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In the final chapter of In Place
of Fear, Aneurin Bevan wrote that ‘progress is not
the elimination of struggle but rather a change in its terms’
(1952: Chapter 10). Since 1952, that struggle and its terms
have indeed changed, and science has in no small part provided
the motive force.
If we believe, along with Roy Hattersley, that ‘the
purpose of the equality we seek is the extension of liberty’
(Hattersley 1987, p20), then a view on the nature of science,
its potential, its risks, and how it might be harnessed,
is somewhat important for those on the left. In Development
As Freedom, Amartya Sen (1999, p53) wrote that ‘the
enhancement of human freedom is both the main object and
the primary means of development’. Our goal for science
is the same. Science – and technology – is,
as Jared Diamond (1997,
p241) put it in Guns, Germs and Steel, ‘the leading
cause of history’s broadest pattern’; its progress
has the potential to underpin the transformation of our‘capabilities’,
to use Sen’s language again – or our ‘effective
freedoms’, as Keynes once wrote. The future of science
quite simply holds within it for the left the prospect of
winning great wars – the war on disease, the war on
poverty, and the battle for peace at home and abroad.
But the left’s
agenda for science does not start with science itself. It
starts with our society and the institutions within that
society that sponsor, shape, harness, exploit or pervert
the results of scientific endeavour.
Over the last
forty years the history of science has received enormous
attention as we have looked at the changes in the post-war
global economy and asked the question, why has science,
and science-driven freedoms, flourished in some communities
and not others?
The causes which
explain the advance of science are intimately linked to
the reasons for differences in income growth, and, as Dani
Rodrik and Arvind Subramanian argued last year (2003, pp31-4),
explanations for the huge difference in average incomes
tend to fall into one of three categories; geography and
the role it plays as a determinant factor, together with
climate, natural resource endowments, disease burdens, transport
costs and the ease of technological diffusion between societies;
integration, and the role of international trade as a driver
of productivity change and income growth; and third, institutions,
particularly property rights and the rule of law.
Of the three variables,
Rodrik and Arvind Subramanian argue, it is the role of institutions
that is key – the ‘only positive and significant
determinant of income levels’; indeed, they argue
that ‘once institutions are controlled for, integration
has no direct effect on incomes while geography has at best
weak direct effects’.
It is not therefore
the case that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’,
as several writers have argued, (including Diamond 1997
and Mokyr 1992). In traditional societies invention may
occur at the level of the individual, but:
what makes them
[innovators] implement, improve and adapt new technologies
or just devise small improvements in the way they carry
out their daily work depends on the institutions and the
attitudes around
them (Mokyr 1992, p155).
It is then at this social level that invention is transformed
into innovation, and in societies ill-equipped with effective
institutions, innovation and invention fails to flourish,
or indeed slows to a snail’s pace – as it did
in Islamic societies after the golden age of learning (750-1100),
pre-Tokugawa Japan, or China after the advent of the Ming
dynasty (1368-1644), when a totalitarian regime began to
suffocate progress with the heavy drapes of monopoly, censorship
and a ban on foreign exchange; in David Landes’s evocative
image (1998), foreign expeditions were cancelled and the
iron foundries, once amongst the most technologically advanced
in the world, were left to rot.
But to begin an argument with a declaration of the virtues
of the marketplace is not an argument to leave the future
of science to the market.
Markets will not produce desirable levels of innovation.
There is, after all, a well documented ‘public good
property (to) new technological knowledge’: ‘once
created, using it does not reduce the supply available to
others, and it therefore has a zero marginal social cost’
(Mokyr 1992, p181). Furthermore, as Rodrik and Subramanian
argue, markets need governments to regulate, stabilise and
legitimise them. This role is so vital because, in the final
analysis, it is only when protected by strong public institutions
that markets can survive shocks. (Rodrik’s analysis
of sub-Saharan countries is instructive. Fifteen countries
nexceeded growth rates of 2.5% before 1973. But because
of weak domestic institutions, few were able to withstand
the oil price
and macroeconomic shocks of the 1970s.)
