Issues in Science and Technology articles from June 2003

Issues in Science and Technology archives from June 2003

Looking back, looking forward.
June 22, 2003... There is a troubling disparity between the scientific sophistication of our culture and its social and political backwardness, a disparity that hovers over every aspect of our civilization," wrote Daniel Yankelovich 20 years ago to begin the...

Winning greater influence for science.
June 22, 2003... In this space 20 years ago, I reported on the unwritten social contract between scientists and society: an unspoken agreement that gives science a "creative separateness from involvement with goals, values, and institutions other than its own."...

Science's growing political strength.(Research & Technology)
June 22, 2003... The past decade has been a period of significant change in science, science policy, and science advocacy. Terms such as bioinformatics, Bose condensates, genomics, nanotechnology, supersymmetries, and wavelets, which were barely in the lexicon...

What's next for technology policy?(Research & Technology)
June 22, 2003... By the summer of 1991, there was no doubt that the Cold War was over and the United States was unchallenged militarily. But the nation's commercial high-tech industry was still facing a decade-old struggle to compete with innovative Japanese...

Globalization: causes and effects.(Research & Technology)
June 22, 2003... Globalization traces its roots to at least the late 1980s. At that time, new countries were entering into manufacturing, which was in some sense the weakest link in the U.S. chain of science, development, manufacturing, and sale of goods and...

Securing U.S. research strength.(Research & Technology)
June 22, 2003... The more things change, the more they stay the same" applies today as it did in the 1980s to the U.S. capability to preserve the nation s leadership in science and technology. In the mid-1980s, the main requirements for preserving U.S....

The foreign student dilemma.(Research & Technology)
June 22, 2003... When the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, many people in the United States were talking about a "new rationale" for federal support of university research in the physical sciences and engineering. The essence of the new rationale was the...

Bolstering support for academic R&D.(Research & Technology)
June 22, 2003... Funding for academic research from all sources grew quite satisfactorily in the 1980s, at about 5.6 percent per year in constant dollars. Yet when I examined the picture in 1991, the future looked dim. The United States was just emerging from a...

Maglev ready for prime time.(Research & Technology)
June 22, 2003... Putting Maglev on Track" (Issues, Spring 1990) observed that growing airline traffic and associated delays were already significant and predicted that they would worsen. The article argued that a 300-mile-per-hour (mph) magnetic levitation...

Toward improved quality of life.(Health)
June 22, 2003... Thomas Jefferson was unequivocal: "Without health, there is no happiness. An attention to health, then, should take the place of every other object." During the past two decades, the association of health and quality of life has been...

Future health care challenges.(Health)
June 22, 2003... Forecasting the future of health care and health policy is an imperfect science. Among the predictions made in the mid-1980s were that there would be a physician surplus, a growing number of elderly people, an increase in the number of people...

Restructuring the U.S. health care system.(Health)
June 22, 2003... The past two decades have seen major economic changes in the health care system in the United States, but no solution has been found for the basic problem of cost control. Per-capita medical expenditures increased at an inflation-corrected rate...

AIDS agenda still daunting.(Health)
June 22, 2003... Fifteen years ago, the research agenda delineated in these pages regarding the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) stressed the importance of a diverse and robust scientific portfolio. It included...

AIDS: the battle rages on.(Health)
June 22, 2003... The late 1980s were not good times for New York's Harlem or the other disadvantaged urban communities in the United States. Two linked epidemics, one posed by the human immunodeficiency virus/ acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/ AIDS) and...

Treating cancer as a public health problem.(Health)
June 22, 2003... As a result of the growth and aging of the U.S. population, more Americans died of cancer in 1999 than in any previous year. Yet mere numbers do not by any means reflect the true state of our war against cancer. I have long argued that cancer...

Viral traffic on the move.(Health)
June 22, 2003... We now know a great deal about the factors that allow novel infections to originate and spread. Major outbreaks during the past decade, including those of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, Ebola, hemolytic uremic syndrome, West Nile, and...

Biodiversity in the information age.(Environment & Energy)
June 22, 2003... My 1985 Issues article was among the first to document and assess the problem of biodiversity in the context of public policy. It was intended to bring the extinction crisis to the attention of environmental policymakers, whose focus...

Hard times for chemical prospecting.(Environment & Energy)
June 22, 2003... Nature is a vast chemical treasury. Largely unexplored, it is the repository of countless substances of potential use. Nature is also vanishing, and this poses a problem in urgent need of solution. More than a dozen years ago, I proposed a...

The continued danger of overfishing.(Environment & Energy)
June 22, 2003... New studies continue to chronicle how overfishing and poor management have severely hurt the U.S. commercial fishing industry. Thus, it makes sense to examine the effectiveness of the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996, which overhauled federal...

Whither the U.S. climate program?(Environment & Energy)
June 22, 2003... Approximately 50 years ago, the first contemporary stirring within the scientific community about climate change began when Roger Revelle and Hans Suess wrote that "human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment." Since...

