Scientific and Technical Communication: Theory, Practice and Policy | Putting People Back Into the Business of Science: Constituting a National Forum for Setting the Research Agenda, Part 2

Strategies for Managing Science Scientifically

At least three science-termination strategies have been proposed. None of them is in the least hostile to the pursuit of scientific inquiry. If anything, these strategies have been proposed in the spirit that science itself should be governed by the principles scientists use to govern their inquiries into nature. Thus, they should be understood as contributing to the general Enlightenment aim of extending the critical attitude of science to a wider sphere of social life, in this case, to the policy forums in which the research agenda is set.

The first strategy, popular among West German leftists in the 1970s, would empower a government agency to monitor the growth of the various scientific fields. Once a field has secured widespread agreement over basic principles, and its practitioners seem to be simply filling in the remaining details, the agency would offer financial incentives to divert the practitioners away from such fine-tuning and toward participating in interdisciplinary projects that addressed outstanding social problems, typically ones with a strong medical and/or legal component. Although no country has yet adopted the German plan as a general science policy strategy, cancer research, both in the U.S. and Europe, has proceeded largely in this fashion over the past quarter-century. Its pluses and minuses are thus reasonably well documented.

When scientists from different fields work well together, breakthroughs come more easily than if each scientist were left to the devices of her own discipline-based laboratory. Far from being an unmitigated good, scientists who have grown accustomed to the standards of their own disciplines often overlook research angles that appear quite plain to scientists operating from a different disciplinary perspective. This tendency — the mutual correction of disciplinary bias — turns out to be one of the big benefits of working in an interdisciplinary team. More generally, scientists tend to underestimate the extent to which practically oriented, "applied" research has been the source of major innovations in theoretically driven, "pure" or "basic" research. The impacts of agricultural and medical research on the development of biology and chemistry in the nineteenth century provide the clearest cases in point. In fact, only in the twentieth century is basic research increasingly a source of innovative applications.

Of course, the possibility of fruitful interdisciplinary activity is predicated on scientists working well together, which is easier said than done. Highly specialized and accomplished scientists typically find it hard to adjust to an environment in which research standards and strategies need to be negotiated on a regular basis. Consequently, even the most serious of social problems (e.g., AIDS) require large financial incentives to divert top-notch scientists from their normal research trajectories; yet, the likelihood that a team of such scientists will enjoy a fruitful collaboration over the long haul remains quite small. The class of exceptions that proves the rule is the remarkable feats of interdisciplinary research done by all sides during the two World Wars. The stakes were survival itself, and the objects of concerted inquiry were "ultimate" instruments of destruction. Ironically, however, the "success" of these projects was credited less to the value of interdisciplinary teamwork and more to the ability of scientists to deliver on a herculean task when allowed to spend as much as they wanted for as long as they wanted.

A second strategy for terminating expensive research enjoys the curious honor of having been originally proposed by Alvin Weinberg, who was then director of research for the U.S. Atomic Laboratories in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Weinberg's funding principle was a simple one: the more expensive the research proposal, the more value it must have for fields outside of the principal investigator's field. The principle makes sense at several levels. In the first place, it applies to science policy the economic principle of "opportunity costs": that to invest resources in one course of action is, at the same time, to foreclose other opportunities for investment. Even if a research program is likely to succeed once it receives a certain level of funding, the value of that success must be weighed against the value of the competing programs that had to be terminated because of their failure to receive those funds. Armed with Weinberg's principle, policymakers will make funding decisions with an eye to the beneficial byproducts that a given research program might have for researchers not directly contributing to the research.

This point about the opportunity costs of funding decisions dovetails with a deep point about the history of science. Major scientific breakthroughs tend to come out of left field, often as a result of people trained in one field moving to another one, or of one field borrowing ideas and techniques from another. The inclusion of cross-disciplinary relevance as a criterion in science policy decisions would highlight such oblique paths of influence. Pursued to its logical conclusion, Weinberg's line of reasoning suggests that the field officially receiving a large research grant need not reap the largest benefits from the research done under that grant. Benefits may accrue to some third-party field whose own methods and theories are revolutionized by drawing on that research.