Nor will societies – and markets – always welcome
innovation when it arrives. As Rudolf Diesel put it, innovation
is ‘a struggle against stupidity and envy, apathy
and evil, secret opposition and open conflicts of interest,
the horrible period of struggle with man, a martyrdom even
if success ensures’ (quoted in Mokyr 1992, p155).
Politics and government are therefore somewhat important.
More importantly for the left however – if history
is anything to go on – the tender mercies of the marketplace
are simply unlikely to develop science in order to create
a more equal society in the future. Over the last decade,
science and technology has powered the most extraordinary
rates of productivity growth and wealth expansion in the
United States. But levels of income inequality are the highest
in the Western world. Jonathan Sacks recently quoted that
rather effective capitalist, George Soros, who observed
that the market is but one institution: it is ‘very
good at generating wealth but cannot take care of other
social needs, such as
preservation of peace, alleviation of poverty, protection
of the environment’. Collective freedom, as Sacks
goes on to argue, is more substantive than individual freedom,
and without it society is not a place of liberty. Freedom
presupposes self-respect, an element of which is independence
and equal dignity; something which is impossible in a society
of searing differences.
Here then is the
challenge for the left and its agenda for science. It must
find a way of organising the market so that the market continues
to power science forward. But it must also arrange our public
institutions to guarantee that the fruits of science are
not exclusive benefits but are shared peacefully by all.
To let the market
– and its role in powering science – flourish,
the left has to confront some basic instincts. One of our
most powerful motive forces is the instinct to plan and
to distrust competition. Although the instinct to plan may
be, as Crosland noted (1957, p50), but one of some twelve
strands of British socialism, and a ‘late development’
at that, it is one of our more influential traditions. But
the market is so important because of the importance of
decentralising control over the innovative process. This
is critical because:
[Historically] it meant that the search and experimentation
was carried out by many independent units, possibly over
and over again. This duplication of effort was not the most
cost effective way of engaging in
technological progress … But this system minimized
the probability of a technological opportunity being missed
as it reduced the risk that a desirable proposal would be
rejected because of a viewpoint peculiar to a
single decision maker (Mokyr, pp167-8).
The consolation for the traditionally-minded on the left
is that government is today the market’s essential
companion.
Nowhere is this
seen more clearly than when we consider the question of
what should constitute the left’s agenda for science
over the next two decades. Given what we can forecast about
the future development of science, what does the left need
to get right?
Arguably, the left’s agenda for the science age is
three-fold:
— To ensure that our markets accelerate the growth
of a science-based economy – and to transform the
ability of everyone in our labour market to participate
in and profit from that growth
— To ensure that public institutions harness the revolution
in genetic medicine and technology-based healthcare to transform
that most basic inequality of all, the inequality in the
health of the genes we are born
with and our chances of survival; and
— Third, to ensure that on the global stage the market
and the institutions of global co-operation together are
transformed so that they do effectively guarantee that what
Churchill called, the ‘dark lights of perverted science’
do not undermine or destroy the new freedoms that we build,
either through direct attack or the fear that they induce.
The point here, as Bevan noted, is that freedom is not a
concept fixed in aspic. Freedom is fluid. Each generation
at its boundaries redefines freedom, and each generation
either retreats, or exploits science to fling those boundaries
ever further out.
The challenge for the left is to ensure that the frontier
is not an exclusive place. Our challenge is to organise
our societies in such a way that the maximum number of us
get to live on that new frontier. The left has long
understood, as Crosland did, the virtue of science-driven
growth, and the redistribution that becomes possible beneath
its arc – the possibilities of Wilson’s ‘white
heat’. But we must be idealists without illusions
if we are to ensure that the frontier does advance and doesn’t
retreat as threats multiply, and as fear and precaution
hem us in. To paraphrase Kennedy, the new frontier of which
we speak is not just a set of promises, it is also a set
of challenges. So what does this mean in practice?
