며칠전, 미국 과학기술계에서 한 내공 하시는 분들이 모이셨답니다.
아마 도올 선생 강의만큼 재미있는 내용도 있는 듯...
Nano에 관한 솔직한 견해도 무척 흥미롭지요.
언젠가 Cantab님이 지적하셨던 내용 그대로 다 나옵니다.
Nanotechnology = 포장의 미학?
저 아래 부분, 굵은 글자로 강조해둔 곳을 눈여겨 보셔도 좋을 듯...
미국 사람들이 동양인들을 위협적 존재로 느끼고 있는 뉘앙스...
그런데, 우린 이공계 기피하자고요?

Transcript: Colloquy on Science, Education, Technology, and Policy


좌측부터 실버만씨
(미역사상최고액기부자),
96년 노벨화학상수상자 스몰리 박사,
노벨 경제학상 수상자 솔로우 박사,
클린턴정부 보건부 장관 샬랄라,
셜리 앤잭슨 총장 (맨 우측)

Hosted by the Honorable Shirley Ann Jackson
President, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Friday, May 16, 2003
Heffner Alumni House, Troy, N.Y.

Guests include:
• The Honorable Donna Shalala
• Philanthropist Morris “Marty” Silverman
• Nobel laureate Robert Solow
• Nobel laureate Richard Smalley

Key:
Jackson (SAJ)
Shalala (DS)
Silverman (MS)
Solow (RS)
Smalley (RSm)

Good afternoon.

Thank you for coming.

We are profoundly honored to have four exceptional individuals with us today — a former U.S. cabinet secretary, two Nobel laureates, and a beloved local citizen and benefactor. They are the 2003 Commencement honorary degree recipients.

When people of such extraordinary caliber and high achievement come among us, it lifts us all. It opens a window for us to learn and to gather some of their experience, their wisdom, and their ability to speak uniquely to the issues of the day. We want to make the most of their brief time with us. This colloquy is our opportunity to step through this window.

I will begin by introducing them.

On my immediate right is The Honorable Donna Shalala, the former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, appointed by President Bill Clinton. During her tenure, from 1993 to 2001, she expanded the Head Start educational program for preschool children, extended AIDS research, sought universal immunizations for children, and reformed welfare. She received her Ph.D. from Syracuse University, has held professorships at Columbia University, City University of New York (CUNY) and University of Wisconsin-Madison, and served as President of Hunter College of CUNY. She currently is the President of the University of Miami. In the 1970s, Dr. Shalala was director and treasurer of the Municipal Assistance Corporation, which helped reverse New York City's financial collapse, an important contribution to the economic well being of the entire state.

Next is Dr. Robert M. Solow, a leading global economist, who received the Nobel Prize in 1987 for his contributions to the theory of capital and economic growth. Dr. Solow developed a mathematical model, which showed that the rate of technological progress and the qualitative improvements, such as new technologies and improved human skills, are more important than quantitative investments and capital accumulation, which add new machines and build more factories. This idea is a primary tenet of education at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Through his work, nations came to understand that economic growth is driven by technological development, and prompted by greater investment in technological research. Dr. Solow served under President John F. Kennedy on the Council of Economic Advisers, and his teaching career at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) spanned more than four decades.

Next to Dr. Solow is Dr. Richard E. Smalley, the Hackerman Professor of Chemistry at Rice University. Dr. Smalley is one of three recipients of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of carbon atoms bound in the form of a ball, commonly known as fullerenes or “buckeyballs.” He developed an important new technique—supersonic beam laser spectroscopy—which he used in his prize-winning research at the University of Chicago. He was one of the founders of the Rice Quantum Institute in 1979, and served as chairman of this interdisciplinary Institute for 20 years. Since 1990, he has also been a Professor in the Department of Physics, and was appointed Director of the new Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice in 1996.

Mr. Morris [“Marty”] Silverman, a Troy native and well-known local philanthropist, who is helping to transform the Capital Region into a international leader in law, science, medicine, and education. Mr. Silverman graduated from the Albany School of Law of Union College (now Albany Law School) supporting himself by working at a gas station he established in Troy with a loan from Standard Oil Company. After graduation he dealt in government surplus automobiles and started Capital Auto Sales with a brother-in-law. From this he created the largest family-owned leasing company in the country. Through his Marty and Dorothy Silverman Foundation, Mr. Silverman has donated generously to stimulate and improve a variety of research and educational initiatives in the Albany area. His generosity also is benefiting senior citizens, abused and neglected youngsters, and veterans.

Please join me in welcoming our distinguished guests.

