FEATURE ARTICLE
Science in 2006, Revisited
From grid computing to genomics, the science fiction of 1986 is fast becoming science fact. There remains equal reward in the signal and in the noise
Lewis Branscomb
Seventeen years ago Sigma Xi celebrated its centenary and reflected
on a century of science and engineering research. I had the honor
and good fortune to serve as the Society's president and to
participate in a discussion of how American Scientist might
celebrate this auspicious occasion. Someone suggested that we
prepare papers predicting the future course of science.
"Nonsense," said a very level-headed board member.
"Nobody can predict the course of science. Everyone will
criticize any prediction we make. Besides, that's what makes science
so exciting."
"Scientists can't predict the future of science," I said,
"but science fiction writers do it every day, and often with
surprising perspicacity." So I volunteered to write a piece of
science fiction with the dateline of 2006, 20 years into the future,
imagining how two decades of change and growth in science might look
from that vantage point.
Cloudy Crystal Balls
It's not quite 2006 yet, so I have three years for some of my
predictions to come true. But how well did I do? The short answer is
that almost all my specific predictions have already turned out to
be simply wrong. I predicted the successful construction of the
Superconducting Supercollider and predicted its successor would be
under design by 2006—a tunnel around Antarctica. In honor of
the International Cosmological Year, the new machine would have the
acronym ICY. I predicted that T. Boone Pickens would endow the Santa
Fe Institute with enough money to become the department-less
graduate school for interdisciplinary science (the Pickens Institute
for Science, or PIS) that Murray Gell-Mann had dreamed of in the 1970s.
One of my more regrettably bad predictions was the idea that the
importance of complexity, irreversibility and nonlinearity in
science would bring about a resurgence of mathematics. In the United
States, that has not happened. Although the mathematicians and the
theoretical physicists are working together again, the U.S.
government has certainly continued to starve mathematics and has
done little to encourage a new generation of American
mathematicians. In this critical field we not only import our
students; we must import faculty as well.
Another disappointment is in education. One could foresee in 1986 a
massive shift from focus on teaching to focus on learning,
especially as the cognitive sciences made such good progress. But
alas, between parents who don't care, schools that can't function,
and politicians who sell clichés but are unwilling to address
the basic issues, again in the U.S. education at the pre-college
level still struggles in a swamp of neglect and ideological determinism.
Clear Crystal Balls
In a few cases I made attempts to be so extravagant that my forecast
would be seen as tongue-in-cheek—and therefore turned out to
be about right for 2003. I foresaw teraflop computing (trillions of
calculations per second) available on the desktop. The development
of new distributed operating systems that allow large numbers of
computers to share distributed data (called grid computing) and to
share the computing power of machines that are momentarily idle
joined with Moore's Law (that processors double in speed every three
years) to make this possible. I correctly forecast the mapping of
the human genome in the 1990s, and predicted that you would be able
to buy it on a CD-ROM for $9.99. Most important, I predicted the
growth of the Internet and its impact on science. (In 1986 Steve
Wolff came to the National Science Foundation and launched NSFnet
using TCP/IP, the key protocols that permitted the explosive growth
of the Internet later. Looking back, it is hard to believe that it
was not until 1987 that 10,000 Internet hosts existed; now there are
hundreds of millions around the world. See timeline at
http://www.pbs.org/internet/timeline/) I called it WUNET (an acronym
for World University Network and pun on "one net"), making
a serious underprediction of the commercialization of the Internet.
On one point I was actually too pessimistic (although literally
accurate) in predicting that by 2006 automatic language translation
would "remain incompletely solved." Finally, I correctly
predicted the confusion that would engulf tenure and promotion
committees in their attempt to define publication so they could
decide who should perish. Even in 1986 it was clear that authors
would become publishers, and scientists would not wait to learn the
latest research advances until the print materials arrived in the
snail mail.
But these were details—some of them intended to be funny when
looked back upon. The serious part of the prediction about science
itself was in one way correct and in another unrealized. All the
trends for science were evident in 1986, and I believe most
scientists would endorse the observations I made. But most would
also say that the majority of science and its institutions have not
moved from their traditional self views. Change happens blindingly
fast in science, but agonizingly slowly in the institutions
of science. Let me summarize the most important trends I forecast.
First, science would become ever more
capital-intensive, which itself would drive science
down a multidisciplinary, multi-author, shared-resource path. That
was a no-brainer; it surely is reality. I did propose a solution to
the competition among nations for the location of the very large,
shared, science facilities. Every participating nation would be
authorized to build a magnificent marble structure, with
"World's Largest Accelerator" or "World's Most
Farsighted Telescope" engraved over the front door. Inside,
there would be of course no accelerator or telescope, only a mammoth
bank of computers and satellite dishes through which each nation's
scientists operated a machine in a generally unknown place, deep
underground or atop an inaccessible mountain. Site selection becomes
much easier. This trend is also well under way.
Second, I saw the reintegration of
sciences —a hugely important trend that is
surely under way but will be far from dominant in the structure of
scientific activities in 2006.
This trend can be seen in at least four areas:
—Cognitive science, brain studies, neurophysiology and
behavioral science. In these areas we do see a huge effort to bring
together these several threads of knowledge, much of it based on
faith that surely one day we can give biochemical and physiological
understanding to human (and animal) behavior.