Reforming our markets
The first item on our agenda is to ensure that the market
which has such potential for driving science forward actually
delivers on the promise.
Over the next
eighteen years, advances in technology will power changes
in industry beyond prediction. By 2010, industry expects
to manufacture computer chips with a billion transistors,
with components under five atoms wide and connections that
switch on and off a trillion times a second; by 2020 computers
are expected to be over 4000 times more powerful than today.
Equipped with this new power, industry will develop in potentially
dramatic new ways. New ITenabled devices and services will
evolve; and the integration – or fusion – of
ICT with traditional products and services, together with
other developments in biotechnology, materials science and
nanotechnology, will ensure that technology becomes
‘pervasive’ in business, the military, and medicine.
With the internet acting as the ‘linchpin’ of
the system, access to global information systems will become
widespread, driving changes to business practices throughout
most industries, with important impacts on the changing
requirements for the workforce. eCommerce will be part of
every industry. Indeed, nearly three-quarters of British
companies already feel that ICT will have a key or important
impact on their sector.
These changes create enormous new opportunities and risks
for our economy, combined as they are with changes in trade
and the pace of change in the developing world.
These changes
will transform the productivity of our economy and the wealth
that is available to share. By 2020, the globe’s output
of just two working days is expected to match global economic
output of 1900.
Abroad, vast new markets will emerge for science based exports,
especially in high value sectors like pharmaceuticals, aerospace,
biotechnology, electronics, automotive, creative industries
and food production. China and India, who already produce
one sixth of global GDP, will potentially grow fastest.
If the combined economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China
maintain stable, growth-orientated policies they may be
larger than the G6 in less than forty years time –
today, their combined output is less than 15 per cent of
G6
(Goldman Sachs 2003).
In fact, by 2050, China, the US and India may constitute
three massive economies, some $22 trillion larger in GDP
than the next largest economy. And with that new opportunity
will come challenges. By the end of the last century India
was already exporting some $30 billion of software services
to Silicon Valley every year. By 2020, our graduates will
compete with a pool of 2 billion other graduates around
the world – a strong global community of IT-literate
people, able to work competently in an IT centric environment.
The United States
will remain the outstanding science-driven industrial power.
It is worth remembering two facts when we debate the nature
of Europe’s – and Britain’s – relationship
with the US. Of the world’s global R&D budget
of some £50 billion, the US spends around 50 per cent.
And secondly, the US has been spending very significant
sums for quite a long time. Indeed, the scale of US R&D
investment between 1941 and 1997 totalled around $130 trillion
(50 per cent of which was government-sourced). The Chancellor’s
proposals for stronger trading relationships between the
USA and Europe are in part so important because of the sheer
scale of US technology leadership in industry.
Britain faces
the future in a good position. With just one per cent of
the world’s population, we fund five per cent
of the world’s science – £2.9 billion
a year by 2005/06; and we generate 9 per cent of world citations
from just 4.5 per cent of the world’s research expenditure.
Information and communication technology (ICT) is increasingly
driving our economy – in 1998 ICT powered 20 per cent
of UK economic growth, and we now spend the second highest
proportion of our wealth on technology in the world. One
in 13 of our workforce works in ICT industries – the
second highest in the OECD.
Increasingly our
exports – and export growth – are high-tech.
Between 1990 and 2000 34 per cent of manufactured exports
were in the high-tech category, and our annual average growth
rate in high-tech exports was 7.9 per cent. We remain home
to strong science-based industries such as aerospace and
pharmaceuticals. We are a leading centre for opt-electronics,
computer games and mobile telephone software and services.
Of Europe’s 50 highest growth technology companies
in 2002, according to Time Magazine, 21 are based in the
UK; and 150 of the 500 fastest growing European companies
are
in the UK – compared with 51 in Germany, 97 in France
and 43 in Ireland. We have the world’s second best
environment for eCommerce, behind the US, and 80 per cent
of Britain’s businesses have a web-site – the
highest percentage in the world – overtaking the US
in 2001.