Now, a colloquy is a conversational exchange — a dialogue — and we have purposely chosen a comfortable setting to cultivate an informal discussion of ideas. We have the privilege of “listening in” on a conversation among these distinguished achievers.

I will ask each of our honorands a question or two, and then our other guests will be asked if they wish to comment. At the conclusion, there will be an opportunity for questions from the audience.

I propose to begin with a question for Secretary Shalala:

One of your primary responsibilities, as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was the health of the nation. Rensselaer has chosen biotechnology, which promises important breakthroughs for health care and the practice of medicine, as one of its primary research foci. How does one get research breakthroughs — from genomics, for instance — into health care in a way that might make health care more accessible and more cost-effective for the average American?


도나 샬랄라(가운데)
클린턴 정부 각료

Donna Shalala (DS)—First, after eight years in government, forget about cost effective. However to improve people’s health obviously genomics, if it fulfills its promise, will give us early warning for individuals about diseases and to the extent that science can help, not necessarily to prevent disease, but to slow it down can provide treatments early on, the promise is unbelievable. It will require a different organization of medicine, and probably more thoughtful planning in terms of privacy. Because it also raises a number of ethical questions about privacy. For instance, are you the only person to know? Does your employer know, if you have a tendency toward a particular disease? What impact does it have long term in terms of insurance. So there are lots of questions. It’s not easy to get from there to here. And as you well know, with biotechnology with all its promise, getting the basic science translated into something that will improve someone’s health is a huge step and will probably take a different kind of infrastructure than we have now in basic science.

SAJ—Would you care to elaborate, you thought the whole thing needed to be organized differently?

DS—It seems to me this kind of science requires we think in prevention terms. It shifts us from thinking about once someone gets ill and the high end of medicine, into understanding that earlier interventions may make a difference in the quality of life. We have less attention being paid on prevention than we do to high tech medicine now in our country; so it may require different kind of resource investment and I actually think who does it may be different in the long run.

SAJ—Would any of our other guests like to comment?

Richard Solow (RS)—I want to say something about the problem Donna remarked on that it’s by no means easy to get from science to a practical application, and an organization like Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute exists for that. It takes a lot of apparatus, a lot of thought, and a lot of luck to do that.

DS—And maybe a cultural change, if I may throw something in. Basic scientists often aren’t interested in whether there is going to be a result down the line so getting them to fill out a potential patent application is a huge cultural leap. I spent part of my career at a research university, the University of Wisconsin-Madison which had something — the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF). What we came up with is that we paid the basic scientists $1,000 each just to fill out the [patent] form. We didn’t care whether they had thought that this was a practical idea or not, but I sent the letters saying we were going to do this to their homes; knowing that they were all sending their kids to college. But the point was to try to make that cultural leap from people committed to basic science and to get us started, and then the experts could take that piece of paper and see if in fact it could lead to something.

Richard Smalley (RSm)—Maybe I should have gone to the University of Wisconsin [laughter]. There is a great sea change in what’s going on in the ivory tower particularly in science, and it’s been happening for at least the past 15 years. I think in fact it was the biotech revolution that set this thing off, where after awhile it became impossible to tell when talking to someone at a cocktail party who was doing molecular biology and whether or not that person was working for a biotech startup or a big pharma[ceutical company] or just a professor in your own institution. I believe the reason for this is that when you finally start understanding what the molecular basis for life is, then anything you do that is on the frontiers of understanding, might very well end up with a new treatment or diagnosis or IPO that could be making people money and making people healthy in a few years. Before that transformation, where the molecular basis of life was explicitly clear was pretty rare I suspect, that in the ivory tower in biology and in organic chemistry that you felt so close. I believe that sort of transition is happening because of the physical sciences because it’s a transition that is very much to be hoped for because it makes the connection between this wonderful enterprise of discovering God’s secrets much more coupled to things that really matter in society.

SAJ—Mr. Silverman, do you have any thoughts in this regard?

Morris “Marty” Silverman (MS)—Dr. Jackson, I’m not qualified in this field so I’m going to crawl into my security blanket here [laughter]. You started something called the Constellations and in that you visualized a forum for creating an international center for health and education and I saw it as your dream of adding biotechnology research to what we were doing in the Capital Region. And so, with your inspiration we have progressed on the other side of the [Hudson] River to a place called University Heights to where we now have convinced not only the people in the community and the state, but in the nation, that we can and will be able to create an international center for health and education. And these are the series, as I see it, of stepping stones. Everyone has talked about the need for nurses, and so I suggest that there is a need for nurses and there is no need for further conversation — we will have an international school for nurses. And with your vision, and with the help of the good Lord, this area can be and will be developed into the equivalent of the Mayo Clinic.

