Scientific and Political Culture in the Capital

By Gary Berg-Cross

Talking about the culture that exists inside the DC area Beltway sometimes evokes pretty negative responses and with good reason. The culture of modern national politics is less the art of the possible than of endless, silly shallow hypocritical ideological confrontation and posturing. Its a place where a pumped up version of American Exceptionalism exists with blistering criticism of current government. Government workers are increasing looked down upon as part of an inept culture just like public school teachers. To some the whole mix that makes up the public sector is seen as inefficient and ineffective. Workers and politicians are lazy they say. They lack good judgment and aren't serious about serving people. I don't hold to those views and their non sequitur reasoning, but I do see political conversation (and action) in the Capital as an unrealistic mix of group and party interests dressed up with bumper quote principles. The faulty reasoning of some is evident when conservatives say things like closing lobbyist-developed tax loopholes is a tax increase which they must oppose. In the past Washington’s summer have been called the silly season, because that’s when politicians went on expensive, taxpayer-funded, “fact finding” vacations around the globe. There’s less government money for such junket silliness, but the exercise of perks has grown into adventurous national tours paid for by campaign contributors. This silliness reflects the fact that there are now enormous wads of money to push ideological ideas and values.


But our DC Beltway culture also contains a good deal of wonderful values to celebrate. Some of this is generated by the non-political and secular institutions in the area. They may be less plush with money but they still generate events like the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival each June-July organized by the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. The festival celebrates cultural traditions around the world. I’m particularly fond of those which present a secular, scientific culture. As locals we can partake in quite a few of their events, but through grants and research efforts they send rational ripples outward throughout the country. I’m thinking of such institutions (a short list) as NIH, AAAS, the National Academies of Science, the Carnegie Institute, the NSF, the National Geographic and the many parts of the Smithsonian Institution (SI) including its Zoo (which I visited yesterday -try the Think Tank for some fun observations of our Ape cousins). They all have events, lectures and programs that celebrate science and often the larger culture. So there is lots to enjoy in the area and together they continue to inspire generations of Americans through broad access knowledge and digestible nuggets of human creativity and discovery. And they are often depend on exceptional people to make them survive in hard, financial times.

2011 Marks the 165th anniversary of the Smithsonian and I like the vision being implemented by SI’s 12th Secretary Wayne Clough. Clough combines sounder scientific and management values than his immediate (Small) predecessor while “expanding the Smithsonian’s global relevance and helping the nation shape its future through research, education and scientific discovery on major topics of the day. “ This is American Exceptionalism at its best.
One of his first initiatives has been a consensus-based new strategic plan that articulates four grand challenges whose goal is to leverage diverse resources of the Smithsonian’s museums and science centers through interdisciplinary approaches. The parts we see in DC are only the tip of SI’s iceberg of science with many moving parts across 769 Acres involving 500 scientists and 9 big research centers.

I feel especially close to the first challenge, called Unlocking the Mysteries of the Universe. It reminds us that science is an ongoing enterprise that builds on the shoulders of past progress. While I tend to think of the SI icons of the Natural History such as human origins, SI’s Science Centers operate out of town and are interested in science broadly and include astronomical investigations to better understand inflation in the early phase of the universe. This gets at current mysteries such as the nature and role of dark matter in the evolution of the universe, and the properties of the dark energy that is speeding up the expansion of the universe.

I also feel excited by the 2nd challenge, Understanding and Sustaining a Bio-diverse Planet. This stands in sober contrast to the way large part of the political system have dealt with issues around climate change. SI continues thttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifo work to increase knowledge of the evolutionary and ecological history of species and ecosystems, and the processes responsible for population declines and extinction.

The next grand challenge - Valuing World Culture is also something that political DC sometimes has trouble agreeing on. Even harder to get a good objective stance and agreement on is the last challenge - Understanding the American Experience. It perhaps represents a more sober and balanced take on experience rather than a slanted view of American Exceptionalism (as I discussed in a previous posting). And I believe our science institutions remain one of the real prize realizations of the aspiration of American excellence.

Towards Grand Challenges – why not an SH Prize for Secular Humanist Challenges?

There are lots of big challenges out there for society to wrestle with. Some such as in the energy, development and health care are well recognized and indeed fall under the rubric of Grand Challenges with prizes. So far as I know we have none in the secular humanist domain, but perhaps we should.

Calling out "grand challenges" to stimulate progress isn't new. Some old paradoxes like squaring the circle might qualify, but recent challenges have largely been less philosophical and more technical. The British government offered the equivalent of about $12 million in 1714 to solve their Navy’s problem: How could British ships calculate their longitude location which allowed avoid shipwrecks & calculating how far east or west they were from home. Many scientists of the day attacked the problem, but it was solved by a humble, self-taught watchmaker named John Harrison.

