Category Archives: Science policy and politics

When the pie shrinks

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When I read the title of James Langer’s editorial in the 12 October issue of Science—”Enabling scientific innovation”—I expected a generic exhortation for the US to invest more money in basic research. What Langer wrote, however, was a despairing indictment of how the US evaluates and funds scientific proposals in these times of tight budgets.

According to Langer, just when advances in experimental and computational techniques have opened up new areas of research, opportunities to fund such research are contracting. Worse, the shrunken funding pie has made peer reviewers and proposal writers averse to risk. As Langer puts it:

In my area of condensed-matter and materials physics, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) can fund only about 10% of the individual-investigator proposals it receives. [The Department of Energy (DOE) has similar difficulties.] Each proposal is sent to a group of peer reviewers, who rank it on a scale ranging from “excellent” to “poor.” NSF then funds only those proposals that receive the uniformly highest reviews. One less-than-“excellent” review, no matter how misguided, is usually enough to doom a proposal. Any proposal that is truly innovative, interdisciplinary, or otherwise unusual is almost certain to be sent to at least one reviewer who will be less than enthusiastic about it. Sensible investigators know not to submit such proposals; as a result, some of the most urgent research areas are disappearing.

Evidence to justify Langer’s fears appeared this week in the form of a commentary in Nature entitled “Research grants: Conform and be funded.” The authors, Joshua Nicholson of Virginia Tech and John Ioannidis of Stanford University, looked at the relationship between a biomedical researcher’s citations (a rough measure of scientific significance) and the level of his or her funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

In particular, Nicholson and Ioannidis examined authors of papers that have garnered more than 1000 citations since 2001. The pair found that

three out of five authors of these influential papers do not currently have NIH funding as principal investigators. Conversely, we found that a large majority of the current members of NIH study sections—the people who recommend which grants to fund—do have NIH funding for their work irrespective of their citation impact, which is typically modest.

Such correlations don’t prove that review panels aren’t funding high-risk, high-reward proposals. But at least to Nicholson and Ioannidis, the correlations suggest that NIH is failing to fulfill its mandate of funding “the best science, by the best scientists.”

In his Science editorial, Langer struggled to come up with a more effective way of funding the best science. He even entertained—but dismissed—the idea of disbursing money through a lottery, which could well do less damage, he wrote, than the current system does.

But there is no more effective way than peer review. When funds are limited, it’s hardly surprising that reviewers become more cautious. Investors do so too. The solution to the review problem is both simple and hard: Increase the size of the funding pie so that reviewers are emboldened to take risks.

China’s new president is a scientist

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Yesterday Xi Jinping officially took over as China’s president, general secretary of the ruling Communist Party, and chairman of the central military commission. In other words, he became China’s new leader.

Given China’s increasing importance—in 2010 it overtook Japan as the world’s second largest economy—and the fact that the ascendance of the country’s new leader had been anticipated for some time, Xi has attracted a lot of media coverage. Still, I was surprised to discover in a recent Wall Street Journal profile of Xi that the subject he studied at Tsinghua University was organic chemistry. (Xi’s Wikipedia entry, however, says chemical engineering.)

To mark China’s Science Popularization Day of 15 September, Xi Jinping attended a science fair at China Agricultural University. The appearance marked Xi’s first return to public view after a brief and mysterious absence.

My surprise was limited to learning Xi’s major. That China’s leader should have a scientific background isn’t surprising. Xi’s predecessor as president and general secretary, Hu Jintao, studied hydraulic engineering, also at Tsinghua University. And Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin, studied electrical engineering at National Central University in Nanjing and at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Whether Xi’s exposure to science at university will influence his policies is a matter of speculation. But it’s certainly the case that China invested heavily in science during Hu’s and Jiang’s presidencies. Last year China devoted 1.84% of its GDP to R&D—$251.8 billion (adjusted for purchasing power). Only the US spent more.

On the physics front, that investment reached a culmination earlier this year. On 8 March scientists working at the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment in China’s Guangdong Province announced they had measured θ13, a neutrino parameter whose larger-than-expected value could help answer one of the biggest questions in physics: Why does the universe contains more matter than antimatter? Robert McKeown, a Daya Bay team member from the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia, told Science magazine’s Adrian Cho, “This is arguably the most important physics result ever to come out of China.” I agree.

Of course, world leaders do more than determine how much their countries invest in science. Could Xi’s scientific background influence his policies in other areas? It might—if Xi has retained a scientist’s respect for data.

There’s at least one encouraging precedent. Like Xi, Margaret Thatcher studied chemistry at Oxford University’s Somerville College. Her government’s response to the AIDS crisis of the early 1980s was to print and drop in every UK household’s mailbox a pamphlet about the disease and how to avoid contracting and spreading it. “AIDS: Don’t die of ignorance” became the official slogan.

Thatcher’s response to the threat of global warming was also scientifically sober: She funded the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, a world leader in climate science.

