The following are extracts of David Baltimore’s presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston on Thursday 14 February.
David Baltimore
“We have a Presidential election coming. Science and technology have played at best minor roles in the primary campaigns. Now that we have a limited candidate pool, it is time for our community to be heard.
“A debate on science has been proposed and some 15,000 people and many organisation have signed onto the proposal. We should write to the candidates and encourage them to participate.
“Their view of science, whether they want to hear its conclusions or want to hide from them, whether they want to have the thinking of our community represented in the White House or relegated to a distant office, whether they will support intensive investigation of alternative energy sources, whether they will liberate the biomedical community to fully investigate the power of stem cell technology, whether they will face the reality that abstinence is not the only way to protect people against HIV transmission, whether they will provide leadership or bury their head in the sand when tough choices must be made, whether they will leave a better country than the one they inherit, all of these are critical questions with which they should be faced.
“And there is one question they should be asked, which is of particular interest to me: will they support an increase in funding for NIH? [US National Institutes of Health]
“It is criminal that at a time when the opportunities in biomedical research outstrip any other moment in history, there has been a 13 percent real decrease in the buying power of the health research budget between 2004 and the 2009 proposal.
“The President must believe himself immortal, or in the hands of God, to have presided over this decimation of one of the jewels of American science, a science jewel that has spawned the biotechnology industry, the one industry in which America is the unquestioned leader.
How can we cede that lead to others by reducing support for the research that made it possible?
The apparent contradiction in national support for science
“Scientists engineers and technologists generally believe that our professions know no borders. We read the literature to gain knowledge, independent of where the experiments were done. We travel to meetings all over the world, sharing our knowledge. […]
“The stronger is world science, the more ideas will bubble up, the richer will be the brew of ideas and experiments that each of us can draw upon.
“That is one side of the picture; the other is that we want our own countries to be strong. Our economic health, our security, our ability to live fulfilling and peaceful lives depends on being strong. Our military strength may be preponderant but that is not the issue: it is maintaining our economic strength that is of concern.
“The US National Academies of Sciences embodied these worries in its report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm”. It is a highly nationalistic document. It calls for programmes to strengthen US science so that we can compete in the newly global economy. By implication, strengthening foreign science would appear to be against our interests.
Another perspective required
“On one hand, we want a peaceful world. The tension of economic competition helps to produce that because each country is concerned with its own development in a global context. Development promotes stability, optimism, independence, competitiveness and a belief in the further value of progress.
“If science and technology are well springs of economic growth, the stronger the science internationally, the more peaceful will be the world.
“The other side of the coin is that we as Americans want our country to be particularly strong. We must recognise that we will not have a monopoly on innovation but we will be able to keep our fair share.
“So the resolution of the contradiction is that we need to do both: keep ourselves strong and encourage others to develop.”
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