Results tagged “science”
A Newark Star-Ledger report on this year's Nobel Prize for Physics shows how the twentieth century's greatest innovation in imaging was the indirect result of two research "failures." Wired has more details of the internal politics.The breakthrough of Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, the charge-coupled device (CCD), had a curious motivation. What catalyzed it was the peculiar agenda of AT&T in the late 1960s. Managers of Bell Labs thought that a new technology called bubble memory was about to replace semiconductors and let researchers on the latter side know they they needed a great new idea fast to prove semiconductors were worth continued funding. Bubble memory turned out to be a bubble and is now only a memory, but pressure, based on an erroneous projection of the future, helped create another future. It also made it possible to capture the images of Apollo 13. Yet the videotube that used the first CCDs became a dead end itself. AT&T's Picturephone service was based on a very rational early fear of cable and television as rivals of the telephone in building new, high-speed networks, as the historian Kenneth Lipartito has confirmed in his standard account of the program.
Veterans of Bell Labs are rightly proud of the organization's record. To quote the Star-Ledger:
Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies, has now produced 13 Nobel laureates and more than 31,000 patents since 1925. During the 1960s and 1970s, the lab in Murray Hill was regarded as a crucible of some of the most innovative research in the world.
"Everything we take for granted today -- digital music, digital art, lasers -- came from Bell Labs," said A. Michael Noll, emeritus professor of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California and a former Bell Labs research scientist.
But it also noted the changes and research group closings under Lucent:
Many Bell Labs scientists, past and present, say their research community has never recovered.
"The environment that was there back then, the excitement about being around creative people who were open to talking about their work, was not duplicated during its time," said Dan Stanzione, a former director of Bell Labs.
Ironically some non-profit research laboratories like Battelle and Germany's Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft have been able to support themselves at least in part through income from the innovations they helped sponsor -- like dry photocopying and the MP3 format, respectively. I have found no information on royalties received by AT&T or Lucent for the invention of Willard Boyle and George Smith at Bell Labs -- possibly because original patents had expired before the digital imaging boom. (I'd welcome information from readers in telecommunication and imaging.)
This prize for 40-year-old work raises an intriguing question. Has something been lost from American and world science by the dispersion of so many great researchers? Some of them have profited personally; at conferences I've met former technical staff members who have made fortunes in finance and entrepreneurship. Others, like the late electrical engineer and perceptual psychologist Bela Julesz, a future MacArthur Fellow whom I met while I was a science editor, flourished in academia and became mentors to a generation of students. Still others have had the best of both worlds, with high-salaried tenured teaching jobs plus lucrative industrial ties.
But is society better off with so much talent redeployed? Are great innovations more likely to arise in the newer, decentralized, and more responsive global environment? Does everything important get discovered independently anyway, regardless of what happens to one organization? I'm not so sure. In Jeremy Bernstein's Three Degrees above Zero, Bela Julesz said Bell Labs had no counterpart in Europe or elsewhere and was "an absolutely unique treasure . . . for the whole world," a "baroque organ" for the maestro who needs "to pull out every register." Maybe the old Bell Labs resembled the Hollywood studio system, where massive resources and depth of skills could be deployed to produce qualitative leaps. The Labs set a high standard for the reconfigured world of global science.
(Photo: Wiki Commons)
Hats off to Daniel Brook for his series on Slate about the September 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta. It's a gem of reporting legwork and historical insight, based on a visit to Atta's thesis supervisor in Hamburg and sharp observations in the ancient city of Aleppo, where Atta was misled by his upbringing to misunderstand its heritage:
With the crumbling legacy of European imperialism and American-backed dictatorship written into its Paris-meets-Houston cityscape, Cairo is one of the world's worst advertisements for East-West relations. With that city as his tragic starting place, Atta refused to comprehend historic Aleppo, a cosmopolitan trading city where Europeans and Arabs, Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived side-by-side for centuries. He scorned diverse, mercantile Hamburg; he attacked polyglot New York. By allowing a discordant present to blot out a more hopeful past, Atta ensured further discord in the future.
Brook mentions but doesn't expand on the engineering background of the September 11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who selected the targets. As the official US report put it:
Highly educated and equally comfortable in a government office or a terrorist safehouse,KSM applied his imagination,technical aptitude,and managerial skills to hatching and planning an extraordinary array of terrorist schemes. These ideas included conventional car bombing,political assassination,aircraft bombing, hijacking, reservoir poisoning, and, ultimately, the use of aircraft as missiles guided by suicide operatives.