Given that some US politicians persist in denying that climate change is happening, despite the evidence, let’s hope the China’s new president takes a more scientific approach to that issue. Let’s hope, too, that he studies tables of GDP data, notices that the world’s wealthiest and healthiest countries are democracies, and institutes political reform in his country.

Subtleties of gender bias

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In 1940 at the age of 19, Rosalyn Sussman graduated from New York’s Hunter College as the school’s first-ever physics major. Eager to pursue physics further but lacking funding, she applied for an assistantship at Purdue University. Someone at the university wrote back to her Hunter College adviser: “She is from New York. She is Jewish. She is a woman. If you can guarantee her a job afterward, we’ll give her an assistantship.”

Hunter couldn’t make the guarantee, so Sussman spent a year as a secretary at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons—until World War II intervened. Short of manpower, the University of Illinois offered her an assistantship. A decade later, she and her collaborator Solomon Berson developed the radioimmunoassay. The technique, which revolutionized endocrinology, is used to identify hormone disorders. The pair’s discovery earned Rosalyn Sussman Yalow a share of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. (Berson died in 1972.)

This photograph of Rosalyn Yalow was taken around 1977, the year she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, W. F. Meggers Gallery of Nobel Laureates

The blatant, casual discrimination that Yalow faced is rarer now, in part because it’s illegal in the US and other countries. Even so, the percentage of women faculty in physics and other math-intensive fields remains well below 20%. Last year Cornell University’s Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams caused a stir when their research led them to attribute the underrepresentation of women not to discrimination but to women’s own choices.

Theodore Hill of Georgia Tech and Erika Rogers formerly of California Polytechnic State University offered a different reason: Girls are less encouraged than boys are to be curious, playful, and bold—traits, Hill and Rogers argued, that are needed for success in math-intensive fields.

Although Ceci and Williams and Hill and Rogers attributed women’s underrepresentation to different causes, the baleful influence of stereotypes could underlie their respective findings. Girls might eschew physics because their image of a physicist is a man, not a woman. Parents might dissuade girls from climbing trees because girls shouldn’t take the same risks as boys.

John and Jennifer

Stereotypes reside in our minds and are manifested by our actions. To determine whether a bias against women, unconscious or otherwise, plays a role in women’s scientific careers, Yale University’s Corinne Moss-Racusin and her colleagues devised a clever experiment. They asked a randomly chosen sample of male and female professors in three fields—biology, chemistry, and physics—to evaluate a male candidate, “John,” for a lab manager position. A different randomly chosen sample drawn from the same pool was asked to evaluate a female candidate, “Jennifer.”

Unknown to the professors, John and Jennifer were fictitious; except for their gender, their resumés were identical. Despite being equally qualified, John and Jennifer fared differently. On average, professors offered John a starting salary that was 14% higher than the one they offered Jennifer. John was considered the stronger candidate, was rated more competent, and—somewhat paradoxically—was offered more mentoring. The bias in favor of John was present across all three fields and was displayed by male and female professors alike.

What could cause such a troubling bias? In the introduction to their paper, Moss-Racusin and her colleagues are inclined to lay the blame on unconscious factors:

If faculty express gender biases, we are not suggesting that these biases are intentional or stem from a conscious desire to
impede the progress of women in science. Past studies indicate that people’s behavior is shaped by implicit or unintended biases,
stemming from repeated exposure to pervasive cultural stereotypes that portray women as less competent but simultaneously emphasize their warmth and likeability compared with men. Despite significant decreases in overt sexism over the last few decades (particularly among highly educated people), these subtle gender biases are often still held by even the most egalitarian individuals, and are exhibited by both men and women.

Do the Yale team’s findings mean that science faculty members, male and female, are biased against female scientists? Possibly. The source of my uncertainty lies in the position that John and Jennifer ostensibly applied for, lab manager. Moss-Racusin and her coauthors do not provide a job description, so I looked for one online.

Physics Today's jobs site had no lab manager positions. I did, however, find one at Baylor College of Medicine on Nature's job site. The description and requirements are clear and detailed, but if you want to conduct original research, that job is not for you.

So it’s conceivable that the professors in the Yale study evaluated John and Jennifer not as scientific researchers but as technical administrators. Even if that were the case, the bias in favor of John exhibited by scientists for a scientific job would still be present and still be troubling.

Dispelling stereotypes that may have been acquired unwittingly and over time is doubtless a difficult goal. Moss-Racusin and her colleagues don’t offer specific solutions but they do advocate establishing objective, transparent evaluation criteria to forestall the inadvertent use of different standards for male and female candidates. “Without such actions,” the paper asserts, “faculty bias against female undergraduates may continue to undermine meritocratic advancement, to the detriment of research and education.”

To “research and education” one could also add human health. If discrimination had prevented Yalow from becoming a medical physicist, I expect someone else would have developed radioimmunoassay, but perhaps not soon enough to benefit some patients.

The 2013–22 decadal survey in solar and space physics

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Last Wednesday the National Academy of Sciences held a press conference in Washington, DC, to introduce its newly completed report on priorities for the coming decade in solar and space physics. Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado chaired the committee that wrote the report. Thomas Zurbuchen of the University of Michigan was the vice chair. Together, they summarized the report’s highlights for the assembled reporters, scientists, and bureaucrats.