But we confront
two major issues, in that our domestic market needs to do
a far better job in harnessing the potential of science,
and our labour market shuts many out from a science based
economy.
Our industry still
struggles in the global competition for productivity. GDP
per worker in the US is almost 50 per cent higher than our
own. GDP per hour worked is around 30 per cent higher in
France and the US than here. And productivity growth –
which actually fell during the Major governments –
ranked well behind the US, France and Germany between 1995
and 2000. That means that the average American worker can
knock off on Wednesday afternoon having produced as much
as a British worker will deliver by end of play on Friday.
High tech innovation is key to our future growth –
it is the fastest growing sector of world trade, growing
from 10 per cent to 25 per cent of world exports between
1980 and 2000. In 2001, the OECD reported that between 1990
and 2000 the UK enjoyed an annual average growth rate of
7.9 per cent in high-tech exports, that 34 per cent of manufactured
exports were in the hightech category, and that the UK was
second only to the United States in our gross value added.
But Asia far outstrips our rate of growth – its average
growth
rate in high-tech exports was 20 per cent between 1980 and
2000, and Europe’s totalled 9 per cent.
We remain weak
at investing in our ideas, and turning them into business
ideas. Almost uniquely amongst the OECD, the UK spent a
lower share of GDP on R&D in 2000 than in 1981 –
at 1.9% of GDP, our R&D
spending rate is some 20-25% lower than that of the USA
and Germany. Overall, between 1995-97, the US achieved around
70 per cent more patents per million inhabitants than the
UK. In the same period, Finland achieved twice as many as
the UK, and Sweden achieved more than three times as many.
Our average annual growth in the number of patents filed
is 3-4 per cent – compared to average annual growth
rates of nearly 30 per cent for South Korea.
While some UK
sectors do well – such as pharmaceuticals and aerospace
– overall, new and improved products generate only
23 per cent of UK turnover – compared to 43 per cent
in Germany, and 31 per cent across the EU.
So although the market will be fundamental in driving science
forward, the role of government will be critical to effective
market performance. Indeed,endogenous growth theorists –
and we know there are a few in the Treasury – have
argued that in a situation when one country begins with
a greater stock of knowledge capital, it will accumulate
knowledge more quickly than its trade partners, ‘perpetuating
and even adding to its productivity lead’ (Grossman,
Gene and Helpman, Elhanan, 1993). But government intervention
– and a
sufficiently large subsidy to R&D – can be used
to overcome the disadvantage, and, once a country has ‘caught
up’, the policy can be removed without reversing the
effect – the temporary policy has permanent effects.
The second half of this challenge, however, is to ensure
that participation in the science economy is open to all.
Today it is not. Fifty per cent of our children leave school
without five good GCSEs. We have a long tail of
underachievement, with its roots in early years; performance
still closely relates to class – and a quarter of
our children drop out of full time education at 16. Our
curriculum is weak on creativity, team working and communication
– the key skills for the twnety-first century. Seven
million adults are ‘functionally illiterate’,
the UK is sixth in the EU league for upper secondary education,
and UK skills compared to our competitors are particularly
bad at intermediate levels. Just over a third of the UK
workforce has reached NVQ level 3 or
equivalent – compared with nearly three-quarters of
the German workforce. Salaries of lecturers lag behind comparative
jobs, and there is a substantial backlog of maintenance
and support for university laboratories, libraries and other
facilities.
Nor is science-based employment – and the opportunity
and wealth that goes with it – evenly distributed
around our nation. Regional GDP imbalances are already far
greater in the UK than in other EU countries – and
getting wider. And two regions – the East and the
South East – account for 40 per cent of all patenting,
and 43 per cent of all R&D expenditure, but only 23
per cent of our population.
This weakness has an economic effect. Already, 40 per cent
of firms do not feel employees have a sufficient understanding
of IT – the highest of any G7 country; and skills
gaps are reported in technical, computer literacy, general
communication, customer handling and management skills.