U.S. oil dependence remains a problem.(Environment & Energy)
June 22, 2003... War and terrorism have changed a lot about how we think about oil markets. But one thing they haven't changed during the past 14 years is the fact that excessive dependence on oil in our domestic energy mix exposes us to potentially serious...

The bumpy road to reduced carbon emissions.(Environment & Energy)
June 22, 2003... A dozen years ago, the debate over controlling emissions of greenhouse gases was just beginning. Several European countries were calling for either a freeze or a 20 percent cut in emissions by the developed world 2000. In the United States,...

Conservator society still a dream.(Environment Energy)
June 22, 2003... Society is all too committed to the notion of "progress" as measured through economic growth and population expansion. The notion of working toward a "sustainable future" is not given much serious thought. Energy policy, for example,...

New life for nuclear power.(Environment & Energy)
June 22, 2003... Most of what I wrote in "Engineering in an Age of Anxiety" and "Energy Policy in an Age of Uncertainty" I still believe: Inherently safe nuclear energy technologies will continue to evolve; total U.S. energy output will rise more slowly than it...

Superfund matures gracefully.(Environment & Energy)
June 22, 2003... Superfund, one of the main programs used by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to clean up serious, often abandoned, hazardous waste sites, has been improved considerably in recent years. Notably, progress has been made in two important...

The unfinished revolution in military affairs.(Defense)
June 22, 2003... In the early 1990s, the Department of Defense's (DOD's) Office of Net Assessment concluded that the world was probably entering a period of military revolution, or "revolution in military affairs." DOD's leadership soon accepted that a military...

Next steps in defense restructuring.(Defense)
June 22, 2003... Twenty years ago, the United States was in the midst of a Cold War military buildup targeted against the Soviet Union and the other Warsaw Pact countries. Today there is no Soviet Union, Russia is no longer the enemy, and many of the former...

How smart have weapons become?(Defense)
June 22, 2003... By the early 1980s, the technology was in hand to define "smart weapons" that could fill at least three important military purposes. First, guided weapons could provide theater-range artillery fire accurately across an entire battle area, when...

Nuclear proliferation risks, new and old.(Defense)
June 22, 2003... During the past decade, the United States and Russia have joined in a number of efforts to reduce the danger posed by the enormous quantity of weapons-usable material withdrawn from nuclear weapons. Other countries and various private groups...

U.S. computer insecurity redux.(Defense)
June 22, 2003... The United States continues to face serious challenges in protecting computer systems and communications from unauthorized use and manipulation. In terms of computer security, the situation is worse than ever, because of the nation s...

Still underserved after all these years.(Education)
June 22, 2003... Much has happened during the past decade that has affected the quality of education received by underrepresented minority groups (African Americans, Alaska Natives, American Indians, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans). Educational progress...

Math education at risk.(Education)
June 22, 2003... Two decades ago, the United States awoke to headlines declaring that it was "A Nation at Risk." In dramatic language, the National Commission on Excellence in Education warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity" that, bad it been "imposed by a...

Information Technology and the university.(Education)
June 22, 2003... A decade ago, many people had yet to accept that the inexorable progress of information technology (IT) would result in fundamental change in universities. Experience is shrinking that group. The basic premises that underlie the need for change...

Free the national bioethics commission.(Ethics)
June 22, 2003... The creation of a national commission in the United States to study and discuss bioethical questions seemed imperative a decade ago. One reason was that a number of other countries, including Australia, Denmark, France, and Great Britain, had...

Baltimore's travels continued.(Ethics)
June 22, 2003... In 1989, when I wrote the article entitled "Baltimore's Travels," I thought that my saga might soon be history. Little did I know that this controversy, which had begun in 1985, would continue on for another seven years. Daniel Kevles...

Security versus openness: the case of universities.(International)
June 22, 2003... The decade of the 1980s was marked by declines in the United States" manufacturing skills and the apparent invincibility of Japanese industry. In this climate, many people in the academic community were concerned that the U.S. government might...

Science in the new Russia.(International)
June 22, 2003... In the former Soviet Union, science and technology served as major forces moderating national policies. The advent of nuclear weapons forced the country to give up its earlier Leninist thesis that wars were inevitable events that produce...

Cooperation with China.(International)
June 22, 2003... In the wake of China's crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, the country's progress on important fronts seemed to be in jeopardy. Many U.S. observers worried that China's nascent economic reform, reliance...

In memoriam.
June 22, 2003... In reviewing the Issues archives to find articles to revisit in this anniversary edition, we came across several authors whose insights we would dearly like to read again but who have died. David E. Rogers was a member of the Issues...

Cecil H. Green.(In Memoriam)(Brief Article)(Obituary)
June 22, 2003... One other individual deserves special mention. Cecil Green died in April at the age of 102. Even though he never wrote for Issues, Green played a critical role. Together with his wife Ida, Cecil was one of the great philanthropists of the 20th...