Like snowflakes upon a sea, and as little regarded, are letters to a new president.
Frustrated former presidents, fretfully retired statesmen, and
senators ambitious to sit in your cabinet want you to enjoy their
wisdom. Ordinary citizens take to their keyboards, as befits a
democracy. Captains of industry, those proud alumni of the Polytechnic
of Life, are determined to level with you. Even
intellectuals–scientists, economists, and, Someone forgive us,
magazine editors–feel the solemn duty to buttonhole you about what you
must do in the first months of your administration.
Wired magazine devoted its October issue to “a Smart List of 15
Wired people with big ideas about how to fix the things that need
fixing.” More selectively, we have asked three éminences of science and
technology to advise you. (Letters from Ernest Moniz, the director of the MIT Energy Initiative; John Halamka, the chief information officer of Harvard Medical School; and Charles Vest, MIT president emeritus.) All try to make action urgent and its nature clear.
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As will I. Whoever you are, you will have pressing demands upon your
attention. As I write in mid-October, a burst financial bubble appears
to be leading to a global crisis of liquidity. You must fight two
protracted wars. The very weather frightens. And at home and abroad
there is a general malaise about the American project: to many, the
United States, which Ronald Reagan, echoing Lincoln, often called “the
last, best hope of man on earth,” seems to have become one of the
ordinary nations.
The promotion of science and technology must feel very far from your
priorities. But encouraging America’s scientists and technologists is
essential to the well-being of your fellow citizens and (insofar as the
United States has been the world’s wellspring of research and
development) of everyone alive.
It was so before. In the 20th century, U.S. achievement in science,
engineering, and medicine “protected our nation’s security, fueled most
of our economic growth, and nearly doubled our life span,” Chuck Vest
writes. “It sent us to the moon, fed the planet, brought world events
into our living rooms, established instant worldwide communications,
gave rise to ubiquitous new forms of art and entertainment, uncovered
the workings of our natural world, and gave us freedom of travel by
air, sea, and land.”
Science and technology may astonish the 21st century, and they can
help solve many of the problems you face; but they will flourish only
if the federal government funds long-term discovery research. Venture
capitalists and entrepreneurs will develop the most commercial
discoveries; but the discoveries are the fruit of research for which
there is no sure application.
Your predecessor hardly cared for such stuff. Over the last eight
years, most federal funding of research was reduced or maintained at
the same level (and therefore declined after inflation). Only one area
of research really prospered: science and technology with applications
in security and defense. Generally, U.S science and technology is
suffering.
Consider, for example, research into alternative energy. In
testimony before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and
Global Warming in September, MIT’s president, Susan Hockfield, told
legislators that in 1980, 10 percent of federal research dollars went
to energy. In 2006, she said, it was less than 3 percent: between $2.4
and $3.4 billion, or less than half the annual R&D budget of the
largest North American pharmaceutical company. Hockfield called for
Congress to begin by tripling funding for energy research.
You should champion such increases. In the cover story of this issue (see “Sun + Water = Fuel”),
Kevin Bullis shows why. He describes a catalyst developed by Daniel
Nocera, a professor of chemistry at MIT, that generates oxygen from
water, much as plants do during photosynthesis. Bullis writes, “The
reaction is the first and most difficult step in splitting water to
make hydrogen gas. And that advance, Nocera believes, will help
surmount one of the main obstacles preventing solar power from becoming
a dominant source of electricity: there’s no cost-effective way to
store the energy collected by solar panels.”
This is a tremendous advance: if artificial photosynthesis works at
a larger scale, we have clean power. Nocera’s current research is part
of a $21.5 million program, funded by the National Science Foundation,
that will continue until August 2013. But Nocera has been working on
artificial photosynthesis since the early 1980s, and it will take
another decade to commercialize his work. If we judge by recent
emerging energy technologies, that commercialization will demand
hundreds of millions of dollars more. Until venture capitalists have
been convinced of the technology’s promise (and potentially for longer,
if the financial markets cannot offer an exit strategy to justify VCs’
investment), much of that money must come from the federal government.
Mr. President, please work with Congress to increase research
funding. Science and technology can expand human possibilities, but
only when they are themselves expansive.