—Cosmology, high-energy physics, astrophysics and
mathematics. Here too the prediction is in full flower. Indeed,
except for mathematics these disciplines now find themselves in the
same department in many universities. Progress has been nothing less
than incredible. And the prediction that the estrangement of
mathematics from theoretical physics would end has surely proved right.
—Biochemistry, medical sciences, and molecular, cellular and
developmental biology. It was not hard, in 1986, to predict this
reintegration, given my successful prediction on the progress of
genomics. I foresaw the ability to use computer modeling to design
and create new molecules with chosen functions. But I was a bit
optimistic in seeing the ability of genomics to tell us about the
biological locus of instinctive behavior.
—Geophysics, meteorology, oceanography and paleontology. The
first three have merged into planetary and earth sciences on the one
hand and climate sciences on the other. Indeed, the concern about
global climate change and sustainability has accelerated the study
of the interrelations of oceans and atmospheres, and paleontology
has proved a vital source of information (if ice cores are
considered paleontology). I could add geography to the list, given
the importance of studies of human habitation, energy use and
technology development in the issue of sustainability.
Third, specialization and reintegration still
compete. It was easy to foresee the dark side of
multidisciplinary studies—the claim scholars might make to
mastery of a broad interdisciplinary area without mastering any of
its constituent disciplines. This would make peer review and tenure
evaluations very difficult and controversial. One desperate hope was
of course doomed to failure—my dream that the National Science
Foundation and National Institutes of Health would stop trying to
predict the work that deserved funding, and instead reward those who
proved their work was worthwhile. For mature scientists that should
be easy. For young scientists I proposed that with every grant to a
mature scientist (based on her record) the university would receive
an additional 25 percent to be used for funding young scientists
within three years of a Ph.D. The universities would choose the
awardees. Back in the 1980s when I chaired the National Science
Board, I had already pushed for an additional mechanism: grants to
be made to young investigators by program officers, made without
peer review. The work of the awardees would be reviewed three years
later and the rating put in the program officer's performance file.
I proposed that an idea Herb Simon espoused back in 1985 would be
widely adopted in universities. The "Simon Standard" was
quite simple: "No one was allowed to publish pan-disciplinary
pronouncements until they had published at least one solid paper in
each of the disciplines drawn upon" (my words, not his). I used
Picasso as my model. When he was a teenager he showed he could paint
like Leonardo; he earned the right to represent a bill with five
lines on a piece of paper (which would sell later for millions).
Under this standard, the mono-disciplinary departments would survive
as keepers of the tools and standards in specialized areas of science.
Fourth, experiment and theory would be come increasingly
indistinguishable. On the data side it seems obvious
that when the quantities of computer-acquired data explode, one
builds algorithms into the computer analysis so the experimenter is
not seeing the output from individual sensors but rather a processed
flow of data which we should call metadata. The algorithms used to
process and simplify the data are themselves based on some theory in
which one has confidence. But the result is really not experiment,
independent of theory. For example, if you use symmetry properties
of viruses in the analysis of x-ray crystallographic images, the
result is clearly not independent of those theoretical assumptions.
The traditional separation of students into "theorists"
and "experimentalists" is no longer tolerable in 2003,
much less will it be tolerable in 2006. A similar line of argument
applies to the use of computation to exhaustion as a means for
"proving" mathematical theorems.
Science and Society
My forecast went only as far as thinking about the potential
integration of the social and physical sciences. The main prediction
was the growing recognition that research tools for dealing more
effectively with the major problems facing societies must be
improved. Again putting on the glasses of a scientist in 2006 to
acquire her hindsight, I wrote, "Creative intuition is a
valuable—even essential—tool for both scientific and
artistic progress. In the social sciences, however, intuition had
long proved a dangerous trap. It was easier to be objective when man
studied nature. Man's study of man is the ultimate challenge. But
the challenge had to be faced."
What I did not address in our 2006 retrospective were some truly
important issues that are transforming science in many dimensions.
Perhaps the most serious oversight was my failure to foresee the
highly welcome growth of participation of women in science, not only
as students but among business leaders and senior faculty. In those
senior posts women are still seriously underrepresented, but the
trends are strong and favorable.
My optimism about the growing political support for better
environmental stewardship in the U.S. now seems extravagant in view
of the current administration's reversal of much of the progress of
preceding years. Nor did I anticipate the extent to which science no
longer enjoys the degree of insulation from politics it once
enjoyed. Science, many would say, has become too important to be
left to the scientists. We have many indicators of a new and more
complex relationship between science and society: the rise of
scientific fraud and new quasi-judicial processes to find and punish
it; the insistence by Congress that agencies supporting science
document not only the resulting scientific outputs but the outcomes
in the form of benefits to society; the rise in earmarks by
Congress, diverting billions of dollars from the safeguard of merit
review. None of this should come as a surprise, given the enormous
growth of biomedical research budgets, but it calls for a new
maturity and new sense of accountability on the part of scientists.
Finally, I can hardly be faulted for failing to foresee the rise of
catastrophic terrorism, bringing with it a felt need to constrain
the flow of basic scientific knowledge to terrorists while still
enjoying the fruits of science for medicine, environment and the economy.
But the bottom line to this effort at seeing the future of science
is that the attraction of science as a life's vocation is unchanged.
"In 2006," I wrote, "God still loves the noise as
much as the signal. Man is still aware that with every step forward
in science, two delicious new questions—crying out for
study—were born."