Like its counterparts in astronomy and planetary science, the latest solar and space physics decadal survey is more than just a shopping list of missions and facilities. Its authors begin by defining their field in a broad and inspiring way:

We live on a planet whose orbit traverses the tenuous outer atmosphere of a variable magnetic star, the Sun. This stellar atmosphere is a rapidly flowing plasma—the solar wind—that envelops Earth as it rushes outward, creating a cavity in the galaxy that extends to some 140 astronomical units (AU). There, the inward pressure from the interstellar medium balances the outward pressure of the solar plasma forming the heliopause, the boundary of our home in the universe. Earth and the other planets of our solar system are embedded deep in this extended stellar atmosphere or “heliosphere,” the domain of solar and space physics.

The report goes on to review past and present accomplishments in solar and space physics before defining the four overarching goals that guided the committee members as they drew up their final recommendations:

  1. Determine the origins of the Sun’s activity and predict the variations in the space environment.
  2. Determine the dynamics and coupling of Earth’s magnetosphere, ionosphere, and atmosphere and their response to solar and terrestrial inputs.
  3. Determine the interaction of the Sun with the solar system and the interstellar medium.
  4. Discover and characterize fundamental processes that occur both within the heliosphere and throughout the universe.

As I listened to Baker and Zurbuchen’s presentation, it became clear that two other overarching considerations informed the report. The first is a conceptual emphasis on viewing Earth’s aurorae, the solar wind, coronal mass ejections, and other heliospheric phenomena as part of a single system. It will be interesting to see whether this systemic view becomes manifest in journals, conferences, and courses. I, for one, have tended to think of solar physics as belonging more to astronomy than to heliospheric physics.

The second consideration is a realistic and—to use Baker’s word—responsible approach to costs. The committee retained Aerospace Corp, a nonprofit consultancy based in El Segundo, California, to carry out an independent cost appraisal and technical evaluation (CATE) of potential missions. For the most part, the total cost of the committee’s recommended suite of programs lies within the budget envelope that NASA provided the committee for the years 2013–22.

Physicists who remember chuckling when they first encountered the zeroth law of thermodynamics might be amused to learn that the committee’s first recommendation is also numbered zero—for good reason. As NASA and NSF, the other principal sponsor of heliospheric research, look to future missions and facilities, the committee recommends that they first complete their current program.

Among the lineup is Solar Probe Plus (shown here in an artist’s impression). The ambitious mission, whose price tag is $1.4 billion, aims to fly as close as possible to the Sun to determine how the solar corona is heated and how the solar wind is accelerated.

Diversify, realize, integrate, venture, educate

The committee’s second recommendation, numbered 1.0, is to implement an initiative that goes by the acronym DRIVE (for “diversify, realize, integrate, venture, educate”). As far as I can tell, DRIVE aims to reorganize and reinvigorate the way researchers and their students practice heliospheric science.

Surprisingly, given its high priority, DRIVE is not expensive. The committee projects that the initiative will cost at most about $50 million a year. To fulfill the goals embodied by its name, DRIVE seeks to make research opportunities more accessible to universities through small and mid-sized missions, including the shoebox-sized spacecraft called CubeSats.

Funding the analysis and interpretation of data adequately is a key element of DRIVE, as is fostering interdisciplinary approaches to heliospheric research. Indeed, the committee urges NASA and NSF to establish heliospheric science centers, where observers, theorists, and modelers can work together to solve the grand challenges of solar and space physics.

When Baker and Zurbuchen introduced DRIVE, it sounded somewhat woolly to me. Now, having read the DRIVE section of the report, I think it’s a bold and worthwhile model that could be profitably emulated in other fields, such as green energy or neuroscience. But to be effective, DRIVE will probably need a light administrative structure.

Accelerate and expand the Heliophysics Explorer program!

Recommendation 2.0 seeks to revitalize NASA’s Explorer program of modestly sized and priced spacecraft. Begun in 1958, the program, according to the committee, is “arguably the most storied scientific spaceflight program in NASA’s history.” Despite its success, which includes three Nobel prizes, funding for the Explorer program fell in 2004 and has languished since. To quote the report:

The medium-class (MIDEX) and small-class (SMEX) missions of the Explorer program are ideally suited to advancing heliophysics science and have a superb track record for cost-effectiveness. Since 2001, 15 heliophysics Explorer mission proposals have received the highest category of ranking in competition selection reviews, but only 5 have been selected for flight. Thus there is an extensive reservoir of excellent heliophysics science to be accomplished by Explorers.

Because MIDEX and SMEX missions are comparatively cheap, developing and launching more of them would not require a big outlay. The committee recommends that NASA augment the current Explorer program for solar and space physics by $70 million per year.

In addition to more money for the Explorer program, the committee also recommends establishing a faster, more nimble way of accommodating missions of opportunity—that is, missions that are conceived in response to new technologies, new scientific knowledge, or new partnership opportunities with other space agencies.