The first modern grand challenge was pretty intellectual and introduced over a century ago by mathematician David Hilbert. At a conference in 1900, Hilbert asked a colleague what would be a compelling presentation topic who suggested that he “look into the future and compile a list of problems on which mathematicians should test themselves during the coming century.” Hilbert issued 23 challenges which were grand in mathematical concepts and represented problem which long resisted solution, and whose solution is expected to have some real consequence. The challenge inspired a generation of mathematicians with generally successful results - nearly all of his challenges have now been solved.

The success of Hilbert’s challenge has spawned several grand challenges over the last few years and they cross many disciplines. A modern grand challenges looks at specific critical barrier that, if removed, would help solve an important problem in the world. In October 2004 Space Ship One was the first privately funded spacecraft ever to reach sub-orbit nearly 70 miles above Earth. The Ansari X spaceflight Prize paid out $10 million to the first privately-financed team to fly a spaceship capable of carrying 3 people to 100km twice in 2 weeks. In 2005, "Stanley," a Volkswagen modified by Stanford University students, survived 130 miles of desert driving without a human driver. It was a robot navigating the rough terrain guided by computer programs and sensors. The DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) prize for robotic vehicles paid $2 million in public money.

The success of the X prize for “space exploration” has launched other Prize Groups including a general Exploration, Energy & Environment, Education &
Global Development. These represent movement from single challenge prizes to whole lists of grand challenges. One of them was developed by the National Academy of Engineering in 2008. They framed the problem in a way that I think many secularists would agree with:

“As the population grows and its needs and desires expand, the problem of sustaining civilization’s continuing advancement, while still improving the quality of life, looms more immediate. Old and new threats to personal and public health demand more effective and more readily available treatments. Vulnerabilities to pandemic diseases, terrorist violence, and natural disasters require serious searches for new methods of protection and prevention. And products and processes that enhance the joy of living remain a top priority of engineering innovation, as they have been since the taming of fire and the invention of the wheel.

In each of these broad realms of human concern — sustainability, health, vulnerability, and joy of living — specific grand challenges await engineering solutions.”

http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/8996/9221.aspx

Among the many challenges they list are to manage the nitrogen cycle, provide affordable clean water and reverse engineer the brain. Many efforts have picked up on Grand Challenges that bring focus and energy to defining and addressing environmental and global health issues. Such global problems have supports from large scale donors such as the Gates Foundation which as a special Grand Challenges Initiatives (http://www.grandchallenges.org/Pages/Default.aspx). Among other things this has increased funding for research on diseases that affect the world's poor. One goal is to develop superior diagnostic tools, prevention strategies, and interventions to counter the debilitating impact of these diseases.

Factors that go into making for successful grand challenges has also been studied. McKinsey & Co.’s analysis of the promise of philanthropic prizes improve current prizes and stimulate effective future use by developing a number of simple frameworks and compiling useful lessons for sponsors is detailed in their article “And the winner is..”

http://www.mckinsey.com/app_media/reports/sso/and_the_winner_is.pdf

A summary graphic from their report is shown below:

And now there are even University programs to support such broad work. Princeton University, for example, has a program to train people on global scale problems with scientific, technological and public policy dimensions. One example is energy problems which have a financial dimension but also confronts climate change science, the management of fossil-fuel carbon, the expansion of non-fossil energy sources, and other environmental impacts of the various energy systems. Confronting infectious disease around the globe is another complex challenge that has genetic, interdisciplinary epidemiology and modern medicine dimensions, but also demands community support and environmental action. To master these problems one needs integrating knowledge from a variety of disciplines including biology, engineering, the social sciences, ethics and public policy. See http://www.princeton.edu/grandchallenges/health/

There are many things that I like about the grand challenge prizes. They are highly leveraged and efficient so that $X often sparks contestants into an aggregate $10X or more effort. In some cases it helps spawn a new industry. And it is often not about one technology. It’s more about transforming the way humanity as whole addresses some of our greatest challenges.

I am particularly inspired by some bold efforts in Europe to bring together hundreds of the best scientists for 10 year projects to explore social life on earth and everything it relates to such as financial activity (see FuturICT flagship proposal - http://www.futurict.ethz.ch/FuturICT. Projects like FuturICT flagship hope to “produce historic breakthroughs and provide powerful new ways to manage challenges that make the modern world so difficult to predict.”

Which makes me wonder if we will ever have a Secular Humanist Grand Challenge. Certainly the current efforts on education and environment are things that humanists can support. But might there be a place for a very specific challenge that we could agree would help address our challenges. One thought is to have something like the Humanipedia - The Free Encyclopedia for New Humanists! (http://www.humanipedia.org/) That site seems to be an idea that hasn’t been carried through. It just created a place for organizations that work on “new humanism” to list their websites. I can imagine a more ambitious effort to create a real, online secular encyclopedia like Wikipedia. It might be a great educational tool for community. It does raise the question of who would fund it. Perhaps the right prize might launch it.