SAJ—I like to hear that [laughter]. As you know, Mr. Silverman funded the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine. It is a very prestigious prize, and it's one that is actually for its recipients not quite at the level of the Nobel Prize, but it’s close. And you’ve endowed faculty chairs at a number of Capital Region universities including of course an entire faculty constellation here. We know about the steps you’re taking relative to your vision to the international school of nursing, what other steps do you see for the other institutions in the region as being necessary to have the complete dream come to fruition?

MS—I think the people don’t really realize the potentials of the region. For example, when I say to you we could be the equivalent of the Mayo Clinic, people really question that. But then I say, but what does the Mayo Clinic have? There is nothing in Rochester, Minnesota. What do we have, we have 3 mountain ranges, we’ve got 22 colleges we are completely surrounded by museums. As far as I’m concerned there is not another area in the United States that can offer a young doctor with a family what we can offer him. I will take a leaf out of Mr. [George] Steinbrenner’s book which means ‘I take the best players, pay them the most money and get the most for his seats, and you can’t get a seat at the Yankee Stadium.’ That’s what I want to see in Albany. When I go to my doctor and I say I have a cardiac condition, and I want him to say, “go to Albany because they have the best doctors in the land and that’s where you should go.” And that’s the way I see this.

SAJ—Now, Dr. Solow, since we have a wonderful regional program, let me take you from the regional to the global. Clearly, one of the goals of an institution such as Rensselaer is to educate the young people who can lead in technological innovation. How do you see technological innovation driving economies today and has your view changed and how does this effect educational institutions that Donna and I represent?

RS—Could I start by apologizing? I am the reason you had to sit here for all that extra time [laughter]. I was at a meeting in New York City which I could not abandon, I was the chairman of it and I left it as quickly as I could and we drove up here at a spectacular pace and I used the time extremely well. I can now spell Rensselaer. R-E-N-S-S-E-L-A-E-R. [laughter] I move on to the next stage of the spelling bee [laughter]. Let me come back to President Jackson’s question, we know it’s a fairly well-established conclusion that if you look back on the history of a country like the U.S., say from the beginning of the 20th Century until now, the primary source of increasing productivity, of increasing output per hour worked, is technological change — broadly interpreted, not necessarily hardware or even software — but more efficient ways of producing goods and services. Growth in productivity is the only durable, reliable source of a reliant standard of living for a large country like this. So we owe our improved standard of life, including medical care and housing and other things to technological change. Twenty or 30 years ago if you had asked me this same question I might have stopped there. Now in the modern world things have changed and the relationship of the progress of our economy to innovation and to technological progress is even more complicated. See technology can be shared. There are countries in Europe — France, Germany, others, that have levels of income per person comparable to ours without having done the innovation themselves that’s been largely centered in the U.S. Technology can be shared and people might say why should we produce RPIs anymore? Why not let the others do that? The thing that has changed is that much of the rest of the world has entered the Industrial Age — the modern age. And the only way a rich country like the U.S. can stay at the head of the league in standard of living is by innovating beyond what other countries can do. Capital now flows anywhere in the world. Labor doesn’t move so rapidly, or easily, or at all for that matter, but we know that populations in Asia and in Latin America and elsewhere, without anything like American education and training, can, in fact, produce goods and services effectively.

The only option for us if we want to maintain the kind of position we have is to move a little faster, is to keep innovating, so that we can have within the boundaries of the U.S., industry, which is just a stage ahead of others. We can maintain not only the level of our standard of living, but its improvement by being the pioneers in new technology. Now, the last two things I want to say about this is another characteristic of modern economies, all modern economies, is that they tend to shift their employment and production from producing goods to producing services. What people want as they get richer is not goods with mass, not physical stuff so much, they want education, they want financial services, they want entertainment, they want business services. They want personal services, they want food prepared somewhere else. And so we shift the center of gravity of our industry from the production for goods to the production of services. Almost three quarters of Americans who are employed are employed in the service sector. The direction of innovation has to shift as well toward innovating in the service sector and that requires a broader range of pills than even chemists have [laughter]. Actually chemists are some of the brightest people I’ve ever known. And service industries are much more directly consumer oriented than goods production industries.

You remember Henry Ford’s famous remark “The customer can have any color car he wants, as long as it’s black,” but if you’re producing in the service sector, the consumer is part of the process almost. Attention to the consumer is vital and the kind of technology, the kind of productivity increase we need is much broader.