And the effect of this on income inequality in the future
is also a serious concern.
Harnessing the medical revolution
The second goal for the left is that, alongside reformed
markets, our public institutions ensure that the fruits
of new science are shared by all. Nowhere is this a clearer
opportunity than in healthcare.
The biotechnology and genetics revolution has begun to unfold
and Britain is at its forefront. Around 4000 diseases are
caused by defects to single genes, and individuals can inherit
genetic predispostions to heart disease, hyertension, diabetes
and dementia. Advances in genetics have been identified
as one of two technology trends that will have the biggest
impact on healthcare over the coming decades (Nuffield Trust
1999). We have already made substantial progress. In 1982,
genetically engineered human insulin became the first biotechnology
medicine. In 1990 the first person to undergo gene therapy
was treated. By 2000 an estimated ten to twenty new medicines
resulting from biotechnology were launched every year (Nuffield
Trust 1999). By 1998 a third of the 350 new biotechnology
medicines in development were for cancer, and
between 1990 and 1998, 30 gene therapy companies were launched.
Now medical forecasters expect our understanding of the
function of specific genes to improve dramatically, as the
Human Genome Project identifies all the genes in human DNA
over the next 2-4 years – and as in parallel we better
understand the function of specific genes – a much
more complex activity. Forecast developments include new
cures for uncurable diseases, and in particular an increasing
pace of drug discoveries, especially for cancer, Alzheimer’s
disease, diabetes, heart disease and osteoporosis; better
screening of patients to identify susceptability to diseases;
and, crucially, the targetting of treatment to the needs
of individual patients. By
2010 genetic screening is forecast to be in wide-scale use
and by 2015 ‘the practical use of gene therapy will
be extended to the treatment of 30 per cent of life-threatening
diseases ’ (OST Technology Foresight Programme, quoted
in Nuffield 1999, p13).
Our understanding of the biological processes which can
be used to heal will grow. Biotechnology medicines will
help patients grow new arteries, treat brain tumours and
slow the progression of Parkinson’s Disease. Together
with this revolution in genetic medicine, surgery too will
change. By 2014, some 50 per cent of surgical techniques
will be carried out by minimal intervention techniques and
10 per cent of surgical interventions will be carried out
by robotic techniques. Bioengineering will help doctors
move beyond
transplantation of organs to creation of artificial organs
– including artificial hearts by 2010 and artificial
lungs by 2015. Advances in transplantation science open
the possibility of transplanting a bigger range of organs
and tissues.
As ICT is exploited in the healthcare sector, and as remote
diagnostic equipment develops (driven by the portability
of equipment and communications technology), home-based
care and services may be able to
expand dramatically – which may have implications
for the structure of the hospital system, as well as for
care at home. In the field of bionics, direct and indirect
electronic brain links may improve the performance of the
brain in handling data and may offer advances in treating
sight and hearing defects.
The UK is well-placed
to exploit this revolution. In the past fifty years UK scientists
have been awarded 46 Nobel Prizes – and over 50 per
cent of these have been in the biosciences and medicine.
Today, the UK’s
biotechnology sector has grown to become the largest in
Europe, and second only to the USA globally; nearly four
hundred UK businesses depend on biotechnology, employing
18,700 people, and with revenue in 2001 of over £1.8
billion (Sainsbury 2002). Fifteen out of the world’s
top 75 medicines were discovered and developed in Britain
and now UK companies account for 62 per cent of the products
in late stage clinical trials in Europe. This opens the
possibility of eroding our legacy of massive health inequality.
Over the last fifty years the health gap between the better
off and the worst off has widened, not narrowed –
and there remains today a very strong correlation between
life expectancy and deprivation. A child born this year
in Manchester will live nearly ten years less than a child
born in other parts of England.
The impact of new medical science will of course be mitigated
by the ‘personal’ nature of many diseases. ‘Lifestyle’
diseases now dominate our health outcomes; 50 per cent of
mortality is thought to be linked to behavioural factors,
and wealthier groups in society appear to be better able
to take action to improve their life outcomes. Nor can the
left be exclusively concerned with the domestic agenda.
