China’s Future

Time Magazine’s Michael Shuman has a really interesting piece on China here. In essence, he thinks the current state capitalism model in unsustainable because it sends inaccurate price signals which are creating huge distortions. Shuman sees China going the same way as Japan.

Shuman’s report is relevant apropos of yesterday’s blog entry here on Advanced Studies regarding some serious future challenges to international science.

Henry Markram Deconstructed…

A man with a plan: Henry Markram and his Human Brain Project, in an excellent piece here by Nature’s Mitch Waldrop.

Henry is a difficult read. On the one hand, he’s Teddy Roosevelt to the Panama Canal. On the other he’s possibly Don Quixote charging at some windmills. I can’t tell yet and I don’t think Mitch knows either. But either way, Markram does recognize a key weakness of modern neuroscience: it lacks the coherent theoretical framework that other lucky fields have (such as the standard model in physics).

Challenges ahead….

To my mind progress in science faces some pretty steep challenges in the years ahead. Chief among them is the follow-on economic damage of the Great Recession. Across the World, but particularly in North America and Europe, sovereign debt, structural deficits and political paralysis are beginning to threaten governmental support for scientific research. Here in the US, the election silly season combined with automatic sequestration cuts, increasingly make the FY13 scientific budget look pretty gloomy.  In Europe, depending how the Euro crisis pans out, the ability of Brussels to go ahead with its ambitious Horizon 2020 plan is perhaps open to question. Moreover, even in Asia, there are economic clouds which have potential to derail the massive investments in science currently taking place. I worry most about the need for China to boost domestic demand in the face of reduced exports to Europe and America. If China can’t do that smoothly, then there could well be significant instability, both economic and potentially social. And the consequences for Chinese science could well be dire.

Another challenge, especially here in the States, are the increasingly frequent attacks on the credibility of scientists. This is part of a politicization of science, both with respect to scientific theories (which serve as surrogates for “culture wars”) and scientists themselves, as they find themselves drawn into those culture wars. I’ve blogged about this danger here quite recently. The upshot is, that when the general public, upon whose taxpayer dollars science depends, stops trusting science and scientists, then science progress runs into a brick wall.

Finally, Globalism itself is being challenged and with it the massive international collaborations (think LHC, Hubble, Antarctica, ISS) which make up “big science”. Many of the truly daunting scientific problems absolutely require a transnational approach. I can’t imagine a successful single country approach to pandemic flu, to say nothing of climate change, energy production or cracking the human “mind”.

Addressing those challenges wont be easy and will certainly require the sustained contributions of scientists and their supporters. Above all, it may require many scientists to look beyond the “bench” for a bit and to reach out to their colleagues, not only to collaborate scientifically, but to protect a larger scientific agenda.

Bell Labs: The Legacy Lives On….

John Gertner’s fine piece on Bell Labs in today’s NY Times is here. Most interesting to me is the notion of proximity of really bright people as being key to success in science. This is central to what we do at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study and why I am working so hard to bring Phase III to fruition, so that all of us at the Institute are finally under one roof.

Let’s not have science become a political football…

One of the great dangers for American science is that it will become increasingly politicized. The partisanship and economic frailty of our current times only exacerbates this risk. A politicized science is one that finds itself, just like any other faction or special interest group, as not credible because of bias and self-interest. And credibility is the fragile currency of science.

Indeed, science’s greatest historical failures, seem to have arisen out self-inflicted politicization. The Eugenics Movement comes to mind. Historically arising from Darwin’s work on biological evolution and natural selection, Eugenics emerged directly from that science, politicized inappropriately to the question of what characteristics constituted a more perfect individual–truly the stuff of political demagogs.

At a recent lunch table here in Washington, I was struck by the dichotomy between Republicans and Democrats over which climate science was to be believed–intelligent lay public members dutifully deferring to scientific research, but only so long as it conformed to their ideological positions.

I have seen the same odd Blue versus Red scientific wars in the areas of embryonic stem cell research, origin of life and more recently economics and it strikes me as damaging, both to scientists and to society, for which good science is so critically important to its welfare.

So as scientists, let’s strive to keep our science at arm’s length from the political wars. Understanding that unprincipled individuals will always be attempting to deploy the latest “finding” to support their own political positions.

Celebrating Faculty Achievement…

Left to right: George Mason University President Alan Merten, Professor Giorgio Ascoli and Professor Robert Hazen.

Watching two of our faculty stars recognized for their teaching and scholarship in the state capital was really gratifying yesterday.

They were two of twelve from across the Commonwealth, and George Mason was the only institution to have more than one winner.

The Governor presided over the luncheon at the magnificent Jefferson Hotel, after the awardees had been presented on the floor of the Virginia General Assembly. It really was quite an honor.