The last remark I want to make on this is that the lesson for RPI or for MIT, for my own university, is that education for innovation can’t stop at science and engineering, but has to go beyond that. Knowing and understanding consumers is as important as producing new goods and services. Marketing is almost as important as engineering ... not quite, but almost. So that the education in a technologically oriented university—what’s the MIT phrase? Shirley will know this ... a university polarized around science — that kind of education has to be a lot broader than it was 30 or 40 years ago.

SAJ—Dr. Smalley, Rice University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are two of the six universities selected by the National Science Foundation to house national nanoscale science and technology centers. And the U.S. House of Representatives has just passed the 2003 Nanotechnology Research and Development Act, which lays out a multi-year authorization for nanotechnology research and development. That’s interesting, a law that relates to a specific area of focus. A natural question is what is the big deal? We have the Center, we even have Dick Seigel, he is your host, what’s the big deal about nanotechnology anyway? What is its great promise that makes it of such interest that Congress would pass a law and obviously your institution and our own feel that this is important arena?

RSm—Well my response to passing this law is very simple. Two words, not enough [laughter]. Nanotechnology has become the buzzword of the past five years at least and in a way it is in fact marketing. It is a name to label an activity that was ongoing for decades before, in fact its roots go to the very beginning of science. It is an area that is defined by almost as many people as there are that practice it as you get into defining it becomes a slippery slope where it becomes essentially anything we do with ‘stuff’ [laughter]. After all, everything we encounter in our life is made of atoms and atoms are not a very small fraction of a nanometer. When you stick them together you can only get 10 or so together before you’re out bigger than a nanometer. So in the honest statement about what is nanotechnology, it is the technology of stuff. It’s the ultimate frontier. So anytime in the history of human kind that we’ve been making stuff, in a way it was nanotechnology.

And so there are a lot of discussions that go on to find out ‘well it couldn’t be that broad’ it would be meaningless, so let’s put up some clear boundaries for what’s inside is nanotechnology and what’s outside is not. And I engaged in a lot of hours trying to figure out just what happens to that boundary and I found it to be a singularly unsatisfying activity. In fact, I think we’re trying to make an abrupt separation of something that really is a continuum. So what is exciting about nanotechnology is, I think really beautifully embedded in the word "nano." Of course a billionth of a meter is a length scale, so it draws your mind into thinking what’s in that length scale. And in that length scale are atoms. And it’s a small enough length scale that you look at it and at least in your mind you can see the atoms. There aren’t that many of them, 10 to 50 at most. You can sort of see how they’re put together, but it’s enough that you can actually think about doing something interesting. And then there’s technology which everyone understands. Any cab driver, you ask him what technology means and he says it’s cool, it’s something that’s important to society, something you can make money with, it’s a lot of what distinguishes the human race from other animals who don’t yet have technology. So to put those two words together in one word without a hyphen, I think, is the great achievement of the National Nanotechnology Initiative [laughter] and it wasn’t easy.

It was in fact going to be the center that founded at Rice University is the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology. I can tell you the reason we did that because at the time we founded that center, nanotechnology meant what has become known as the Drexelarian ‘grey goo’ of replicating universal assemblers, and we didn’t want to burden this new center with being identified with that. That’s not what we meant by nanotechnology. So we separated what we meant by nanotechnology with the leavening influence of science in between it.

But when the National Nanotechnology Initiative was being introduced, the issue of whether it should be nanoscale science and technology initiative or whether it should be just nanotechnology was brought up. And I and a number of others argued, well, if you make it nanoscale science and technology then it’s meaningless because anything is that. Nanoscale science is something I’ve been involved in for decades. It’s the conjunction of those two things in one word that gives it a tension. There is a tension in that word and that is the tension between the ivory tower and the real world. People say nano and you’re looking where the atoms are and you’re worried about the physics and the chemistry. Is it a metal yet on this scale? What do you mean by metal? Does it conduct electricity? Is it big enough to have properties of tensile strength in the way we normally think of big things or is there something intrinsically quantum-mechanically fuzzy in there? So this is the frontier of science, yet without a hyphen there is technology right there. It’s a tremendously powerful marketing tool. In many ways I think it’s a name we can put on a flag and wave and say, ‘This is what I’m doing Mommy, I’m doing nanotechnology.’ Why do you work in the laboratory in chemistry and physics, studying this arcane stuff that very few people can understand? Well, it’s because it’s fascinating and we’re interested in the secrets of the universe. But there’s another reason we do it. We don’t do it as an art form, we do it because of the impact we think it’s going to have. So you have one word now that conveys that whole story. So I believe this is the reason why we have been so successful in getting Congress behind it and if it’s in fact that important, I believe even a billion dollars is not enough.