NASA: Let academia lead space science

Perhaps by coincidence, a commentary by Baker appeared in Nature two weeks before his committee released its report. Entitled “NASA: Let academia lead space science,” the commentary urged the space agency to fund more missions that are small enough in scope that university-based principal investigators (PIs) can develop and lead them.

Whether Baker’s fellow committee members endorsed his commentary is not clear. They do, however, evidently share his belief in the merits of PI-led missions. Recommendation 3.0 calls for NASA to transform its Solar Terrestrial Probes program from a large, centrally directed program to “a moderate-sized, competed, PI-led mission line that is cost-capped at approximately $520-million per mission.”

The STP program aims to elucidate the physics of the Sun’s influence on Earth, on the other bodies in the solar system, and on the interstellar medium. To avoid the risk that a competitive free-for-all would omit important aspects of STP science, the committee outlined three kinds of missions that it would like to see fly:

  1. IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) to characterize the zone where the Sun’s magnetohydrodynamic influence ceases to prevail in the solar neighborhood.
  2. DYNAMIC (Dynamical Neutral Atmosphere) to study how Earth’s ionosphere and thermosphere influence, and are influenced by, processes that occur at lower and higher altitudes.
  3. MEDICI (Magnetosphere Energetics, Dynamics, and Ionospheric Coupling) to determine how the magnetosphere-ionosphere-thermosphere system responds to solar and magnetospheric forcing.

The committee’s enthusiasm for modest missions is not unbridled, however. In the committee’s view, tackling the problem of how and why the Sun varies is a job for large, integrated missions. NASA’s Living with a Star program already includes the Solar Probe Plus and the Radiation Belt Storm Probes missions. Recommendation 4.0 is for Geospace Dynamics Constellation, a set of six formation-flying spacecraft that will characterize how the energy of geomagnetic storms is deposited and transformed in Earth’s atmosphere.

Recharter the National Space Weather Program

In March 1989 a geomagnetic storm caused the collapse of Hydro-Québec’s electricity grid. Five months later another geomagnetic storm shut down electronic trading on Toronto’s stock exchange.

Anticipating such storms—or space weather—and predicting their effects is more important, now that the world’s electrical infrastructure has expanded, the number of Earth-orbiting satellites has increased, and telecommunications have become economically and socially more important.

The current solar cycle, the 24th since records began in 1755, is set to peak next year. To monitor the cycle’s activity, the US relies on a set of spacecraft, such as the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, whose principal purpose is basic research and whose engineering lifetimes are coming to an end.

To avoid gaps in coverage, the committee recommends that NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Department of Defense should plan ahead and plan together. Of particular importance, the committee says, is maintaining a permanent monitoring capability at L1, the first Lagrange point of the Sun–Earth system. Lying between the two bodies 1.5 million km from Earth, L1 is an ideal vantage for tracking solar activity.

The US has a comprehensive plan, the National Space Weather Program, for dealing with space weather. The trouble is, as the committee puts it, “implementation of such a program would require funding well above what the survey committee assumes to be currently available.” Accordingly, the committee recommends that the NSWP

should be rechartered under the auspices of the National Science and Technology Council and should include the active participation of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of Management and Budget. The plan should build on current agency efforts, leverage the new capabilities and knowledge that will arise from implementation of the programs recommended in this report, and develop additional capabilities, on the ground and in space, that are specifically tailored to space weather monitoring and prediction.

I haven’t read all 455 pages of the committee’s report. In venturing to summarize it, I have no doubt missed some important points and emphases. But what I have read has impressed me. Here is a plan to study the heliosphere as a system in a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and cost-effective way. I hope its recommendations are heeded.

Not enough peasants, not enough economics

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Many years ago I read an essay in which the author—I think it might have been Frederik Pohl—complained about historical inaccuracies in sword-and-sorcery novels. Of course, it’s hardly “wrong” in such works to have fire-breathing dragons, power-bestowing rings, or shape-shifting ravens. Rather, what so irked Pohl were errors in depicting a plausible world based on medieval technology.

In particular, he lambasted authors for getting the economics wrong. The lack of labor-saving devices in the Middle Ages meant that growing and raising food—the main economic activity—occupied most of the people most of the time. A tale of warring princes may have talking bears and magic cloaks but it must have plenty of peasants!

Pohl’s polemic came back to mind when I encountered an essay in the latest issue of Isis, one of the journals carried by the Niels Bohr Library and Archives. Under the title “Time, money, and history,” David Edgerton of Imperial College London urges his fellow historians of science to include economic factors more fully in how they regard and study science.

Edgerton presents several pieces of historical evidence to make his case. For example, in his view the R&D component of the Manhattan project is routinely overestimated and overemphasized by historians (or “oversized,” to use Edgerton’s word). Of the project’s $2 billion budget, only $70 million—3.5%—was spent on R&D. The lion’s share went to DuPont and other large corporations for building two nuclear factories at Oak Ridge in Tennessee and Hanford in Washington State (shown here under construction).

