Amersham Biosciences and Science Annual Award for Young Scientists

Thank you very much for inviting me to speak today. These awards sponsored by Amersham Biosciences and Science magazine are an excellent way to encourage talented young scientists, and to create more visibility for science as an exciting and fulfilling career choice.

On Monday evening I had the pleasure of dining at the residence of the Swedish Ambassador with recipients of this year's Nobel Prizes and other guests. President Jimmy Carter was there, along with the other six American laureates in physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics. After dinner, the guests submitted questions to the laureates, who of course responded eloquently.

One question asked about the conditions required to attract young people into research careers. The respondent answered immediately with one word: "Money," and then went on to make it clear that the issue was larger than one of personal gain.

Since an important part of my job in Washington is to advise the President and other White House policy makers on strategies for sustaining America's leadership in science, I too have thought about this question. Today I would like to reflect on my own personal experience in science, and add some comments on that eloquent one word solution to everything.

When people ask me what I do, my first impulse is to say that I am a physicist. That has been my self-image for as long as I can remember, even before I knew that what I wanted to be in life was called by the name "physicist." I know that I am very fortunate in this respect. I never had to worry about what I should do with my life. Many, but by no means all of my scientist friends had a similar experience. From an early age they were fascinated by the world of phenomena around them. In my case it was with mechanical things, like the old-fashioned construction toys called "Erector Set," or "Tinkertoys," now displaced by "Lego's." I took things apart and put them back together, and was fascinated by the inner logic of things that worked.

I did not at that time take much interest in biology. For one thing, my memory for the arbitrary names of things was terrible. It still is. What I could remember were relationships. So I became a theoretical physicist, and studied the relationships of things in nature through mathematics. My colleagues and I worked on simple systems because those were the only kind for which the mathematics could be induced to yield up the information that lay hidden in equations. The early computers were more a hindrance than a help in many fields of interest, and we made jokes about their consuming appetite for time and energy. That has all changed in a revolutionary way that I will say more about later.

For reasons that are unclear to me in retrospect, I participated from the beginning of my career in discussions of strategy with my older colleagues. Perhaps it was because I had always read very broadly, so I was aware of the issues of the day, both in the functioning of our little community and in the science we studied together. I had a good liberal education, and could write well, and speak confidently about my work. I took pride in the papers I co-authored with others, and nearly always ended up writing the final version. I rewrote the proposals and the reports, and by virtue of my doing so, often ended up with more responsibility than I wanted.

And so inevitably people asked me to help glue the group together, and represent them to others, and I became first a department chair, then a dean, then a university president before I was forty. Until I became a president, I found it possible to carry on a full research program of my own. But that became more difficult as the responsibilities mounted, and I finally stopped doing original work, but I continued to read deeply in my field, and I still do.

At a certain point, I realized that science entails a wide spectrum of activities. Within a research group, different people take on different tasks -- some do the computing, some the writing, some the theory, some the construction and operation of apparatus. All understand the objective, and speak the same language of science, but each almost instinctively finds the tasks best suited to their interests. I worked at the larger infrastructure needed to perform the research, first within the department, then the school and the university. As I learned more about the machinery of science, and more of it became apparent to me, it grew in scale in my mind until the pieces that seemed important encompassed the entire society, even extending to other nations. I became an administrator out of the same fascination for how things work that drove me toward science in the first place. My job today as advisor and policy director for the world's largest patron of science could be viewed as the logical endpoint of a process that began more than a half century ago in my mother's kitchen, making toys of blocks and string. At each step I thought I was simply doing science. I am one individual doing my part within a global community that is trying to discover how all of nature works, including ourselves and our society, and pass on the knowledge and encourage its use by others for the multitude of uses for which nature-knowledge has proved its potency.