SAJ—I’m going to broaden the conversation to a conversation with the audience, but there is a follow-on question I’d like to ask Dr. Shalala. We all know that there have been issues with the use of human subjects in clinical trials, there have been deaths, some cases at institutions we know about and that’s on one side of the scale in terms of issues and questions of ethics particularly in biotechnology research and the translation of that into clinical practice. On the other hand, there’s another kind of ethical debate, but it actually brings ethics and religion together and that has to do with the issues of embryonic stem cells. Where do you think we’re going with these sorts of issues and you’ve been the president of three very different universities, you’re the president of a university today how do we embed an approach to these things that we do at our universities, but I’m interested initially in kind of where you see things moving in these arenas.

DS—I think we’re totally confused as a society. Some of it has to do with the scientific illiteracy, but even if people understand the science they have deep concerns about these issues. But it raises profound issues for those of us who lead universities or do science and that is that perhaps we’ve let our science get ahead of our ethics in some cases and it needs to catch up. On the Human Genome Project, I always thought the most important thing that we did was integrate the emphasis within the project so that they were in a constant discussion with the scientists. In terms of our own responsibility as universities for ethical conduct, we have to make certain that we’re prepared to invest the resources so that we review the proposals and have ongoing review of science and the way in which it’s being done. Because what’s at stake is everything we’re doing. If we lose the confidence of the American people because they think we’re doing things in a funny way in an immoral way, we will lose this golden age of biomedical research and all its resources along with it. Making sure that we reserve the rules and make sure they’re even tighter, and that these are well-funded and we take the time to review projects, becomes very important. I have never believed that science was inherently moral. It’s up to us to put it to moral purposes. And we have to reassure people, and explain to them, and make sure they are part of the dialogue whether it’s stem cell research or any other kind of research, so that they understand what we’re doing and for what purpose and why it’s important. But we cannot do this just by talking with each other [as scientists].

SAJ—Let me open the discussion to the audience . . .


Question (Q)— There is concern about where stem cell research in particular is going in society. In Europe there was no such preoccupation, but less focus on the ethics of it and that we were going to have a brain drain where a lot of leading scientists that were interested in this area were going to go to England and France. Is this still a concern?

DS—In Europe they do have ethical reviews and the British Committee made the decision that the science ought to go forward. Did we lose many scientists? We lost at least one senior one from University of California at San Francisco who said that he wanted to pursue this research. This research is going down in the U.S. At the University of Wisconsin we made a decision, because we anticipated the controversy, to set up an institute (inaudible) the public arena so that the research could go forward. So it wasn’t that we put ethical constraints or have that discussion at the same time. I believe that it has to be a public discussion, but we have to have institutions and individuals we trust so when it is reviewed it goes forward without legislation having to be passed. We have to have ways of making decisions, and it doesn’t have to be debated in Congress, that’s the danger as far as I’m concerned. Because if you don’t like stem cell research, wait until you see what’s coming behind it.

RS—I think that part of the problem that Secretary Shalala put her finger on quite exactly is that in much of Europe, decisions like the stem cell decisions are more closely held. It’s not felt it’s a matter for the general public, these are duly elected, democratic governments, and they have their committees and the committees do their work and make their decisions, and there is no feeling that this is something that needs to be discussed on every street corner. We do it rather differently in that sense. Democratic society, plebeian society has its plusses and minuses. The plus side is that it is democratic, and it does give ordinary people a stake in what’s happening in society. The minus side is that often they make their decisions without any real knowledge about what is at stake, what the consequences will be both for good, or for danger.

Q—This seems to be skirting around the issues of some of the decisions being made in the U.S. about injecting religious beliefs and religious doctrine, especially among a lot of our political leaders, into our secular public life. It seems to me that is some of the areas in which irrationality is being injected. Could you comment about the effect that we realize technological advance is important to us as an economy, and yet there is an awful lot of irrational but very important things being brought into public life that I think the history of this country has tended to avoid. But in the last couple of years has become to me what I consider to be a disturbance.