This conclusion may strike the reader as perverse. Nevertheless, the fact remains that no revolution in science has ever required the vast initial capital investment that is nowadays routinely sought for the most expensive and glamorous research projects. Neither Newton nor Darwin nor Einstein ever sought large research grants — and justifiably so. What government agency dedicated to the promotion of institutionalized science would find it in its interest to support research that promises — if "successful" — to displace most of the people working at the cutting-edge of a large number of fields? That was, after all, the downside of the revolutions associated with these three scientists. After Newton, astronomers had to be knowledgeable in mechanics; after Darwin, biologists and geologists could no longer ignore each other's work; after Einstein, no physicist would be taken seriously without a theory of measurement.

It is worth recalling the consequences that scientific revolutions have had on the value of scientists' labor. When supporters of the Supercollider touted the "revolutionary" character of its expected findings, they were not proposing a shift in worldview equivalent to the shifts attributed to Newton, Darwin, or Einstein. Locating the top quark or the smallest particle of matter, for all its apparent momentousness, would be intellectually no more significant than being the first to reach the top of Mount Everest. The last thing that the Supercollider's supporters wanted was to have to retrain thousands of scientists. Rather, they trumped up the value of their high-energy physics puzzles to a level that was commensurate with the amount of funding that they are seeking from Congress. If a genuine scientific revolution were to have occurred in the aftermath of Supercollider research, it probably would have been in any field but high-energy physics. Both the field's internal power structure and its balance of power vis-a-vis other scientific disciplines could have only been strengthened by the level of funding that Congress was asked to commit to the Supercollider.

Still, scientific revolutions do not come cheap, though it is often hard to count up the costs. While such revolutions are certainly labor- and capital-intensive affairs, the necessary investments are rather diffuse both in terms of their sources and their recipients. Only a relatively small part of the overall labor and an even smaller part of the capital is invested in the designated "genius" of a given scientific revolution. Part of what gives a scientific revolution its seemingly miraculous qualities is that historians and policymakers fixate on the revolutionary genius to such an extent as to suggest that one person's efforts could move the world in a way that entire armies could not. In this context, it is sometimes claimed that truth is efficiently revealed to the honest scientific inquirer, whereas the artifice of politics requires constant coercion, manipulation, and, in any case, effort. However, in the case of the greatest scientist of them all, Sir Isaac Newton, this distinction simply does not hold up under scrutiny.

Living before the "Age of Grantsmanship," Newton earned a modest income as a mathematics professor at Cambridge University. Because his now classic Principia Mathematica was a rather hefty tome with pages upon pages of arcane geometric proofs, no publisher thought they could profit from printing it — that is, until Newton's friend Edmund Halley (of Halley's Comet fame) subsidized the entire operation. But Newton realized that publication alone would not turn many heads in the scientific community, since his advanced mathematical formulations were enough to intimidate even potentially sympathetic readers. He, therefore, embarked on a campaign of instructing likely reviewers of Principia in how they may represent his main arguments without including the higher mathematics. Newton went out of his way to invite challenges from scientists throughout Europe, especially France, whose major scientific societies sponsored competitions throughout the eighteenth century to refute this or that Newtonian claim. Although Newton is unique in the extent to which he orchestrated the revolution that bears his name, his example illustrates the number of levels on which activity must occur in order for a revolution to succeed. While no government agency need be in the business of fomenting scientific revolutions, it can foster the sorts of situations that characterize such revolutions by encouraging certain rivalries, both within and between disciplines, as well as cross-fertilizations.

Truth be told, "cross-disciplinary fertilization" is often little more than a policymaker's euphemism for the fact that universities poorly adapt to changing job markets. As a result, a surfeit of scientists are produced who need to find work in fields other than the ones in which they were trained. Barely a third of recent natural science graduates have found employment related to their chosen field of study, a figure that is comparable to supposedly "unemployable" graduates in the humanities and social sciences. The fact that most of the other two-thirds have managed to find some form of employment testifies not to the "versatility" of scientific training, but to the resourcefulness of desperate job seekers. One wonders whether those who eventually found jobs in, say, accounting or systems analysis would have gone through the trouble of majoring in high-energy physics, had they anticipated their fate in the job market. Indeed, it has yet to be shown that science graduates enjoy an advantage over other graduates in competing for these jobs. On the contrary, it may well be that the highly specialized nature of the science curriculum renders students ill-equipped for jobs not directly tied to that training. Like a species that has become overadapted to its ecological niche, science graduates may be incapable of survival in a radically changed labor market.