Addressing his fellow historians, Edgerton writes:

We need to follow all the money, not just that going to the university. Rough estimates of the comparative scale of industrial, government, and academic research through the century show that the usual implicit maps of the historians systematically oversize academic research by comparison with government and industrial research. Industry and the military (largely in industry) have been—nearly everywhere and nearly always—the main funders of research and development. Not only research within the academy but, indeed, those aspects of academic research least connected to industry are oversized—physics, particularly particle physics, and biology, particularly molecular biology—while chemistry, mathematics, and engineering are undersized.

Edgerton’s essay triggered another literary recollection—this time, of a paper I’d read in the March issue of the British Journal for the History of Science. In “The limits to ‘spin-off’: UK defence R&D and the development of gallium arsenide technology,” Graham Spinardi of Edinburgh University tells a fascinating story of government-sponsored R&D. And in doing so, he implicitly supports Edgerton’s case.

Gallium arsenide is a semiconductor whose properties make it better than silicon for certain applications. Thanks to its excellent electron mobility, GaAs can operate at the high frequencies used for mobile telephony. And thanks to its direct, as opposed to indirect, bandgap, GaAs beats Si as a material for making lasers, LEDs, and other optoelectronic devices.

But Si has offsetting advantages that continue to give it an edge over GaAs and other semiconductors in computational applications. Si is cheap, stable, and readily doped. It has an insulating phase, thanks to its native oxide. And its hole mobility, while an order of magnitude lower than the electron mobility of GaAs, is still high enough to support gigahertz clock rates.

By the mid 1950s, Si’s predominance in commercial electronics was clear. It was also clear that semiconductors would have military applications. Recognizing that market forces alone would likely propel Si-based technologies, the British defense establishment decided at that time to fund research into GaAs, which was less developed. The goal, to quote one of Spinardi’s sources, was “to leapfrog silicon technology.”

Fateful repercussions

That decision had fateful repercussions for Britain’s electronics industry. In a sense, the British government’s investment in GaAs paid off. By the 1990s, when the commercial applications of GaAs in LEDs and microwave telecommunications were taking off, British labs had already developed devices and manufacturing techniques that could support a consumer-focused GaAs industry.

But, as Spinardi explains, those companies, which included Plessey and Marconi, opted instead to continue developing devices for their original military sponsors. What’s more, their decades-long focus on GaAs had left them little room to develop Si-based technologies. Britain’s electronics industry missed out on booms in Si and GaAs.

To discover why British companies failed to achieve commercial success in GaAs in proportion to their expertise, Spinardi interviewed researchers and managers and studied documents from labs and government departments. Within the economic and industrial conditions of the time, those companies did not act foolishly. In fact, they developed successful products in three areas: defense, equipment for processing GaAs, and radar.

Those areas have one thing in common, notes Spinardi. They’re inhabited by a few big, commercial or government customers, rather than thousands or millions of individual customers. To quote Spinardi: “Unlike consumer products, where buyers are sought after production, made-to-order goods are only produced once a buyer has agreed terms. Investment is therefore far less risky because it can be based on, and costed into, procurement contracts.”

That aversion to risk partly reflected British corporate governance. The big British electronics companies were public and had to answer to their shareholders. In the short term, bidding on large contracts made commercial sense.

It might also have made sense in the long term. As British investment in GaAs was beginning to bear fruit in the 1980s, Sony, Matsushita and other deep-pocketed Japanese companies were moving into the consumer electronics industry. The US had begun investing in military applications of semiconductors. Competing against either the Japanese in the commercial sector or the Americans in their own military sector might have been a futile and costly mistake.

Whether Britain’s investment in GaAs was a success or a failure is a matter of perspective. On the one hand, the expected military applications were realized, to the gain of both Britain’s armed forces and their British suppliers. On the other hand, having made that investment, the final step to mass-market success was surely small enough that at least one company could have, and maybe should have, taken the financial risk and jumped. Spinardi concludes his paper with this observation:

The dominance of defense in the post-war UK innovation system helped provide a technology base with much spin-off potential, but ironically it also engendered industrial conditions that may have limited the capacity of UK industry to make the most of this.

The European Research Council is five years old

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Five years ago I attended a symposium and reception hosted by the European Union at the National Geographic Society’s headquarters in Washington, DC. The goal of the event was to introduce the newly founded European Research Council (ERC) to European scientists who’d moved to the Washington area. The EU wanted European scientists to return to Europe. The prospect of ERC grants was the lure.

To make the case for the ERC, the EU brought in Janez Potoƒçnik, who was the European commissioner for science and research at the time, and Fotis Kafatos, who was ERC’s founding president. John Bruton, the EU’s ambassador to Washington and a former prime minister of Ireland, made the opening remarks.

The ERC was different from other European grant-awarding bodies, Kafatos told the audience. Grants would be made to individuals, not to institutions, and they’d be awarded on merit. If sticking to that principle meant that scientists based in a handful of countries ended up with all the grants, so be it.