DS—You know, I would prefer we didn’t legislate on this, that we had scientific institutions that were transparent, not secret. The history of science is not a history of purity. Remember the Tuskeegee experiment, and we didn’t get on the AIDS issue quick enough because we thought it was simply a disease of homosexuals. So I don’t have a problem with us defining our morality or bringing in what we believe are good judgments that aren’t necessarily just scientific, but the question is whether we believe in the institutions and the ability of our science to take into account our ethical standards and then to make reasonable decisions that take into account the implications of much of this area of science. But I would be careful about wanting to give it just to a narrow body. Because in essence we have a history of secrecy in science and in health decisions that have done people great harm. So I could be careful about not wanting to have a public discussion about these issues. I would argue, and since Shirley is about to take the presidency of AAAS, for more scientific literacy so that people whether they’re public figures or not, who have to make decisions, understand what we’re talking about. If you watch the debate in Congress, that was not completely clear. And let me assure you, it was bipartisan that it wasn’t completely clear.

SAJ—In fact for the record I’m a strong proponent of general scientific literacy, in fact I had the privilege to deliver the William D. Carey lecture of the AAAS [which I read, said Secretary Shalala]. It’s the major public policy lecture and a key point of my remarks is that if we don’t address this issue given the nature of how we discuss various important concerns about where the society goes, not just in the sciences but beyond, but it’s from the point of view of what we’re talking about this afternoon, there really has to be a higher standard because the level of illiteracy is astounding in that sense.

DS—And it’s not just stem cell research, I lived through the bovine growth hormone debates in Wisconsin, and we trucked up every pediatrician we knew to reassure the public in Wisconsin that their milk was safe, but the advocates of course spooked the people and then pointed to the fact that they were spooked as why you shouldn’t do it. So scientific literacy will help, but it’s also a general assurance by people that they trust their institutions and trust their scientists. That’s why our behavior on research is so critical to our credibility when we have to step out and explain the next steps we want to take.

RSm—These issues are of great public interest and deeply involved in science are an opportunity to advance science literacy. Nanotechnology is now confronting the same societal and ethical conundrum that stem cell research and genetically modified foods and organisms. Some of the life sciences have already done some of the pioneering encounters with society on this and in the nanotech thing where there is talk about the possibility of having a self-replicating, self-assembling, effectively new life form made of mechanical things causes, rightfully, a great degree of concern on the general public’s part. Is it possible something like — what is described in something like Prey — lies down the road for the National Nanotechnology Initiative? Well, that’s a great opportunity to say let’s talk about that. How possible is that? What are the implications? And it isn’t as though it’s the only possibility are negative impacts in nanotechnology and the future of molecular and cellular biology. And there is the hope and almost the certainly of curing virtually almost every disease that we know of. So a loved one you have who is blind and has no plan of ever seeing, well one of these days we’re going to give sight to the blind. It almost reads like the New Testament.

So in the abstract you talk about a new technology and you think, oh my God, this could really get us in trouble. But we’re already in trouble, and there’s always this tension between the possibility of technology doing good and getting us in trouble. And we don’t have to go blindly into this, we can engage in a debate. And I love this nanotechnology part of this because I get to tell people about atoms and how things work. And I’m in the process now with Eric Drexler about this self-assembling mechanical robot, and I’m going to get to teach him how chemistry happens. It’s a great opportunity.

SAJ—You raise an interesting issue. Many would argue that part of the difficulty is that so much of the discussion on these issues takes place within the community of those inside science and technology as opposed to those who do science and technology being part of the larger debate. Any thoughts about that?

RSm—The combination of literacy and transparency is what you want, that is the basis. Where you can find a subject, where you can talk about the details in a simple fashion you get the chance to demystify. I don’t blame people thinking this priesthood up here is doing things with their money, off talking a language I don’t understand, and I just have to sit back passively and take whatever comes out. If you take the priests off the pedestal and have them talk the plain talk and really talk about the nitty-gritty details of what’s possible and what’s not, it helps a lot.

Q—I have a challenge and a question for the education community as a whole. It was triggered by Professor Smalley that we were already three quarters in this nation in a service environment. And yet the strength of this country is in the innovation area and that’s quite clear, and that’s where educational institutions have done a great job in furthering that idea. However, what is implicit in the problem is in fact that once we get 80 to 90 percent there, all the innovations will be taken advantage of overseas and in different countries. They’re the ones that have the choice and will have the interest to transition from invention to commercialization. And I see this as a huge problem that I hope the educational institutions can find a way to address and reverse that trend. Is that at all possible?

RS—Let me start with a basic principle to keep in mind. On the whole with almost no exceptions, we, or any group like Americans, are better off when other people are better off. Having the income and wealth of the rest of the world grow is to our advantage as it is to theirs as they become more productive they can sell things inexpensively to us and they buy things from us. There is nothing of the zero sum game in this. There is nothing that says if others get wealthy we are ipso facto poor. That’s not at all a problem.