To be sure, historically speaking, a tight job market often explains the emergence of new disciplines, as ambitious people trained in an oversubscribed field have found professional fulfillment by colonizing an undersubscribed field with their oversubscribed skills. Suppose you were Wilhelm Wundt living in the highly competitive environment of German higher education in the 1870s. Fortified with considerable self-possession and a doctorate in the elite discipline of physiology, he proceeded to apply the field's experimental techniques to the mind-body problem in philosophy, a field that had fallen into disrepute and hence allowed relatively easy career advancement. In this way, Wundt "invented" the science of psychology, a field that would remain largely in philosophy faculties until the end of World War I. Cases such as Wundt's force the policymaker to consider whether this mismatching of supply to demand need be the principal cause of scientific innovation. If so, then given that most First World universities have failed to curb their intake of science students since the end of the Cold War, we should expect a ferment of innovation as unemployable scientists scramble to repackage their skills to unsuspecting employers. After all, a fifth of all scientists worldwide — and a third in countries like America and Britain — held military research contracts during the final days of the Cold War.

The third strategy for scientifically managing science promises to be the most democratic by demanding the most changes in how scientists put forth their research agendas. It starts from the observation that science policymakers typically find Weinberg's criterion of interdisciplinary relevance very difficult to put into practice. The main source of the difficulty is that research proposals are ordinarily evaluated by peer review, which means that scientists are encouraged to write their proposals with an eye toward impressing experts in their own field, each encased in its own standards and jargon. Thus, a given proposal is judged for its ability to advance the frontiers of knowledge in the particular field. The peer reviewer is not invited to ask larger questions having to do with whether the particular field of knowledge itself is worth promoting indefinitely: Is there a point at which we would be better off shifting our investments from high energy physics to molecular biology? Because there are no opportunities for raising a question of this sort, proposals end up being accepted or rejected largely on grounds of "technical proficiency." In other words, the cross-disciplinary comparisons that are needed to implement Weinberg's criterion simply never arise in the normal course of events. Indeed, without a complete overhaul of the science policy apparatus, the disciplinary structure will simply be reproduced year after year, as each field allots its share of the available grants to technically proficient scientists.

However, the situation would be quite different if scientists from different fields were required to defend their proposals to one another in an open forum, such as before a congressional appropriations committee or perhaps even a university symposium. Historians, philosophers, and sociologists of the scientific enterprise could be called in initially to design procedures for publicly examining the scientists' claims. However, provided with an incentive to interrogate one another's claims, the scientists themselves will be in a position to intensify the investigation, stripping away gratuitous jargon, overstatement, and all-around obfuscation that might otherwise mystify nonexperts. In that way, what originally appeared to be a matter of apples and oranges — such as the theoretical benefits of a branch of physics and the practical benefits of a branch of biology — would now be rendered comparable in discourse. In fact, some philosophers and sociologists of science today believe that most of the seemingly "deep" differences in subject matter between the sciences are due to the lack of open communication channels across the corresponding disciplinary communities. If such communities were routinely accountable to each other, then much of the aura of expertise and esoteric knowledge that continues to keep the public at a respectful distance from scientists would removed. Here two points are worth recalling. First, scientists themselves constitute part of the lay public for every branch of knowledge that goes beyond their specialty. Second, to call for science to be conducted in a "civil tongue" is not to end all disagreements among scientists. However, the cross-disciplinary turf wars that now produce more heat than light are likely to diminish.

Good models for thinking about criteria for evaluating competing claims in our science policy forum may be found in welfare economics. Of particular relevance are schemes for income redistribution based on competing ways of compensating the losers in a policy debate. These schemes have been given widespread currency in one of this century's leading works of political theory, A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. According to Rawls, in the just society, people will tolerate income inequalities if they believe that the poorer members of society can somehow derive benefit from the income of the wealthier members. This idea is common to all modern theories of public finance, ranging from the investment tax breaks favored by the Right to the higher tax rates on the wealthy favored by the Left. The problem of public finance is central to modern democracies that operate within a capitalist economic framework: How can everyone benefit from wealth that remains concentrated in relatively few hands? Modern science is implicitly forced to ask a similar question, given the vast disparity in costs and benefits across the disciplines. A useful way of thinking about this disparity is through the concept of epistemic fungibility.

