Fareed Zakaria speaks out for science
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8091
When the physicist and statesman of science Neal Lane advocates federal investment in scientific research, the journalist and commentator Fareed Zakaria pays attention. But then, Zakaria has a long record of vocal, sometimes almost impassioned, support for federal science funding.
Lane served as the president’s science adviser, director of NSF, and ex officio member of the National Science Board. Zakaria hosts CNN’s foreign-affairs show GPS (global public square) and writes for the Washington Post and the Atlantic.
In July 2014 congressional testimony recorded at Scientific American under the headline “Investments in basic research are just that: investments,” Lane began by invoking a conservative authority:
In a 1988 radio address to the nation, President Ronald Reagan said that “although basic research does not begin with a particular practical goal, when you look at the results over the years, it ends up being one of the most practical things government does. . . . Major industries, including television, communications, and computer industries, couldn’t be where they are today without developments that began with this basic research.”
Last month on GPS, and later as reexpressed in print in the online CNN commentary “Reagan’s big lesson for America,” Zakaria invoked Lane’s testimony and the same appeal to Reagan’s conservative authority. He wrote, “It used to be that funding basic science was not a partisan issue,” and observed that as “Lane notes, a certain rock-ribbed Republican was a big proponent of basic research.” Zakaria quoted Reagan’s declaration that research funding “is an indispensable investment in America’s future,” adding “Let’s hope that today’s politicians follow Reagan’s advice.”
In a long 2009 Newsweek commentary , Zakaria argued as Reagan did and as Lane does. In January 2011, he called for President Obama’s State of the Union speech to propose “doubling federal spending on research and innovation.” Later that year, he opened a commentary with a quotation from the president’s actual speech: “The first step to winning the future is encouraging American innovation.” Zakaria went on to declare that the “ecosystem that encourages technological breakthroughs and their application does not develop in a vacuum. It requires great universities, vibrant companies that devote time and energy to research and—yes—large amounts of government funding.”
In June 2012, Zakaria argued in his Washington Post column that the “economics of large-scale increases in support of science and technology are clear,” but that as usual, “the politics is the problem.” That column extolled federal research-funding successes including the Human Genome Project, the 40 million people who use statins to reduce cholesterol, and Energy Department R&D to make fracking practical. The column also marshaled evidence to bolster a warning:
Federal funding for research and development—a drop in the bucket compared with farm subsidies—has long been in decline. From 1970 to 1995, it fell as a percentage of gross domestic product by 54 percent in physical sciences and 51 percent in engineering. Federal R&D funding increased slightly in recent years but has resumed its long-term slump—just as China and South Korea are increasing their funding 10 percent year over year. The budget for Turkey’s government agency for science and technology is slated to grow 15-fold over the next 15 years. In a knowledge economy, American jobs will depend more on scientific research than they did in the 1950s, yet we spend much less as a share of GDP.
Already in 2015, Zakaria has sounded his federal-research theme yet again in his Washington Post column. He closed with this:
My favorite example comes from Walter Isaacson’s fascinating new book, “The Innovators .” In the 1950s, the U.S. government funded a massive project at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, employing equal numbers of psychologists and engineers who worked together to find ways “that humans could interact more intuitively with computers and information could be presented with a friendlier interface.” Isaacson traces how this project led directly to the user-friendly computer screens of today as well as ARPANET, the precursor of the Internet.
Federal funding for basic research and technology should be utterly uncontroversial. It has been one of the greatest investments in human history. And yet it has fallen to its lowest level as a percentage of GDP in four decades. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is catching up in entrepreneurship and research. A real start-up culture is emerging in Sweden, Israel, Beijing and Bangalore. China is on track to surpass the United States in spending on research and development.
But there is hope. Ajay Piramal, a thoughtful Indian businessman, said to me, “I think one of the reasons that the United States is so successful is that it constantly criticizes itself. All that criticism makes sure that you never get complacent.” So while foreigners praise U.S. innovation today, Americans should set about making sure that there is innovation tomorrow as well.
Meanwhile at the Wall Street Journal, a sidebar to a front-page article on the new Congress’s makeup reports that a “dearth” of scientist-legislators “has caused increasing alarm among scientific associations, which are concerned about maintaining research funding.”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.