Reflections

This section collects the essays from Reflections from the Frontiers (Explorations for the Future: Gordon Research Conferences 1931-2006), GRC's 75th anniversary commemorative publication.

The New Generation
Wil Lepkowski
Wil Lepkowski
Independent Journalist
Planting the Seeds of Science Policy

Early in 1999 I retired from Chemical and Engineering News and received a note from Carl Storm expressing surprise and wishing me happy days. I called Carl to thank him and, in passing, told him how odd it seemed, given its importance, that the Gordon Conferences had apparently never held any meetings on science policy. “Well, propose one,” he said and told me how. I followed his suggestion: the Gordon board approved the proposal and a meeting on the topic was held in 2000. Two more followed, in 2002 and 2004, with a fourth scheduled in 2006.

I subsequently discovered that GRC had in fact sponsored a meeting in 1968, largely devoted to science policy, called Science, Technology, and Economic Growth, but that one breathed only for that year, never to inhale again. Policy as a Gordon topic returned to its cove in yonder hills, except for lectures or allusions to it in various other Gordon Conferences over the years.

A quick historical review shows that the seeds of today’s astonishing era of discovery were sown by World War II, when the United States’ scientists and engineers were called into service to help win it. The nation’s researchers turned out a spectacular stream of innovations that included synthetic rubber, new drugs, surgical techniques, electronic espionage systems, early computers, radar, and most ominous of all, atomic weaponry. After the war Vannevar Bush, the MIT engineer who managed the wartime research effort, produced the revolutionary report “Science–the Endless Frontier,” which set the framework for government support of science for both peaceful and military purposes. The ultimate result was massive financial support for research in all fields of basic science and, in time, for engineering and the social and behavioral sciences as well. At the same time scientists, because of their work on the atomic bomb, were forced to think about and engage themselves in the social, ethical, and moral consequences of their efforts.

Congress and the executive branch began to demand analysis of an increasing load of technical issues. The policy work of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science expanded enormously, research universities became active lobbyists, and every major scientific and engineering society found itself compelled to establish policy units. As early as the mid-1960s public policy concerning science and technology was becoming an academic discipline in its own right.

Many issues are ripe for policy research, acute historical analysis, and incisive topicality, including industrial influence on academic research behavior; global change and its social and political consequences; effective government structures for good policy making; stem-cell research and its ethical considerations; energy policy in a time of dwindling oil availability; the vague but critical field of “homeland security” in the United States accompanied by a controversial research agenda and a host of restrictions on information and immigration; the ethical and social responsibilities of industrial research; the comparatively low level of science literacy in the United States; and the profusion of controversies in medical and agricultural genetics. The list goes on and on.

So much for background. To organize the initial meeting, I needed partners, and so I called on Marty Apple, then president of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, and Daryl Chubin, then on the staff of the National Science Board. Marty volunteered as cochair and Daryl elected to be vice chair (which meant he would chair the conference’s second meeting). Together we mapped out a program that by its diversity would determine what would work within the GRC format and what would not.

The Science and Technology Policy Gordon Conference in 2000 began with a keynote session on future issues across the spectrum of science and technology policy. Following were sessions on the implications of information science, science education, science communication, international relations in science and technology, the ethical issues in molecular genetics, trends in defense research, and the basis of protest movements against the Western domination of science and technology. The topics stretched across many issues and disciplines and were seen by many as too light on the research side and too wide in subject matter. Still, much was learned, and the conference was under way.

The second conference was held in 2002, organized by Daryl and his cochair John Elter of Plug Power Corporation, and by vice chair Jane Maienschein, a historian and philosopher of science at Arizona State University. Jane joined with Susan Fitzpatrick, vice president of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, to cochair the 2004 conference. The 2002 meeting, while more focused and interactive, was disappointingly small. Clearly, Jane and Susan had their work cut out for 2004. By dint of hard work and outstanding fundraising, the conference, held at Big Sky Resort in Montana, was a smash. Rich with students, bulging with posters, and oversubscribed, the conference was diverse in makeup and focused subject matter.

The 2006 conference is well along in the planning stages and will be cochaired by biologist and bioethicist Fred Grinnell of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, and Skip Stiles, an independent policy consultant and former staff member of the late U.S. Representative George Brown of California, and co—vice chaired by political scientist David Guston of Arizona State University and bioethicist Rachel Ankeny of the University of Sydney.

Conference organizers are aiming to increase international participation, which was modest up to 2004. GRC leadership also began rethinking the criteria for properly evaluating Gordon Conferences of the policy type, which should include issues of idea generation, the pertinence of case studies, the reporting of scholarship, and the shaping of research agendas.

One critical hope is that more of the Gordon Conference community will participate in the evolution of policy-type conferences. It is the work of these scientists that has set the character and tone of the modern age, and it will be their thoughts and their discoveries that will set the agenda for the policy community. Science and Technology Policy participants believe that while the first goal of the conference is to promote excellence in the policy community, the discussion is ripe for the presence of the entire community of Gordon Conference participants.