Some forms of inquiry are more "epistemically fungible" than others. Consider the difference between high energy physics research done on the Supercollider and psychological inquiry conducted by means of public opinion surveys. The Supercollider was normally presented as a scientific instrument expressly designed to test certain theories in physics. No other discipline was likely to benefit directly from working on the Supercollider, as no other discipline requires particle accelerators for testing its theories. In addition, the dimensions of the Supercollider were non-negotiable: One did not consider "big" or "small" versions of the Supercollider, and it would make no sense to speak of "half" or "three-quarters" of a Supercollider. The Supercollider would not have been usable at all until it was completely built. The decision whether to construct the instrument was thus an all-or-nothing matter, a fact that contributed to its controversial history.

Together, all of these features rated Supercollider research low on epistemic fungibility. In contrast, public opinion surveys are common to a variety of disciplines in the social sciences, so that even if most of the work were initially done by psychologists, sociologists and political scientists may stand to benefit and subsequently contribute to that line of research. Moreover, one can tailor the scope of the survey to the amount of funding available. While surveys that question more people are normally regarded as more representative of an entire population, one can determine the "statistical significance" of findings reached on any sample size. These opportunities for negotiating the dimensions of the project make survey research more epistemically fungible.

If policymakers regularly thought about science funding as a branch of welfare economics, they would require scientific teams to draft proposals not only for accomplishing their own goals but also for compensating other scientists with whom they are competing for funds. Moreover, the burden to provide compensation would be greater with the amount of money that the teams sought. Imposing such a requirement may cause certain disciplines to scale down their funding demands, as they reckon that the intrinsically esoteric nature of their inquiries precludes the incorporation of practitioners from other disciplines into their proposals. Of course, the other alternative available to these nonfungible fields would be to seek full funding from industrial and philanthropic concerns in the private sector. In that case, if the trend toward increasing specialization in science is truly irreversible, we should see the "privatization" of science, which, some predict, will incline society to think about the products of scientific research much as we think about works of art today. In effect, a privatized scientific enterprise would convert all knowledge to intellectual property.

Not surprisingly, many scientists balk at the prospect of privatization. Historically speaking, most of the power that elite groups derive from specialized knowledge is directly traceable to that knowledge being shrouded in secrecy or, in some other way, rendered inaccessible to most people. Privatization, it is feared, would only increase that tendency, as certain wealthy "patrons of the sciences" could emerge as majority shareholders in the knowledge produced by particular fields. To stave off this unsavory possibility, it is reasonable to suppose that some scientific communities would start to reconceptualize their practices to increase the fungibility of their fields. For example, high-energy physicists may decide that rival theories in their field can be just as effectively tested on relatively inexpensive computer simulations as on the $10 billion Supercollider. After all, geneticists, psychologists, and economists have long used computer simulations for analogous purposes, as they have tried to get around the unfeasibility of staging direct tests of their theories. Here it is important to recall that nothing in the formulation of a scientific theory dictates the method by which it must be tested. Indeed, it has become commonplace among historians of science to reveal the complicated negotiations that result in a community of scientists agreeing to test a particular theory by a particular method.

However, perhaps truest to the spirit of welfare economics would be for high-energy physicists to try to persuade a coalition of inquirers from different disciplines to participate in some successor to the ill-fated Supercollider project. For example, social scientists interested in understanding large-scale organizational behavior in isolated settings would find the community that surrounds the Supercollider (Waxahachie, Texas) an ideal site for study. In fact, some of these social scientists may be already seeking grants to investigate different communities that have similar characteristics. If the physicists were willing to take the trouble, they could persuade the social scientists to join their team instead. Such an invitation not only would save money but it would also eliminate much of the rancor and mutual suspicion that currently accompany interactions between natural and social scientists — interactions which all too often have threatened the fate of innovative interdisciplinary research. Of course, as with all compensation schemes, the wealthy would have to pay, which, in this case, would mean that the physicists would lose some of their privacy, as they allow the social scientists to roam around the Supercollider facility, regularly recording observations and asking questions, most of which will range from the pointed to the pointless. In the not too distant future, one could even envisage the social scientists remarking on ways in which the scientific worksite could be improved. Such are the first painful steps toward a democratic science.

