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Talk by Academy President Bruce Alberts on Science for African Development

Substantive Session of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations

Geneva, Switzerland
July 17, 2001

In the brief time available for this presentation, I want to make four main points. I shall begin with something on which we can agree and end with a point from one of Africa's leaders that is likely to fuel the debates at this meeting.

1) The first point is that science and technology are advancing at an ever-increasing rate. This is to be expected because new knowledge is constructed by combining elements of old knowledge that are generated in all parts of the world often in unexpected ways and each new discovery provides better tools to produce the next discovery. We can therefore be confident that, while their nature can not be predicted, the scientific and technological advances of the 21st century will be even more phenomenal than those we have witnessed in the past 100 years.

As one example, we are just at the beginning of a massive computer-telecommunications revolution. Over the next decade, we know that the available bandwidth will greatly increase, while costs will drop dramatically. We therefore need to plan for a very different world, one in which every village in Africa and the world can in principle be connected to the Internet using solar power and satellites where necessary. The price of information transmission will drop more rapidly in the 21st century than did the price of transportation in the 20th century.

Even with technologies available today, there are many fascinating experiments under way to explore the effects that these new communication tools can have on education and development. The next few slides show photographs of a rural village in India, not different from many other villages in the developing world. But in this village there is a computer room, connected by wireless Internet to a service center run by the M.S. Swaminathan Foundation in Chennai. This "information village" project, and others like it, have successfully relied on women from the village itself to provide daily weather and market prices, as well as agricultural and health information, to all the inhabitants. There are more than 30 such experiments under way today in India alone. As scientists, we need to study and learn from these experiments so as to make a science out of connecting the world to knowledge resources. With the technology moving so fast, it is critical to "learn by doing" in this way, so that we learn how to make the next wave of the technology even more useful for productive and sustainable economic development.

2) My second point is a very different one. Although generally invisible to political structures, there is a unique culture that is shared by scientists around the world. This culture is based on universal values that have been essential for building our scientific foundation of knowledge. On my list, these values are:

Honesty, generosity, and a respect for evidence with openness to ideas and opinions irrespective of their source.

Because we share these values and because good science in China, India, or Iran is not different from good science in the United States or Switzerland scientists can easily communicate across political boundaries, and we have formed strong international networks based on personal trust.

In the last few years, these scientist-to-scientist networks have been enormously strengthened by the Internet and the World Wide Web. Not only can we communicate instantaneously at very low cost, but there has been a strong international movement to exploit the Web to greatly expand the quantity and quality of the free knowledge resources available for science and scientists. One example is the on-line abstracts of the world's biomedical literature produced by the US National Library of Medicine previously sold, but since 1997 available free to anyone with an Internet connection at the PubMed Web site. Another example is the Web site of my Academy, now with more than 2,000 free reports on science and science policy on topics that range from global climate change to the "lost crops" of Africa. Important other examples are the more than 1000 scientific journals, including our own journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that are being made available free in their electronic form to developing nations.

There is much more that scientists can do in this regard, and a great willingness to do it. In these efforts, we can be guided in part by several new organizations designed to represent the world's scientists. One of these is the InterAcademy Panel on International Issues (IAP), with its headquarters at the Third World Academy of Sciences in Trieste. This 5-year old organization of science academies (or their equivalent) from more than 70 nations currently is focused on promoting sustainability science, and on building up science institutions in Africa.

An even newer effort is the InterAcademy Council (IAC), recently founded in the Netherlands by the IAP, with a governing board composed of 15 science academy presidents from all continents. This new organization, founded in consultation with Secretary General Kofi Annan, has been designed to provide unbiased science advice to international organizations like the UN, the World Bank, and the specialized agencies. Our first study is just beginning, on promoting science and technology capacities and institutions in every nation, to prepare them for the 21st century.

