, aggressive debate about the most powerful force for social change that we have at our fingertips and that we have not really taken very seriously in terms of the role of governance and public policy for connecting the knowledge that we create with the problems that we're trying to solve. So just a couple of quick things to help guide what I think are some of the issues that ought to be on the table. The first is it's simply not about money. So this graph shows the percent of the discretion... I can say that right in D.C., the percent of the discretionary budget that has been spent on non-defense research and development by the government in the last 40 years or so. Let's see, do I have a little red thing here? All right, anyway, the hill at the beginning is the Apollo project, which is an applied engineering project. But if you get rid of that, what this shows is the government is basically willing to spend a certain percentage of money on R&D. It's not going to spend much more and it's not going to spend much less. So in times of good budgets, we'll have rising science budgets and in times of budgetary stress like now, we'll have declining science budgets. But the commitment is more or less there. It's not really debatable. The other point is Albert Einstein was not responsible for the nuclear... for the development of nuclear weapons. An incredibly complicated organizational, institutional arrangement that brought together universities, the private sector, the government, thousands of brilliant scientists, thousands of civilians and others to translate a whole array of scientific knowledge into one particular technology was the real story of what went on. So it's not about the individual scientist laboring away in their laboratory. It's about the institutional context in which knowledge is created and used and connected. And so this importance of institutions has really brought home when you think about the role of the Pentagon in fueling innovation in the U.S. during the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Really every technological system that we've come to depend on, everyone has some significant roots in the Pentagon. Here are just a few examples. Satellite imagery, that's a picture of the Pentagon itself. Micro processors on the bottom left. Computers which were really initially funded at enormous expense by the Defense Department to calculate the trajectories of projectiles. And gas turbines or jet engines on the right. Just a couple of examples. So the institutional attributes of DOD, of the military industrial complex which effectively connected the government and private sector and universities and a kind of innovation ecology, is an extraordinarily potent force for technological change that doesn't really fit into the kind of nice linear myths of the bridge going from basic to applied. Another really important key to what's been going on when we're successful at connecting science and innovation to social goals is again this institutional ecology, institutional architecture, the connections between various players in the process of turning knowledge into action. So this is just from a publication that looked at in very close detail a number of important biomedical innovations. And what it showed was not a suspension bridge, but in fact double pointed arrows between every one of the players in the health innovation system. And a key point here that we'll get into in a discussion later on is that patience and the bedside is a very important source of knowledge information, scientific questions that feeds back into the research system. So again this notion of a bridge from basic to applied. When we look closely what we see instead is lots of complexity, lots of interconnectedness. Another challenge to the way we normally think about science and this kind of deistic put in the money and good things will happen is that often big breakthroughs start with technologies whose mechanisms are not understood. One example is AZT which was the first semi effective HIV AIDS drug which in fact existed on the shelves of pharmaceutical corporations before AIDS was discovered. And another is the powerful vaccines like smallpox and polio that have been enormous contributors to human and social benefit but were really developed in a kind of a theoretical way before we understood much about the basic science of immunology and of those particular diseases. So again my point is that what we need to think about is a complex ecosystem with lots of interconnections between different players, communication in all sorts of directions, not this notion of the brain of the genius feeding inspiration to the system. And finally the point I want to end with here is the notion of what this means for accountability and new thinking about the social contract between science and society. So here's a picture from Hurricane Katrina. Now the thing you need to know about Hurricane Katrina vis-a-vis this particular event is that we knew everything in advance. The science was totally settled. I mean I was trained as a geologist and my rocks for jocks 101 class, one of the things that we were told was New Orleans is going to get hammered someday because it's in Hurricane Alley and it's totally unprepared and the dykes weren't well. So it raises the question of for what are we creating knowledge? And this is ultimately I hope the question that we can really delve into in depth today. So for what are we creating knowledge? How is it going to be used? What are the institutions that are involved? And how do we ensure that we're creating the knowledge that we need to actually resolve the immense challenges that we're facing today as a nation and as a society? So that's the kind of tee-up for the conversations that are to come.