After Bruton, Potočnik, and Kafatos spoke, the scientists in the auditorium had the chance to comment and ask questions. One scientist, an Italian molecular biologist, was skeptical of the ERC. What he liked about working at the National Institutes of Health was not so much the salary, but the lower levels of bureaucracy and political maneuvering needed to do his job. Holding a new grant, even a large one, in his native Italy was not attractive.

 

I hadn’t thought much of the ERC until earlier this week, when I noticed a news story on the BBC’s website. Using the ERC’s fifth anniversary as a news peg, reporter Jonathan Amos briefly reviewed the ERC’s history, albeit from a British perspective. He noted that UK-based researchers have won 20% of all ERC grants devoted to frontier or “blue skies” research.

I also learned from Amos’s story that ERC grants are open to non-Europeans, provided they hold them at European institutions. What’s more, even though the ERC is funded by the EU, researchers in non-EU countries are eligible, including—thanks to a commendable gesture of enlightened generosity—Israel and Turkey.

The UK accounts for 8.4% of the population of Europe. Its share of ERC grants is therefore disproportionally large and would seem to suggest that grants are awarded without regard to national boundaries. To check further, I turned to the most recently available ERC annual report, the one for 2010.

On page 62 you’ll find a list of the universities that have the most ERC grantees. Eight are home to more than 20 grantees: University of Cambridge (47), University of Oxford (43), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (42), Hebrew University of Jerusalem (33), ETH Züa;rich (32), Weizmann Institute (32), Imperial College London (27), and University College London (26). Only three countries are represented: Israel, Switzerland, and the UK. A separate table on page 63 lists the eight non-university research organizations that host more than 10 ERC grantees. Five of them are in France; one each is in Germany, Spain, and the UK.

As an independent gauge of how successful the ERC has been in funding science, I turned to the American Physical Society’s publication search tool. Entering “European Research Society” into the full-text box yielded an impressive 243 papers in APS journals that acknowledge ERC funding. The most cited paper, “Uniaxial strain in graphene by Raman spectroscopy: G peak splitting, Gr√ºneisen parameters, and sample orientation,” appeared in Physical Review B. In the three years since it was published, the paper has garnered 129 citations.

So I think we can congratulate the ERC not only on its fifth anniversary but also on its success.

Humanity’s water footprint

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On 11 February 1942, three days after they’d landed on Singapore’s weakly defended northern shores, Japanese forces under General Tomoyuki Yamashita seized control of the island’s reservoirs of drinking water. The position of the defending British-led forces became precarious. Four days later, British General Arthur Percival and 80 000 British, Indian, and Australian soldiers surrendered in the largest capitulation in British military history.

Singapore’s modern leaders have not forgotten the strategic importance of a secure water supply. When I visited the island nation two years ago, I toured a Siemens lab whose focus was developing membrane technologies for recycling wastewater. NEWater, as the reprocessed sewage is appealingly named, now accounts for 30% of Singapore’s consumption. Thanks to desalinated seawater (10% of the supply) and other measures, Singapore has reduced its dependence on water imported from neighboring Malaysia from 50% of the total to 40%.

NEWater.jpg

Arjen Hoekstra of the University of Twente in the Netherlands is also aware of water’s strategic importance, but on a global scale. He and his collaborators have developed the concept of a water footprint—that is, the amount of water a country consumes to sustain its population and economy.

What makes Hoekstra’s work so interesting—and, I believe, important—is that he doesn’t just tally countries’ domestic sources and sinks of water. Raising beef cattle consumes a lot of water. The global average, according to Hoekstra, is 15 500 liters of water per kilogram of beef. So if the inhabitants of a country eat a lot of imported beef, then its water footprint rises thanks to the corresponding virtual inflow of water.

In the latest of a series of papers, Hoekstra and his colleague Mesfin Mekonnen take a detailed look at the water footprints of countries whose population exceeds 5 million. They identify three kinds of freshwater: “blue” (drawn from lakes, rivers and other natural sources), “green” (rainfall), and gray (polluted water). Farmers in California’s San Fernando Valley, say, use more blue water than green water when they irrigate their crops. Semiconductor companies in Silicon Valley produce gray water when they make computer chips.

Hoekstra and Mekonnen estimate that the world’s annual average water footprint for the 1996–2005 was 9087 giga cubic meters per year, of which 74% was green, 11% blue, and 15% gray. By far the biggest contributor to the world’s water footprint was agriculture, at 92%. Industrial production and domestic water supply made up 4.4% and 3.6%, respectively.

As you might expect, the countries with the largest population have the largest water footprints. China, India, and the US have footprints of 1207, 1182 and 1053 Gm3‚àïy, respectively. What’s less obvious is that the total trade in virtual water, at 2320 Gm3/y, amounts to a quarter of the total world footprint. Some countries that have big agricultural sectors are net exporters of virtual water. Net importers tend to be either rich and industrialized or poor and dry.

The huge size of virtual flows has several strategic implications. China is currently a net exporter of virtual water, but its modest per capita footprint of 1089 m3/y is 87% of the value for the UK, but it’s only 38% of the US figure. If China’s economy comes to resemble America’s more than Britain’s, the impact on global flows of virtual water could be significant.