3) My third point is central to the agenda of this meeting. Every region of the world, including every nation in Africa, needs ready access to both the knowledge that has been gained from science, and the ability to use science's intellectual resources and its methodologies.

A few years ago, I spent a great deal of time on a major study of the international agricultural research system (the CGIAR). The soils in Africa are degrading and its population is increasing, leading to a prediction of major, worsening food shortages by the end of this decade. There is an urgent need for wise decision-making, based on the highest-quality science, on how to best use Africa's limited natural resources its soil, water, energy, and materials at both the national and village levels. Much of the science and technology that will be needed is already known somewhere in Africa and the world, but there is a great urgency in sharing this knowledge so that it can be applied much more effectively. At the same time, because of our new communications abilities, we also have a great opportunity to connect the scientists and engineers throughout the world to specific African problems so as to stimulate the creation of new knowledge and technologies of special applicability to Africa. For example, most young American scientists have no idea of how their skills might be applied to African challenges, even though I know that many would like to contribute if they could.

In this growing partnership between African scientists and those around the world, there is an urgent need to re-examine the institutions and processes for adapting science for use in different parts of Africa. Whether the applicable knowledge already exists in Africa or outside the region, the transmission belts are frayed. Old models of transferring scientific knowledge are fundamentally outmoded, yet we live with an institutional legacy that keeps us from rapidly reaping the harvest of recent decades of research in both Africa and its partners in other parts of the world. We need to think afresh about how international science is organized to focus on the problems of the poorest.

4) My fourth and last point is perhaps the most controversial. Every country, including each in Africa, needs both its own skilled scientists and the strong institutions required to mobilize and support them. The vast majority of these scientists should be local people, who understand their nation's culture, can communicate freely with its peoples, and can serve its unique needs. Countries at different stages of development will need different types of scientific and technical expertise, and would be expected to provide different levels of investment in science. But even the poorest nations must have scientists who are deeply involved in education at all levels, so as to produce the human capital on which so much of development depends. And these nations must also have enough talented individuals and effective institutions in areas such as agriculture, environment, and health to allow them to choose wisely from the increasingly vast store of the world's scientific and technical knowledge to meet local needs adapting what is known to best fit local cultures and languages.

Through the global knowledge system that scientists are creating on the Internet, local scientists become the crucial adaptors who are required to connect the needs of ordinary people to the intellectual resources available to meet these needs. Any country without such a core of scientists and technologists can expect to be completely cut off from the invaluable knowledge and know how of the world's scientific community. This situation becomes increasingly tragic and counterproductive as our new communications networks begin to empower each individual scientist for the first time with the means to close the gap between the knowledge resources available in industrialized and developing nations.

Last but not least, each country needs to help its scientists create an honest and effective mechanism for providing impartial, scientific and technical advice to governments and policymakers. Without such honest brokers created by a science culture, governments are unlikely to be able to commit to the appropriate long-range investments and policies in health, agriculture, education, energy, and environment that will be needed for sustainable economic development. In the words of Mamphela Ramphele, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, who can speak about Africa with great authority:

"The insights, methods, and ways of thinking attendant on scientific inquiry hold, I believe, the key to personal and national development in much of the developing world. ... The characterization of science as 'Western' by some social scientists is unfortunate: It serves to delegitimize scientific inquiry and the application of science to everyday problems. It finds resonance among elites in the developing world who see the entrenchment of a science culture as a threat to their power over the poor and marginal."

Today, I ask you, as representatives of the governments of the world, to join in a new partnership that captures the spirit of the 21st century: with honesty about our global issues and the challenges we face; with generosity of time and commitment to meet the needs of the poor and especially the poorest; and with an open-mind about the steps we can take to solve those challenges. We can no longer afford to tolerate the walls that keep policymakers and scientists from speaking to each other effectively. African or non-African, we can use occasions such as this to move our dialogue forward, in a larger complex of emerging institutions, actions, and initiatives that expresses our commitment to a new Africa.

Thank you.