Indications are that some in Congress are rethinking funding criteria for science… though upon inspection those new criteria might not look all that different from the criteria in place now: requiring that (1) funded research contribute to the national welfare in any of several ways; (2) it be ground-breaking; and (3) it not duplicate existing work. What seems to be at issue is more a question whether an additional high-level certification attest that these criteria have been met.
As long as the topic has been raised, here’s some further perspective. It’s prompted in part by the administration’s major new research thrust to map the human brain and stirrings that portend a possible human voyage to Mars sometime in the early 2030’s (when Earth and Mars will be relatively close).
Both programs would appear to satisfy the Congressional criteria summarized above. But they’re large… they’re big science… and that raises the question: should such grand initiatives meet additional criteria, and if so, what are they?
A preliminary: what makes some science big? Ask people, and you’ll get a variety of answers, ranging from: a given dollar threshold. Multi-investigator. Multi-institutional. Multi-disciplinary. Multi-year. Multi-national. Some or all of these attributes do indeed characterize big science, but they might not be definitive.
Consider two additional, slightly different traits:
(1) so big that the host organism (that is, society…humankind…a nation…you pick your social unit) notices.
For developed nations, R&D expenditures generally amount to a few percent of GDP; in the U.S., this rate is about 2.8%. That rate is not as high as the rate for some other countries, but U.S. GDP is so large that this amounts to something over 30% of the world’s total. The dollar figure is in the neighborhood of $40B/year. That’s for everything: the physical, chemical and biological sciences; the Earth sciences; mathematics and computational science, and so on. Most of the projects imbedded in the $40B are small, the order of say $50-100K; that means something like 500,000 to one million projects. Take away any handful of these… or add a few, even multi-institutional, multi-year projects… and there’s hardly any discernible impact at the national or international level.
But go to Mars, or map the human genome, or the brain, or build a high-energy particle accelerator to look for the Higgs boson, and you’re quickly spending billions of dollars over a span of years. It’s impossible to tackle projects of this scope without having an impact on the rest of science. Money for these efforts typically comes at the expense of other work. Mapping the human genome provided an example. At the time, some biological scientists were suggesting that mounting a serious effort to understand the nature of human thought would be a worthy alternative. And it’s not just the money. For example, such big projects also make significant demands on the technically-trained workforce, who are then unable to work toward other ends.
That brings us to the second characteristic of big science:
(2) so big that order matters.
Back in the 1970’s as lunar exploration drew to a close, NASA and its stakeholders began contemplating manned missions to Mars (and beyond). But given the limited scientific and technological capabilities available at the time, the cost of such an effort would have been staggering relative to GDP. At the time, the US faced the need for expensive military outlays to conclude the Cold War and maintain thereafter a dominant global security position. Going to Mars was a bridge too far. Efforts to build the Super-Conducting Super Collider also fell victim to this calculus. Instead, the United States concentrated its research funds on smaller projects.
Nanotechnology received emphasis as did high-performance computing. Biotechnology experienced rapid development. The results of these and other investments have been not just the creation of knowledge and understanding but the generation of tremendous wealth and economic growth… not just for the United States alone, but for and expanding set of trading partners worldwide. As a result, a richer world… a world also more advanced scientifically and technologically… can, three to four decades later, expand its horizons on the types and variety of explorations it might contemplate. Not just governments but also private-sector firms are getting into the act. By tackling these opportunities first, the United States and the rest of the world have actually hastened the day that human beings might set foot on Mars.
All this suggests that when it comes to the big projects, special attention needs to be paid to the question of whether they expand options for society (the way IT and biotechnology have) or whether they constrain or choke off future possibilities. That’s inherent in the NSF criteria, both current and contemplated, but perhaps not as explicit as it might be. When a single science project becomes so big that the opportunity cost is significant, then this needs to be taken in account in a considered way.
Want an example of a bad technological decision… one that foreclosed options for society? Egyptian obsession with bigger and better pyramids for the pharaohs comes to mind.