Generations of educators have assured us that that the study of science and engineering create international understanding across religious and ideological lines, promoting an international language that puts problem-solving ahead of dogma. And many scientists, engineers, and physicians around the world have indeed been outstanding ecumenical advocates.
But there's a dark side of technical knowledge. It's equally compatible with intolerance. Osama bin Laden, too, was educated not as a mullah but as a civil engineer. While many Iranian science professors are prominent in the resistance to the of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the brutal strongman appears to have an impressive technical background, even claiming on his blog that he had score 132 out of 400,000 engineering university applicants on a competitive examination. (Link via Wikipedia.) The world's second most wanted terrorist next to bin Laden is also no cleric but a physician, Ayman al Zawahiri. Well before September 11, 2001, the English historian Simon Sebag Montefiore noted the rise of medically trained tyrants, the Doctators, in the Spectator:
'Doctatorship' may be defined as the process by which a medical doctor, devoted to sacrificing himself to save lives, becomes a political dictator, devoted to sacrificing lives to save himself. 'Doctatorship' is a murky place where bedside manner meets state planner, where torture meets cure.
Whereas the Zawahiri and Atta families belong to the higher Egyptian intelligentsia, Ahmedinajad would be an obscure village artisan like his forebears if the passionately modernizing Shah had not promoted technical education for the masses, not only to promote growth but to weaken the hold of the religious conservatives.
The lesson is not that scientific and technical education are dangerous, but sadly that education alone has been overrated as a source of humane values.
The Athenaeum Club, 1830. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
When the great and good convene to ponder the future in historic landmark buildings, there is not always happy news. A group of pharmaceutical executives and government regulators, invoking the name of one of London's most venerable clubs, seem to be ratifying the idea of an "innovation drought," according to the Financial Times.
The Athenaeum Group's proposals seem unexceptionable in themselves: more efficient regulation, more cooperation among pharmaceutical researchers to combat a discouraging trend:
. . . the number of new medicines has steadily dropped, while the cost of bringing each one to market has risen sharply to more than $1bn (£605m, €700m).Still, it concerns me to read that Thomas Lonngren, chief of the European Union's pharmaceutical regulatory agency,
. . . argues that the biggest barrier to progress is science itself. "We are going into a new era of drug development where it's getting more and more complex. It is generally accepted that we have moved from low- to high-hanging fruit. Mother Nature is saying that she has the cards."This idea is plausible, but isn't it part of the scientific outlook to question "generally accepted" views, especially in one's own industry? Only four years ago, the Australian physicians Robin Warren and Barry Marshall received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery (beginning with old-fashioned serendipity) of the bacterium Heliobacter pylori and its role in causing stomach ulcers. Is it really conceivable that there are no other mavericks with ideas that will cost less than a billion dollars to develop and test?
In a newspaper interview as late as 1902 the great physicist and technologist Lord Kelvin, an Athenaeum member, told a newspaper interviewer (link courtesy of Wikipedia):
Neither the balloon, nor the aeroplane, nor the gliding machine will be a practical success.Fortunately the Wright Brothers did not depend on Lord Kelvin for funding, and demonstrated their flyer at Kitty Hawk the following year anyway.
The social psychologist Daniel Gilbert, in his book Stumbling on Happiness, notes about this episode that "when scientists make erroneous predictions, they almost always err by predicting that the future will be too much like the present."
Too much "realism" about lagging innovation can become a self-fulfilling prophecy with the discouraging message of an ever more resistant Mother Nature. Naysayers to the contrary, there is a place for hype. And there's a lot to be said for the motto of the 1968 student protestors: "Be realistic, demand the impossible."
From Seth:
It's true that funding agencies do tend to stress low-risk projects, but this approach makes sense. Scientific achievements most often come from slow and steady progress, punctuated by an occasional major discovery. The major discoveries can't occur in a vacuum; they rely on having that foundation of knowledge that was built up over prior years.You're right that important work often is the result of cumulative efforts. The cult of paradigm-breaking, revolutionary science dismayed even Thomas Kuhn, whose Structure of Scientific Revolutions became of the best selling scholarly books of all time. On the other hand, my own friends and acquaintances in science seem to agree with the poll results that there's too much caution in grants. That may be true in journal editing, too, and not just in the US. The Spanish physicist Juan Miguel Campanario has studied the rejection of high quality papers.