I don’t think it’s the case that we are slow to commercialize new ideas in science and technology. Actually just the other way around. It’s one of the strengths of the American economy in that it moves very quickly from a piece of knowledge produced in Professor Smalley’s nanotechnology center, and moves much more quickly than other cultures and societies tend to do toward making something useful in an everyday sense. That’s not I think because Americans have some special propensity to do this kind of useful innovation. Fundamentally it’s because amongst our social and economic institutions is a belief in competition and on the whole it turns out to be, I’ve done some work on this with a group of colleagues.

If you compare like industries in Japan, Germany, France, and the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere, and ask when the American industry outperforms in the general sense of producing better stuff more cheaply, then the corresponding industry in another country, what underlies that? Is there something special about the labor, is it something about access to capital? It turns out fundamentally that markets in the U.S. with obvious exceptions, tend to be more competitive, more open, American producers are more often faced with the need to compete with best practice, whether the best practice is a factory in Germany or a Japanese transplant in the U.S., or another American enterprise half a continent away. It is a collection of social institutions of which the proclivity to want and to preserve competition is perhaps the most important one that gives us a little bit of edge in precisely that process of converting a technical idea into a useful and therefore valuable product. So that is not my fear.

DS—All of my adult life people have been worried about whether Japan was going to move ahead of us, or Germany, or someone else. And I think it’s because of where I sit that the fact we have this extraordinary array of research universities in the U.S. really makes the difference for us in terms of creating new knowledge, whether it’s in the basic science or going further than that. Years ago I was in Japan, and I went to visit the foreign minister’s garden; he had one of these great gardens. And I said to him I’d like to borrow your gardener to take back to Wisconsin because I’d love to have a garden as beautiful as this. And he said, “To have a garden this beautiful you have to have my gardener and 100 years [laughter].” The fact is that we spent the last 100 years building these extraordinary research universities, no one else in the world has the number or the scope or the depth, but no one has this group of scientists that we do and this vast array of research universities that are creating new knowledge. And I like to think that’s what’s kept us and will keep us. Add to that what you’ve just heard about competition, and how we take these ideas and turn them into products, and how competition keeps us going. But we have to remember that the kind of institutions we’re in now are important and are part of the driving force of economic growth.

RS—Higher education is one of America’s most popular exports. We sell a lot of it to foreigners.

RSm—In the life sciences and in the information sciences we’re doing just fine, the U.S. and the U.K. are number one. But in the physical sciences and engineering, guys and girls who make stuff that does stuff, we may not be in the forefront for much longer. There’s a dramatic transformation happening specifically in the Pacific Rim and in China in these fields. If you look at U.S. Ph.D. production in the physical sciences and engineering, so all Ph.Ds minus the life sciences and information sciences, you just look at that in the U.S. it’s flat for the last 15 years at about 4,000 Ph.Ds per year. Look at it in the rest of the world it’s pretty much the same except in the Asian countries. In Asia, citizens getting Ph.Ds are going up and we’re about the same. If this trend continues, and nothing is in play that would reverse it, roughly 90 percent of all Ph.Ds in the physical sciences will be Asians, many of whom possibly most of whom are practicing in Asia. Having taught many of these people myself, I don’t feel so sanguine that our American spirit and our iconoclastic thing will remain. I think this may be the biggest single threat to the prosperity of the U.S. and also to national security.

SAJ—Dr. Smalley you’ve actually made a point that you thought we needed an Apollo-like program to reignite the interest in the physical sciences and to bring young people along and to develop them. And you’ve even expressed that this could be organized around energy, which you see as the single greatest challenge we face if I’m paraphrasing you correctly. And you’ve even testified to Congress about this. Could you elaborate?

RSm—You said it very well… You just look at this Ph.D. production in the physical sciences in the past few years, particularly at a time when the NSF has just knocked themselves out to do something about this. And every scientist and university is getting federal grants and is compelled to get involved in this. We’ve done all sorts of stuff and good work. And I’m sure we’ve had an effect, but still it’s flat. In fact, we’re kind of lying when we say flat because it’s been dripping down a little in the past 3 to 4 years.

If the vertical scale were some parameter having to do with the success of a company that was their history, and the competition was going up like this, you would fire the management of that company. You would put in new management, and you would say "look at everything you’ve done in the past that’s an example of what’s not good enough anymore." And just putting myself in that position asking what could you possibly do, it’s clear that that is some Sputnik-level event with some Apollo-like program is needed to bring back the magic.

