John P. Holdren, President Obama's science adviser, is soliciting questions via Vine, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Here's mine, as submitted via Twitter:
The question follows up on a continuing thread here on whether and how Congress and the White House can get serious about invigorating basic scientific inquiry on science frontiers related to energy - a push on basic discovery that is a vital underpinning for innovation in the private sector.
In the past, Republicans - including the conservative columnist George Will - have championed public investment in scientific research.
But the toxic, divisive and paralytic approach of the Tea Party and far right has prevented reasonable examination of ways to restore a bipartisan culture of discovery in America.
On the environmental left, a tendency to mash up messaging on science and preferred liberal policy prescriptions has unnecessarily deepened the public divide over addressing human-driven climate change.
[ Insert, 9:50 a.m. | I sent this post to Andrew Hargadon, who studies the path from science to invention to innovation at the University of California, Davis, and has long been a valuable source on related questions. Here's his reply, which stresses that basic science is important but is not the critical factor in spreading the gifts that come through such inquiry:
The short of it is that we have tended as a country to overvalue laboratory-based R&D and undervalue field-based learning-by-doing. Most everything that we've claimed to justify early stage R&D was really putting something we already knew into the field and figuring out how to make it work, how to make it, and how to make it better. Penicillin, radar, jet engines, nuclear power, transistors, computers, the Internet were all more procurement than basic science, and most of the advances that brought them to the scale that we are hoping for took place while they were in use.
Sure, we can find some original (and funded) research that we could point to as its source of each innovation. But it's a homuncular notion that presumes the original discovery contained the entire blueprint of the final outcome. We'd be denying the epigenetic nature of all 'inventions'-that the environment plays a critical role as new ideas and technologies come together to have the impact that we are looking for from sustainable innovations.
The economic historian Nathan Rosenberg, among others, noted that it takes roughly three decades to get science out of labs and into practice. Most of that time is spent figuring out what works and what doesn't, what else is needed to do the job, and who would benefit from doing it. ARPANet would have had a hard time becoming the Internet without all the protocols (TCP/IP, world wide web), applications (mail, Mosaic), and all the related broadband, transmission, server technologies. As Raghu Garud and Peter Karnoe pointed out in their study of the development of wind energy, the US spent the 1970's studying the basic science while the Danish wind industry was out there making turbines, making them work, and making them better.
Not that we should underfund basic science. The point is that most basic science pursues questions generated by basic science and judged by those same scientists, a path-dependent approach that has disconnected itself from the challenges and opportunities-the many small but very real problems associated with developing effective, scalable solutions to climate change.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that basic science should not be tainted by commercial interests, and, 50 years later, we have effectively insulated the bulk of our national research efforts from direct engagement with the challenges and opportunities of industry. And now we find ourselves at a point in time when we urgently need science to address those very challenges.
Before we fund more basic science we should be investing-in bold ways-in rebuilding the connections between research and practice, then fund the best research projects to emerge from those interactions. Along the way, we'll be training a whole new generation of science and engineering researchers to think differently. And we'll need them.]
I've also sent Holdren's office a fresh reminder that the White House never answered some great - and still relevant - questions from Dot Earth readers back in 2008, in the early days of the Obama Administration. They touch on environmental education, population policy, fusion and more.
Maybe there's time for answers now.
Just so it's handy, here's the full Office of Science and Technology Policy graph on trends in non-defense research and development spending:
The White House data are here.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science also tracks federal research spending. Here's how much defense research dominates.
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