Abroad, HIV/AIDS, with conflict, is the greatest systemic
threat to development in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is reversing
decades of gains
made in development. Amongst the countries in Southern Africa
are some of the most advanced epidemics, with infection
rates from 10 to 38 per cent of the adult population. Life
expectancy is dropping and is projected to fall further,
in some countries by twenty years or more. Infant mortality
and maternal mortality are rising, and there is now a generation
of 11 million AIDS orphans. The HIV/AIDS epidemic is projected
to cut economic growth in Southern Africa by 0.3-0.4 per
cent annually. Abroad, our challenge is to persuade the
international community to commit the resources to control
the epidemic. Annual expenditure on HIV/AIDS needs to reach
between US$7 and US$10 billion by 2005 to stand any chance
of successfully combating the epidemic.
The preservation
of peace
Item three on the left’s agenda for the science age
must be the preservation of security – the challenge
of ensuring that science is not exploited in a way that
undermines the advances that we have nurtured so carefully.
The US Democratic Party primaries well illustrate the political
necessity of being tough on security. We must do the same
– but clear in the knowledge that peace at home will
only come when on the global stage we organise markets and
institutions not just to trade, but to build new foundations
of trust.
It has to be said
that the prospects for controlling the proliferation of
dangerous technologies are not auspicious. In the last two
decades the world’s community of 200 nations has changed
fundamentally. There is good news. Democracy has spread:
since 1980, 81 nations have taken significant steps towards
democracy and 33 military regimes have been replaced by
civilian governments; 140 nations now hold multi-party elections
– the highest ever – and 64% of the world’s
population now live in free or ‘partly free’
countries.
The ‘bi-polar’ cold war has ended, inter-state
peace has grown, and the global arms market has, since the
late 1980s, shrunk by over 50%; this has left the US as
the pre-eminent military power, with a defence budget accounting
for some 37% of the globe’s annual $750BN military
spend – over nine times the
size of that of the UK.
The UK is of course unlikely to be at risk from conventional
attack, but by 2030 we may be within range of missiles from
‘proliferating states’, and, according to the
MoD: ‘Terrorist acts … will likely remain the
greatest threat to the security of the UK mainland’
(MOD 2001). The end of the Cold War has helped release demands
for greater autonomy in many nations, triggering terrorism
and ethnic conflict. Now, in the post-Cold War era, war
is increasingly concentrated within states rather than between
them (54 of the 57 conflicts since 1990 have been inside
states, not between states); this is fostering a new and
inextricable relationship
between failing states and international criminal networks,
which supports proliferation. And of course these dangerous
friends are not only a threat to our conventional understanding
of peace; they also threaten us through their support for
crime in our communities.
Over the next
18 years, therefore, most security analysts agree that disaffected
states, terrorists and organised criminals are expected
to take advantage of advances in IT and technology to develop
their resources and alliances. Weapons of mass destruction
and small arms may proliferate. Some states will continue
to pursue nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and missile
systems – and the likelihood of terrorist and criminal
groups having access to such weapons will increase (CIA
2000). Russia, China, North Korea and possibly Iran and
Iraq will all continue to maintain or acquire intercontinental
ballistic missiles. Less developed nations or non-state
actors will be more likely to seek sub-conventional technologies,
ranging from
ballistic missiles to terrorist bombs to computer viruses,
as ‘asymmetric’ tactics to side-step NATO’s
traditional advantages (MOD 2001).
Transnational
organised crime has a greater share of global GDP than the
UK; its turnover makes global organised crime the fourth
largest force in the global economy. The international drugs
trade is now worth $200-300 billion and alien trafficking
$7billion. Both are expected to grow, and criminal organisations
are likely to become more sophisticated and better organised,
forming loose alliances, subverting leaders of unstable
or weak states, and ‘insulating themselves into troubled
banks and businesses’. This has a huge
impact on Britain. Ninety per cent of UK heroin comes from
Afghanistan. Ninety per cent of cocaine comes from Columbia.