We were talking as we came up here about the Kennedy administration and what was the thinking process where after the Eisenhower administration, the Kennedy administration came in. And within 6 months they decided that the resolution of this problem of getting American boys and girls into the physical sciences and engineering was not weapons, it was to put a man on the moon. And it was so successful, you get people talking about this and it’s like a daVincian revival. People stand up and know they can repeat everything Kennedy said. It worked as a passion, and for a few years there in the early 60s being a physical scientist or an engineer was the most romantic thing you could do if you were a nerd in high school. You couldn’t get a date, though [laughter]. We need to find something like that again. I believe that the mission that would do that is the challenge of this nation to find the basis for energy prosperity for this century like oil was in the last century.

>RS—I would put just a slightly different look on what’s just been said. I think too that the lack of interest of American students in the physical sciences is a saddening thing, a deplorable thing. If we are out-producing enough physicists, chemists, and electrical engineers and mechanical engineers for our own good. Then I think that’s bad, and we ought to find a way to produce more. And I suspect that Professor Smalley is exactly right, the way to do it is to find a set of problems which are interesting, glamorous, and important, and the energy problem may be one of those. But I would stop there. Once we have as many physical scientists as we want, I don’t care how many physical scientists other countries have. I don’t think the race is to produce more because we are not going to be able to outproduce China in the physical sciences or anything else that is roughly proportional to the population, but it does seem to me that that’s the key. The bad news that Professor Smalley was reminding you of is that we are not generating as many physical scientists as we think would be a benefit to ourselves.

SAJ—You mentioned, Dr. Solow, the role of competition in our economy and society. Which means that we are more market driven. Some would argue that there’s difficulty in getting to this question in a broader based way beyond the scientific community of whether we’re producing as many physical scientists as we would like because if we didn’t have as many as we thought we needed the market would value them more.

RS—I think that’s a small part of a correct answer. One of the ways we can generate…whenever I see a television ad that says we need more nurses, the first question that comes into my mind is “Well then, pay them more” And you’ll have more nurses [applause]. To a certain extent, of course the availability of really well-paying jobs in the physical sciences will attract people. On the other hand there are going to be well-paying jobs in investment banks as well. One way to divert people with the right kinds of talents into physical sciences is probably not going to be able to compete with investment banking on the salary side, but you can compete on the grounds that a) it’s more interesting and b) it’s more useful to society and c) there are really big new things that can be done whereas investment banking probably doesn’t offer that [laughter].

DS—I have another explanation. If you had the physical and chemistry teachers I had in high school, you’d understand why I majored in history [laughter and applause].

RSm—In the 50s we were very much in the same situation and we were confronted with a very powerful scientific and engineering enterprise going on in the Soviet Union. And when Sputnik went overhead we all felt — of course I was so young that I was actually praying for thermonuclear war so I wouldn’t have to turn in my homework the next day [laughter] — people a little older than I were feeling we had to bolster teaching. High school didn’t really have great teachers either, and it wasn’t clear you could get rich being a scientist or engineer. My father was very angry with me for going into this. If we’re waiting to solve this problem for the transformation of the American high school and grade school teachers, it’s never going to happen.

SAJ—I think there is an underlying issue with the talent pool that has to do with the changing demographics in the country which many in the science and engineering community when we speak about the need to develop the talent and attract people into the sciences, particularly in engineering and the physical sciences, we don’t look at the fact that there is a changing demographic trend. And much of that talent brought into an educational situation that in fact is more akin to you winding up not being in science in terms of the teaching and attendant problem particularly in our public school systems. So I’m not here to offer opinions but I will offer this one, that this is a problem to be addressed along the whole spectrum of education whether we like it or not and we do have to deal with recognition on a numerical basis that the talent is going to lie among groups that we heretofore have not tapped. And so I am one who believes that talent is inherent in every person I think it’s an issue that we in the education arena generally that we are going to have to deal with.

DS—And you know, the research has shown that a lot more kids enter college wanting to major in science then get turned off. Either they don’t have the skill levels to continue or they get turned off by the boot camp introductory level courses that we have begun to change so that we can keep more of them in science. So we have a lot to do ourselves to coax people along, both in the elementary and the high school level, but also at the college level.

SAJ—Unfortunately, our time this afternoon is coming to a close. I believe that I speak for everyone when I say that this has been a rare privilege and a pleasure for the entire Rensselaer community. I want to thank our guests — The Honorable Donna Shalala, Dr. Robert Solow, Dr. Richard Smalley, and Mr. Morris “Marty” Silverman — for sharing their special insights, experiences, and thoughts about the issues and challenges that face us all. The experience has been something like the handing off of a baton between runners, for many of the Rensselaer graduates, who will cross the stage tomorrow, will be addressing these very issues in a variety of forms in their work in the future.


Thank you.