Incorporating Science's Silent Collaborators

The success of coalition politics, such as the one fostered by welfare economics, ultimately rests on the political system's ability to identify the degree of compatibility and conflict among different interest groups. This ability, in turn, depends on correctly identifying all the relevant interest groups. So far we have looked at some of the issues surrounding adequate faculty representation in the National Forum. But including non-faculty representatives is equally vital to the success of any science-based coalition. And here I do not mean representatives of industry and government, which the Carnegie Commission report makes a point of including at every turn. Rather, I mean the less exalted class of technical and support personnel, as well as relatively recent Ph.D.'s — "postdoctoral fellows" — who have yet to find regular academic posts. The numbers of this latter group, increasingly known as the "unfaculty," are large and growing, now routinely filling 1 out of 5 academic positions in America's research universities . Together with less credentialed staff colleagues, they are the unsung heroes of the research process. Underpaid and undervalued, they often make all the difference between success and failure: What if the project secretary is unfamiliar with the work rhythms of the researchers, or the lab technician has not been consulted on the overall scheme of the project, or the postdoc's judgment is trusted only in matters of technique? Just as consumers need to be incorporated in decisions taken at the level of production, so too these "implementers" need to be incorporated in decisions taken at the level of project conception.

Indicative of the neglected state of non-faculty voices is that the Carnegie Commission report calls for the revamping of university research facilities without saying a word about the people who would staff these facilities and ensure that projects proceed according to plan. The trickle-down science policy mentality apes a top-down research management style, in which the sheer brilliance or utility of a project idea supposedly calls forth the appropriate personnel. This policy is propelled by romantic images of research teams inspired by visionary directors. Back on earth, however, studies of corporate management style show the cult of the irreplaceable individual is a formula for megalomania, rude awakenings, and failed enterprises. If the actions of any one individual — even the scientific "genius" — are seen as disproportionally more significant than those of anyone else, then work and responsibility are not distributed to make optimal use of the talents of all the team members.

Admittedly, deliberations at a National Forum may take an unexpected turn once secretaries, technicians, and postdocs are allowed representation. In particular, they may want to lend neither their opinions nor their approval to the science policy process until the status of their labor and the terms of their employment reflected the seriousness with which they were now being taken. Some scientific traditionalists may hesitate at the introduction of such issues. Nevertheless, these staples of labor-management relations follow from the realization that success of science policy in a truly democratic society is measured not merely by the quantity of the goods that science produces — nor merely by the quality of those goods — but by the quality of the interactions of the people who are employed in producing those goods. One can only hope that a National Forum on Science and Technology Goals will soon be designed so as to enable our research priorities to be set both by and for all the people entrusted to get the job done.

Summary and a Postscript for the New Millenium

Like the Almighty God of Scripture, science in America today is both everywhere and nowhere — at least if the accounting procedure of the US federal budget is taken as one's guide. The invisible pervasiveness of science reflects our faith in science's inability to do harm if left to its own devices. On the contrary, I argue that this refusal to examine science critically does harm to democratic governance and public welfare by tying up large amounts of money that might be better spent elsewhere. In addition, such an uncritical science policy perpetuates an attitude toward knowledge that both devalues education and wastes and frustrates the talent of those who pursue scientific careers. Moreover, this attitude is currently spreading throughout institutions of higher learning and across academic disciplines. Armed with some insights from the history and sociology of science, I have proposed three strategies for the "scientific" management of science. Each would make science more open to democratic forms of accountability without necessarily compromising the quality of the science done. However, these proposals can work only if we adopt a more expansive view of the range of interests that need to be taken into account in the science policy process. And this means bringing into our discussions not only cutting-edge researchers but also teaching faculty, postdoctoral fellows, as well as secretarial and technical support staff. We will have then made a systematic shift in our understanding of science from the manufacture of products to the employment of people.