You can see that I have been motivated all my life first by curiosity, and second by the desire to make things work -- "things" including the ill-defined machinery of group interactions, institutions, governments, and cultures. You might think that the value of empirical methods would diminish in situations where human passion dominates, but that is not the case. Effectiveness with people depends crucially on seeing others as they are, not as we imagine them to be. Overcoming our preconceptions about people is the first step to achieving the mutual understanding required for collective action. This is not an easy step to take either in science or in human interactions because our preconceptions are built into the cultural framework, which includes even the language, through which all our ideas are filtered. The questioning habits of good science are of the greatest value for success in human affairs.

What were the conditions necessary to my own delightful journey in science? My first impulsive response would be, not money, but the existence of a community and the means of access to it. I needed others who shared my interest in a certain field, and were as intent on understanding it as I was. I also needed libraries, and computers, and the whole system of publication and communication with world-wide peers. My group needed laboratories and technical support for the intricate machinery of discovery. We all needed jobs that would permit us to spend time, lots of time, on our research. And of course we could not even join the community of science without access to education, and not just any kind of education, but one that offers apprenticeships that could bring us up to the moving edge of ignorance where we could help to push it back.

From this long list of needs, you can see that science is not an act of individuals or even groups of scientists, but an enterprise of the entire society. There must be an agreement within the national culture that we are going to do this thing called science, and that we are going to build this vast infrastructure of education, communication, laboratories, and apparatus, and give up other things to make it work.

Yes, money is required. But money alone will not produce this complex environment, this ecosystem that sustains the growth of science. That is why I felt as much a scientist when I was struggling to build a new sewage plant for the university, or acquiring a new telephone system, or working out a management organization that would remove bottlenecks in an expanding program without creating chaos. Despite their bureaucratic flavor, money, management, planning, accountability, are science words, and the complete scientist understands this and takes them all into account to get the science done.

Since 1950, Americans have won half the Nobel prizes. That has happened because our society believes science is important and has invested heavily in it. There is every indication that it will continue to do so. President Bush asked Congress this year to appropriate the largest budget for science ever, more than $110 billion. That number will increase again next year, despite competing urgent national needs.

I think it's worth it. Science evolves as life has on our planet -- long periods of slow systematic change punctuated by short periods of revolution. One such change occurred early in the 20th century with the discovery of relativity and quantum mechanics, accompanied by a flourishing of technique. Another happened at the time of World War II. Another one is happening now.

We are living today in the middle of a deeply profound change in the tools and sociology of science, and these are creating conditions that open up an entirely new landscape of opportunity for discovery that I call the frontier of complexity. The changes are driven by huge improvements in instrumentation and information technology.

Powerful new techniques allow us now to image, analyze, and manipulate matter at the atomic scale, atom by atom. And astonishing developments in computing and data management permit us to collect, store, visualize, and simulate the vast amounts of information required to describe objects of functional size on the atomic scale. The two capabilities work together to create fields such as molecular biology and nanotechnology. Our current understanding of life processes, and particularly the functioning of proteins and other complex life chemicals, was barely conceivable just a decade ago. This audience is well aware of the new capabilities that have made the "-omics" campaigns possible: genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, cognomics ... And the knowledge produced by these grand efforts promises to change our perception of human health, disease prevention, and therapy. The expansion of capabilities in health science alone justifies the enormous increase requested by President Bush for the National Institutes of Health in the current budget.

The same new capabilities in instrumentation and information technology open new opportunities in almost every field of science. Experiments that explore hugely complex or numerous systems are now conceivable. Applications in astronomy, particle physics, chemistry, materials science, and biology are well known. The social sciences too benefit from the ability to search for patterns in immense and fragmented data bases.

The opportunities are so vast that society is hard pressed to pursue them all. Instrumentation is expensive, and other occupations compete with science for excitement, for service to society, and for the improvement of personal circumstances. More than ever before, science is joined to the intricate machinery of society. How effectively we seize the opportunities now available to us depends on our ability to adjust our collective behavior to rapidly changing conditions. Part of that adjustment requires a larger vision of our roles as scientists.

These awards add a new dimension to your own roles in your professions. My hope is that you will expand into it, and accept a broadening responsibility for creating and sustaining the vast infrastructure upon which all science rests. Please accept my best wishes for success in whatever path you choose to follow, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to make these remarks.