Fifty-eight per cent of asylum seekers come from failing
states.
Yet it is on the global stage that the link between strong
institutions built on progressive values and the safe exploitation
of science has the closest links. But the agenda of tasks
for market reform and institution building is gigantic.
Our global governance institutions are still rooted in the
world of 1946 yet confront new transnational problems –
economic volatility, migration, competition for scarce resources,
humanitarian and environmental crises, terrorism, crime,
cyber threats and weapons proliferation. Our global approach
to combating international criminal networks and failing
states is insufficient and fragmented. We need stronger
international frameworks for conflict prevention and intervention,
and tackling criminal networks across all issues.
Today the UK spends
a lot on aid and military capability. But we spend little
outside the UK on conflict prevention (£119 million),
tackling terrorism (£132 million), drugs (£15.1
million) and organised crime (£28.5 million) (Prime
Minister’s Strategy Unit 2003). We are not aligned
with the US on many global initiatives such as Kyoto, the
International Criminal Court and strengthening the WTO.
And, on the other hand, the EU, which can be a tool for
good global governance, is currently not up to the task.
And worse still, we are not organised effectively to tackle
the roots of the injustice that so often feed terrorism
and war. Today, although 600 million
children in developing countries live in grinding poverty,
150 million children are malnourished, and 30,000 children
face death each day from diseases we could prevent, aid
flows to the least developed countries are falling. Aid
per capita in least developed countries has fallen from
around $33 in the early 1980s to under $20 per capita today,
and our efforts to effect international fair trade are foundering
after the collapse of the Doha round of trade talks.
Conclusion
This then is the
left’s agenda for science: an agenda for reshaping
the institutions – public and private – that
shape the direction of science and harvest its fruits. Yet,
the final point is about the nature and speed of change,
and here we must revert to some of the historians with whom
we started this article. What stands out from the history
of science is the importance of integration.
Once upon a time the ‘heroic’ school of invention
held that progress was driven by the one-off acts of genius.
Now we understand that technologically driven change is
cumulative. Now we understand that ‘all other things
being equal, technology develops fastest in large productive
regions with large human populations, many potential investors
and many competing societies’ (Diamond 1997, p261).
Diffusion of invention is potentially more important than
the original invention, because of the ‘autocatalytic
process’, and the potential for recombination of innovation.
The explosion of printing in medieval Europe was made possible
by the combination of some six – not one – technological
advances. James Watt’s steam engine of 1769 built
on at least a century of forerunners in England, France
and Holland. Edison’s light bulb of 1879 improved
on many others patented between 1841 and 1878.
Today, the global
economy is more integrated than ever. Global firms and indeed
the global science community do have within their power
the ability to transfer, transfuse and integrate the best
ideas wherever they originate. It took but thirty months
for all major semi-conductor innovations to spread throughout
Europe, the US and Japan (Lewis & Harris 1992).
We have doubtless felt that change was speeding up for many,
many centuries. Yet the speed of change may go through another
step change in the next eighteen years. If we lose office
– or direction – the advances of science could
almost certainly deliver a new era of the most fundamental
inequality. An era in which the new wealth created is held
in the hands of the few, in which new medicine is available
only to the rich, and in which fear and threat proliferate.
But if we get it right, we will deliver not just new possibilities
but new possibilities for all.
The key will be to retain our vision and our confidence
in the potential of the future and to remember that as,
Bevan said, the risk we run is not that we offer the country
too much vitality, but too little.
This article draws extensively on Liam Byrne, Britain in
2020, Forethought 2003; and the analysis presented in Strategic
Audit: Discussion Document, Prime Minister’s Strategy
Unit (2003). Liam Byrne is the cofounder of technology business
EGS Group, and led the Forethought project, Britain in 2020.
He is an Associate Fellow of the Social Market Foundation
and sits on the advisory board of the National Federation
for Teaching Enterprise.
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