Appealing to scientific authority has proven politically to be the most palatable means for democratic governments to coerce the populace. However, these governments are now saddled with enormous budgetary deficits, mostly arising from the need to buffer the effects that rapidly changing economic conditions have on their constituency. Under these circumstances, it is easy to see why an expensive scientific project like the Supercollider would be regarded as dispensable. But what if this is only the beginning of a trend toward governments divesting their financial interest in the education and research of the scientific community? Historically speaking, this would be equivalent to secularizing science, in the sense that Christendom was secularized when the emerging nation-states of Europe in the 17th century refused to grant a single Church special economic and political privileges. This led to a period of evangelism, in which religious believers competed to attract believers who would materially sustain their efforts. Analogues of such proselytizing efforts can already be seen among the defenders of New Age knowledges who broadcast their "infomercials" on late-night Cable Television. They promise custom-made enlightenment at a price (of a video, a book, or a therapy session). In the next few decades, we may find IBM or Shell Oil publicizing their virtues in terms of the major projects in high-energy physics or molecular biology they have supported — which may be used to excuse whatever political or ecological indiscretions were involved in their support. It will be interesting to see the role that will be played by all those disappointed natural science degee holders who were misled into thinking that there was a market for pure inquiry.

Bibliographical Note

James Bryant Conant, President of Harvard University (1933-53) and a leading architect of US science policy after World War II, is usually credited with the argument that science's unique historical trajectory means that it cannot be evaluated by the standards used to judge other social institutions. His Science and Commonsense(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2nd edn, 1951) was the most popular of several books he wrote for nonscientists. Kuhn's very influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions— cited in this article (see note 10) — is dedicated to Conant.

A new round of questioning about the role of science in society began after the Soviet Union launched the first artificial space satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. This event was taken to indicate that the United States had fallen behind the Soviets in the "Science Race," a thinly veiled symbol of the Arms Race. Science policy debate over the subsequent decade is conveniently gathered in Edward Shils, ed., Criteria for Scientific Development: Public Policy and National Goals(Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1968). Here the reader will find the articles from Minerva(a journal edited by Shils) cited in this chapter. (The relevant "race" today is over "economic competitiveness", and some old foes, Germany and Japan, have returned to haunt us.)

The 1960s witnessed the emergence of some notable critics of science's involvement in "the military-industrial complex." The theoretically sophisticated Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), by Jerome Ravetz, attracted considerable attention in its day. However, in the long run, the most influential theorist of "critical science" has turned to be the more radical Paul Feyerabend, whose books Against Method(London: Verso, 1975) and Science in a Free Society(London: Verso, 1979) called for "the separation of Science and State," on par with the constitutional separation of Church and State.

The critical science movement has always been more powerful in Western Europe than in the United States. The reader can get a vivid sense of the more explicitly democratic, even populist, tendencies in this literature by having a look at Mike Hales, Science or Society? The Politics of the Work of Scientists(London: Free Association Books, 2nd edn, 1986). However, the scientists have recently begun to strike back at the critics. Especially notable in its "knowledge of the enemy" is Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). Gross and Levitt provocatively argue that science critics are making it harder, not easier, for the social goals of the Left to be realized. A good source of responses from the "academic left" is The Science Wars,eds. Andrew Ross and Stanley Aronowitz (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1996).

The best survey of the history of attempts to mask the political character of scientific research is Robert Proctor, Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Closer to home, David Guston and various interlocutors have explored the "essential tension" between science and democracy in the history of American political thought in a special issue of the journal, Social Epistemology7, 1 (1993).

Notes

For an analysis of the various appeals that are made to balance issues of equity against those of efficiency, see Brian Barry, Political Argument(Altantic Highlands NJ: Humanities Press, 1965).

See Sal Restivo, "Modern Science as a Social Problem," Social Problems35 (1988) 206-228.

The following account of the federal science budget is taken from a wide-ranging report conducted by the research arm of Congress, the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA): Federally Funded Research: Decisions for a Decade(U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991), chap. 5.

Available from the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government, 10 Waverly Place, New York NY 10013.

"Big science" was popularized by the quantitatively oriented social historian Derek de Solla Price in Little Science, Big Science(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963).

Ernest Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: The Priorities of the Professoriate.(Princeton NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990).

Boyer classifies institutions of higher learning according to the kind and number of degrees awarded, as well as the range of subjects in which they are awarded.

This point was first forcefully raised in science policy circles by the philosopher Stephen Toulmin in a critique of Michael Polanyi's influential vision of the scientific community as a "republic of science." See Toulmin, "The Complexity of Scientific Choice," Minerva2 (1964), 343-359. See also Polanyi, "The Republic of Science," Minerva1 (1962), 54-73.