The US, which is simultaneously the world’s biggest exporter and importer, runs a large net export surplus. Given the droughts that have gripped Texas and other states, continuing that surplus might be unwise. Now, thanks to Hoekstra and Mekonnen’s work, we can determine how unwise.

A chat with Australia’s chief scientist

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Last week I visited the Australian Embassy in Washington, DC, to have a chat with Ian Chubb, Australia’s chief scientist. He was in town to promote Australian science and to meet science policy makers. He’d just arrived from London; his next stop was Ottawa.

Chubb is a neuroscientist, whose research focuses on the biochemistry of signal transmission. Before he took up his position, he served as the vice chancellor—that is, the chief executive officer—of the Australian National University in Canberra.

Our hour-long conversation ranged over several topics, including climate change, education, and Australia’s bid with New Zealand to host what will become the world’s biggest, most sensitive telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). I was aware of Australia’s strengths in astronomy, medicine, and other fields of science. But after listening to Chubb, I came away with the impression that Australia has another, less well-known strength: science policy.

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In its population (22.7 million) and GDP ($1.2 trillion), Australia resembles a medium-sized European country. Its scientific output is that of a rich, advanced nation. According to Thomson-Reuters, Australia’s share of the world’s scientific papers published in 2006–10 was 3.17%, 10 times its share of the world’s population. Australia is particularly strong in molecular biology and genetics and in immunology. In both fields in 2008, papers from Australia garnered on average more than 20 citations each.

Geographically of course, Australia is quite different from, say, Spain or the Netherlands. The sixth biggest country in the world, Australia occupies an entire continent and is located almost as far as cartographically possible from both the ancestral homeland of most of its citizens, the UK, and its most powerful military ally, the US.

Australia’s unique geography is a factor in its science. The country’s vast, largely unpopulated interior provides an excellent site for SKA and other astronomical facilities that require dark or radio-quiet skies. Australia grows enough food to feed three times its population. If climate change imperils Australia’s farmland, the loss of production will be felt beyond its borders.

Hot topics

Climate change is a hot political issue in Australia. The failed effort in 2010 to establish a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse emissions led to the resignation of Australia’s previous prime minister, Kevin Rudd. On the day I met Chubb, the Australian Senate had just passed a different carbon-limiting scheme. Under the Clean Energy Bill, around 500 power stations, factories, and other heavy users of fossil fuels will be required to buy permits for each ton of carbon dioxide they emit. The revenue will be used to lower personal income tax and to fund clean-energy initiatives.

On climate change, Chubb said he regarded his role as providing the Australian government with the best scientific advice. The evidence in favor of manmade climate change is strong enough that governments should try to slow the pace of change, he said. As for whether a carbon tax is the best course of action and, if so, what its value should be, “That’s a matter for economists.”

Rich countries, big or small, typically fund individual scientists at similar levels. Size matters when it comes to particle accelerators, satellite observatories, and other expensive projects. Besides the SKA, Australia’s biggest project is the Australian Synchrotron, which was completed in 2007 at a cost of $220 million. Using the facility’s publications search page, I discovered that the synchrotron has yielded 507 journal articles. (However, the facility has faced funding and leadership problems.)

The recently announced Clean Energy Future amounts to another, big project—or, rather, projects. The multi-faceted initiative includes a finance corporation. Backed with $10 billion from the recently passed carbon tax, the corporation will invest in clean-energy companies that might have difficulty raising capital themselves.

On the topic of science education, Chubb cited a recent survey that revealed, surprisingly, that 70% of the undergraduate students taking chemistry at Australian universities are freshmen. Evidently, Australian undergraduates study chemistry more as a prerequisite for medicine and other subjects rather than as a subject itself. Chubb suspects the same could be true for physics.

Prompted by those and other concerns, Chubb is overseeing a new study of Australia’s science skills base and its relevance to the country’s present and future needs. Another study led by Chubb will assess Australia’s publicly funded research.

Besides seeking to improve the health of science and home, Chubb and his fellow policy makers want Australia to play a bigger international role. Rising ocean temperatures and sea levels threaten the corals that form the Great Barrier Reef, one of the country’s most valuable natural assets. By tackling climate change at home, Australia is contributing toward and shaping a global solution.

Charles Day

Hong Kong and Singapore: a tale of two cities

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Hong Kong and Singapore are small and urban. For every square kilometer of land area, Singapore has 5.1 km of streets and highways, the third densest road network in the world, and Hong Kong has 1.9 km, the world’s ninth densest.

Given that both places are also rich, you might expect their roads to be clogged with privately owned cars. But thanks to policies implemented by the Hong Kong and Singaporean governments, traffic moves more freely than in Washington, DC, where I live. Although the two governments aimed to achieve the same end—fewer cars on the roads—the policies they adopted are revealingly different.