I agree with Umesh Patil that scientific quality can have a long lag time. I should add that I hope the Pew Research Center will follow up with a survey focusing on what's happening at the graduate and postgraduate level now. It might also look at the controversy over opportunities for scientists and where there is really a shortage:
The Sloan Foundation sponsors some of the most prestigious fellowships for young scientists, so their assessment of scientific opportunity should be cause for concern, even though the Obama administration doesn't share it. Last year Dr. Bruce Rosen of Massachusetts General Hospital told the Boston Globe:Among the most vocal critics: Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York, which funds basic scientific, economic and civic research. He says there are "substantially more scientists and engineers" graduating from the USA's universities than can find attractive jobs.
"Indeed, science and engineering careers in the U.S. appear to be relatively unattractive" compared with other career paths, he told Congress in 2007.
"It is a time of great difficulty, in my own experience not seen since the mid-late '80's," he said. "In our own lab I've begun to see very promising young scientists choosing careers in business consulting rather than research positions, and am facing the very real possibility for the first time in a very long while of watching good scientists potentially lose their jobs for lack of support. This is obviously devastating for the individuals involved, and very dispiriting to the community of their peers who see themselves sometimes only a small step ahead."According to this article in Nature (full text may require subscription) there are significantly more principal NIH investigators over 70 than under 30:
"We're eating our seedcorn," says [NIH Director Elias] Zerhouni.Anna raises this issue from her own experience as a young investigator and also questions conventional scorekeeping on scientific prowess:
I don't understand why US eminence is an issue - as if we were in competition with everyone else, which doesn't seem to be the spirit of science. Haven't all of us learned, ever since grad school, that collaboration is the key to success in science? It is true that there is a lot of competition in science, but during recent years such competition has done more harm than good to science.And I agree that there's sometimes a note of panic or even chauvinism in criticism of America's scientific position. At least one distinguished economist, Amar Bhidé of Columbia (who earlier this year gave a presentation at the center I'm visiting), believes Americans' real vocation is as "venturesome" consumers, whose zest for innovation benefits themselves and the world far more than "techno-nationalism" would.
It's not clear that scientific (or humanistic) education improves people or societies. The Soviet Union had superb schools and some of the world's best popular high school science publications. What's important is not seeking domination at others' expense -- it's continuing to be in the first rank of a cooperative global enterprise.
Matthew Nisbet in his reply and on his blog looks on the positive side, the
almost unrivaled respect, admiration, and deference in American society, with these perceptions relatively unchanged since the days of Sputnik.I'm in accord with Matt's interpretation of that aspect of the report and also reject alarmism about a widening gap between science and the public. But it's that very esteem that made me highlight the public's concern about long-term trends.
Alex L., a Materials Science student, is alarmed by the absence of American-born peers at his research university in the Southeast. And I think that's a reflection not so much of the quality of secondary education as of the perception that the social respect may be there, but the opportunities are not. See the Pew report's table. Fully 31 percent of the public thinks business executives contribute "not much" or "nothing" to society, but so far that hasn't turned much talent from business to science and engineering. Quite the contrary. The low opinion of business may also signify, among other things, the perception that executives are putting short-term profits ahead of investment in research, so why expect great scientific career opportunities from them? For a more corporate-oriented critique of research support and competitiveness, see the current Harvard Business Review (abstract).
There are some apparent contradictions in the thinking of scientists. Three quarters of them (76 percent) say this "a good time for science" in general, and a slightly smaller proportion for their own fields, but fully 87 percent are concerned about lack of funding for basic science as a "very serious" or "serious" impediment to "high-quality" research. Does that mean it's a great time -- for mediocre results? It probably reflects scientists' sentiment that grant-makers favor the routine and predictable. As a section of the report explains:
Comparable shares of scientists working in applied (62%) and basic (60%) research say that most research funders in their fields emphasize lower risk projects expected to make incremental progress. Across scientific disciplines, those working in the biological and medical sciences are more likely than others to say that most funders stress low-risk projects.
Here's a view from the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation site for a European perspective. It suggests lasting headaches from the US dot-com hangover:
In Washington, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation only classes the US sixth according to criteria such as investment in research and development, high technology infrastructure and the proportion of researchers in the working population. More seriously, of the 36 countries studied, the United States was the one that had progressed the least in ten years.In science and technology alike, there can be a long delay before a trend in education or grant support is reflected conspicuously, as in the Nobel Prizes, which honor researchers for work often done decades earlier on the basis of previous professional training. The laity, ignorant of scientific (and other facts) though they may be, might have more insight from a distance than researchers who must focus on the next proposal.
Edward Tenner