It was in this context that OTA senior analyst Daryl Chubin coined the expression "quark barreling" to characterize the self-serving arguments used by physicists on behalf of the Supercollider. The Council of the American Physical Society's concerns are reported in Federally Funded Research, p. 159, fn. 40.

The most influential work to present this position is Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn, 1970). Kuhn's position is systematically contested in Steve Fuller, "Being There with Thomas Kuhn: A Parable for Postmodern Times," History and Theory31 (1992) 241-275.

In Newtonian mechanics, "inertia" refers to a body's motion before it has been subjected to an outside force, such as gravity. Soon after Newton proposed the principle in his First Law of Motion, philosopher began to see similarities between this idea of "natural motion" and the theological concept of "free will" in humans. Following the example of the sociologist Emile Durkheim, many social scientists have envisaged the normative strictures of morality as akin to gravity in being an invisible external force that curbs the inertial tendencies of the individual's pursuit of self-interest.

For a spirited and learned attack on the attempt by social scientists — economists, in this case — to derive legitimacy from defunct physics, see Philip Mirowski, More Heat Than Light(Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

The first cries from economists can be heard in Paula Stephan and Sharon Levin, Striking the Mother Lode in Science: The Importance of Age, Place, and Time(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

The virtues and vices of the peer review process are discussed in Daryl Chubin and Edward Hackett, Peerless Science(Albany: SUNY Press, 1990).

The locus classicus of this line of sociological research may be found in Robert Merton, The Sociology of Science(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), part 5.

Thomas Schott, "The World Scientific Community: Globality and Globalization." Minerva29 (1991) 440-462.

Derek de Solla Price (see note 5 above) is responsible for the arguments that suggest that larger R&D budgets make for a more productive scientific community than smaller budgets. Such arguments generally appeal to "economies of scale." In fact, Price found that scientific productivity was closely correlated with electrical energy production. See Price, "Toward a Model of Science Indicators." In Y. Elkana, J. Lederberg, R. Merton, A. Thackray, H. Zuckerman (eds.), Toward a Metric of Science(New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1978), pp. 69-96. The idea that science may suffer from "diseconomies of scale" (that is, "bigger is worse"), especially if scientific inquiry is seen as aiming for the ultimately comprehensive account of reality, is pursued in Nicholas Rescher, The Limits of Science(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

Tantalus is the source of the word "tantalize." In Greek mythology, Tantalus suffered a cruel fate. Cursed with an unquenchable thirst, whenever Tantalus moved toward a juicy fruit, the wind blew the fruit out of his reach, causing him to redouble his efforts, only to have the fruit elude him yet again. His torture thus consisted of being repeated frustrated just at the moment of consummation.

See the highly romanticized defense of the Supercollider presented in Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory(New York: Pantheon Books, 1993). Such was suggested in The New York Timeseditorial written in the wake of the Supercollider's demise, on 24 October 1993.

The Enlightenment is a general cultural movement that began in eighteenth century Europe and is strongly associated with "modernity." Enlightenment philosophers — in whose ranks include Voltaire and Kant — held that the popularization of scientific modes of thought would foster the criticism and reform of traditional religious and political practices. This science policy strategy is generally known as "finalization." The word itself suggests that a mature science coasts on its own inertial tendencies, unless it is explicitly given direction, and in that sense, "finalized." See Wolfgang Schaefer, ed., Finalization in Science (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984).

In the American context, this was the lesson drawn by Vannevar Bush, director of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. In a very influential treatise published soon after World War II, Science: The Endless Frontier, Bush argued that the success of the war effort justified the establishment of a "National Science Foundation," whose goal would be to encourage discipline-based, basic research, but in the policy environment that scientists enjoyed during the War.

This view was first presented in Alvin Weinberg, "Criteria for Scientific Choice," Minerva1 (1963) 159-171. It has since been discreetly endorsed by the OTA in Federally Funded Research, 139-140. To prevent confusion, Alvin and Steven Weinberg are not related. In fact, Steven is quite hostile to Alvin's views, a point he makes in Dreams of a Final Theory, pp. 59-60.