Hong Kong, the more purely capitalist of the two, simply makes car ownership exceedingly expensive. Registering a car entails paying a one-time tax levied at 35% of the car’s value. Thereafter, drivers pay an annual licensing fee based on engine capacity: around $500 for a Toyota Yaris; around $1450 for a Lincoln Navigator. Gasoline is taxed almost as highly as it is in Western Europe. Motorists in Hong Kong pay about $8 per US gallon.

Singapore’s government intervenes in the country’s economy more than Hong Kong’s does. Having set 40 mph as a target for the minimum mean speed of traffic, Singapore’s government calculates how many cars the country’s roads can handle. Rather than make driving unaffordable to most citizens, Singapore rations the number of cars by requiring that drivers secure a certificate of entitlement before buying a car. Roads have tolls (shown here) whose rates vary with time of day. Gasoline in Singapore costs around $4 per US gallon.

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Hong Kong and Singapore also have different—and successful—approaches to funding scientific research. As in the case of keeping traffic moving, the different approaches reflect the two territories’ core philosophies.

Perhaps because of its dedication to the free market, Hong Kong has evolved into one of the most service-intensive economies in the world. Domestic manufacturing accounts for just 3% of GDP. When Hong Kong invests in basic science, its principal aim is to support its universities, not its tiny industrial base. The territory is determined to become a higher-education hub for the South China region. Good universities—the kind that talented children from Hong Kong or Guangdong want to attend—do good research.

Singapore’s government is determined that the country’s vibrant manufacturing sector should not fall below 25% of the total economy. Funding priorities in R&D reflect that determination. Although Singapore supports basic research, its main R&D focus is applied research and close ties to industry. Having attracted Samsung, Seagate, and other foreign companies to set up factories in the 1990s, Singapore is now persuading those and other countries to set up R&D labs there too.

Small countries, even small rich countries, lack the resources to fund a broad-based research effort. To be successful, they must, as Hong Kong and Singapore have done, look to their national interests and values, identify strategic goals, and then devise policies to reach them.

Big countries also think strategically about their investments in research. But that doesn’t mean they can’t learn from Hong Kong, Singapore, and other small, successful countries.

Charles Day

My report about physics in Hong Kong appeared in Physics Today‘s September 2008 issue. My report about physics in Singapore appeared in Physics Today‘s June 2011 issue.

Striking the right balance between basic and applied research

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The transistor, the LED, and the medical isotope technetium-99m are important applications of science, yet as far as I know none of them was invented as the result of a government initiative to fund industrially relevant research.

The transistor was invented at Bell Labs. The LED was invented at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and technetium-99m was discovered—and its usefulness to medicine recognized—at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

My short list is not meant to buttress an argument that governments shouldn’t fund applied, goal-directed research. They should. The challenge lies is striking the right balance between basic and applied research. If a government overemphasizes applied research, it risks depriving basic researchers of the funds they need to make discoveries and inventions that could prove industrially important.

The question of basic versus applied research has been in the news this year. In February, Nature‘s Jane Qiu reported that

China is betting that an ambitious programme of applied research will help to secure its future as an economic superpower. Innovation 2020, unveiled last week by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), maintains support for basic research. But the plan will place a new emphasis on translating the research into technologies that can power economic growth and address pressing national needs such as clean energy, said Bai Chunli, vice-president of the CAS, at the academy’s annual conference in Beijing, where the plan was announced.

Earlier this week, another report in Nature outlined a controversial plan to refocus Canada’s National Research Council toward applied research.

Whether China and Canada will benefit from their newfound fondness for applied research is hard to predict. I can say, having visited several industrially focused research labs in Singapore, that success appears to entail working closely with industry—very closely, as exemplified by Singapore’s Institute of Microelectronics.

If you visit the Industry section of IME’s website, you discover that

IME has collaborations with every sector of the electronics industry in Singapore from IC design, wafer fabrication and packaging to niche technology industries such as MEMS and leading edge photonics.

IME aims to provide advanced technology support for a competitive electronics industry through advanced services, technology transfer and R&D manpower development. These collaborations provide the essential inputs to guide IME’s R&D programmes, thereby ensuring that IME stays relevant to the industry.

Canada’s new direction for its National Research Council does not appear to envision such close cooperation with industry. Rather, the plan calls for research in four strategic areas and includes projects—to quote the Nature story—that are aimed at “developing a strain of wheat resilient to environmental stress; improving the manufacture of printable electronics; increasing domestic production of bio≠composite materials; and using algae to soak up carbon dioxide emissions from industry.”

One of the first feature articles I edited for Physics Today was “Amorphous Semiconductors Usher in Digital X-Ray Imaging” by John Rowlands of the University of Toronto and Safa Kasap of the University of Saskatchewan.

Back in 1997 when the article appeared, flat-panel detectors based on amorphous selenium were in their infancy. Now you can buy them from a company called ANRAD, which is based in Saint-Laurent, Quebec.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the 1995 paper in Medical Physics in which Rowlands and Wei Zhao first described the detectors. Funding for the research came from the National Cancer Institute of Canada, whose aim, I presume, was not the promotion of Canadian industry. But that’s what its money ended up doing.

Charles Day