To put it in terms of R&D policy: More money is spent on "D" (the networking of interests that enables an innovation to spread) than on "R" (the work that originally goes into making the innovation). Contrary to the common view that traces D's dominance of R to the rise of Big Science, this tendency can be found throughout the history of science. See John Cockcroft, The Organization of Research Establishments(Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1965).

The employment figures were provided by Jane Fielding and her associates at the Sociology Department, Surrey University, UK, in the context of a debate that the author had with UK government science policy advisor, Robert May, in the pages of the Financial Times(Britain's answer to The Wall Street Journal.) on 18, 21, and 28 November 1995. The author was responding to May's concerns about the decline of university science enrollments across First World nations. Good anecdotal evidence that recent physics Ph.D.'s regret their career choice may be found in the campaign statements of the four write-in candidates for the 1994 election to the Council of the American Physical Society.

A good survey of the full range of problems raised in this paragraph may be found in "Careers '95: The Future of the Ph.D.," Science270 (6 October 1995), pp. 123-147.

In the sociology of science, Wundt's career path is regarded as a classic case of "role-hybridization." See Joseph Ben-David and Randall Collins, "Social Factors in the Origins of a New Science." American Sociological Review31 (1966), pp. 451-465.

"R&D Budget: Civilian Gains Outpace Defense." Science News137 (3 February 1990), p. 71.

Advanced readers interested in pursuing this thesis should see Steve Fuller, Social Epistemology(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

Readers may be interested in finding out about the tactics that scientists currently use to appear authoritative before policymaking forums, as well as the counter-tactics that have been developed to challenge those displays of authority. For the former, see William Wells, Working with Congress: A Practical Guide for Scientists and Engineers (Washington: AAAS Press, 1993). For the latter, see Brian Martin, Strip the Experts(London: Freedom Press, 1991). The Freedom Press is located at 84B Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX, UK. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

This concept was first introduced in Steve Fuller, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge: The Coming of Science and Technology Studies(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), p. 295. In economics, "fungibility" refers to the ease with which one good can be exchanged for another — and hence the ease with which it can serve as a means of satisfying the ends of its owner. A fungible good is one that can be had in different amounts without destroying the good's integrity. For example, a half-bag of groceries may provide half the nourishment of a full bag, but a half-automobile will not get you halfway to where you want to go. Thus, only the groceries are fungible, not the automobile. By calling this kind of fungibility "epistemic," I am stressing the fact that the goods in question are forms of knowledge.

Of course, once Congress voted to halt funding on the Supercollider, various science interest groups competed to pick at the carcass of the partly built particle accelerator. Among the most publicized strategies came from the medical community, namely, to have it produce radioisotopes that could provide proton therapy to cancer patients. See Kim McDonald, "Fight Erupts Over What to Do with Remains of the Supercollider," Chronicle of Higher Education(23 March 1994), p. A23. However, these post mortem attempts to salvage something of value from the nearly $1 billion spent on the Supercollider should not be confused with fungibility proper. The test lies in the question, "If one were keen on increasing the availability of proton cancer therapy, would supporting an expensive project in high-energy physics be the most efficient route?" (The answer, presumably, is no.)

For a wide-ranging discussion of the historical backdrop to this move, see Yaron Ezrahi, The Descent of Icarus(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press). An interesting historical aside is that had computer technology been more advanced than particle accelerator technology in the 1930s, hypotheses in high-energy physics may have been tested by computer simulations (as is common today in science, e.g. climate modeling). After all, particle accelerators are themselves persuasive only as simulations of the first milliseconds after the Big Bang. For the best insider argument on the economic unfeasibility of continuing high-energy physics research, regardless of its symbolic and cultural value, see David Lindley, The End of Physics (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

A good case in point, which involved an anthropologist studying the gendered character of high-energy physics research, is documented in Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

On the demographic characteristics of the unfaculty, see Federally Funded Research,pp. 214-215.

A good brief analysis of the social processes of secularization is Daniel Bell, "The Return of the Sacred: The Argument about the Future of Religion," in G. Almond, M. Chodorow, and R. Pearce (eds.), Progress and Its Discontents(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 501-523.

Putting People Back Into the Business of Science:
Constituting a National Forum for Setting the Research Agenda, Part 2

Steve Fuller

Book Contents

Putting People Back Into the Business of Science: Part 2