Program on Science, Technology, and Global Development

The last two centuries have seen staggering advances of technology in fields such as  communications, computation, transportation, materials, power, agriculture, medicine, and a host of others that are important to human well being.  The advance of technology has been the primary source, more generally, of the vast increases in productivity and per capita incomes that many countries have experienced.  But the advances in technology has been highly uneven, both across areas of human needs, and across groups of people.  Thus there has been little advance in know-how and practice employed in primary and secondary education. Advances in know-how in public health and medicine have largely been concentrated on diseases of affluent countries. In some of Africa living standards are now no higher than they were a century ago, and in many ways human life is more grim.  Further, a number of the widely used modern technologies are straining severely the physical and biological environments that support modern human life.

The Program on Science, Technology, and Global Development is dedicated to study of the processes of technological change, and of the advance of the scientific knowledge that underlies many modern technologies, in order to gain a better understanding, both of the factors that have led to such amazing progress in certain areas, and of the reasons why that progress has been so uneven. Our belief is that better understanding in itself can improve significantly the policymaking processes bearing on the issues. But the program is dedicated, as well, to trying to inform directly the policymaking processes in key areas.

Scholars connected to the program are joined with a group of European scholars in a study of the uneven evolution of medical know-how. Clearly differences in perceived markets have played a role, as have the resources coming from various public programs. However, there also are major differences across kinds of human illnesses and the extent to which the standard strategies of biomedical research have been able to make progress. Thus, we now can effectively cure childhood leukemias, and testicular cancers, but we have made only limited progress on prostate and breast cancers. We are centrally interested in the reasons for these differences, and more generally, in why certain fields of science and technology seem so much more difficult to advance than others.

During this coming year, work along the lines just described will branch out in two directions. One will continue the focus within medicine, but have a particular orientation to the development of vaccines. The other will involve a broadening of focus to consider a number of different areas of practice, from certain fields of engineering, to educational practice, to business methods, to environmental policymaking, and explore in each the extent to which advances in scientific understanding achieved over the last half-century have permitted advances in practice. The project is intended as a beginning of a study in depth of the reasons why scientific understanding has improved so greatly in certain areas, but not in others.

Inquiry into the processes of technological and scientific advance leads rather directly into consideration of the institutions involved, as well as the public policies that shape and are shaped by the institutional division of labor. In recent years the term “innovation systems” has come to be used to describe this complex of institutions.

Over the last year the program supported two conferences, one concerned with innovation systems bearing on pharmaceuticals, and the other with both agriculture and pharmaceuticals, with a focus on biotech. The issues explored ranged from the changing roles of public research and of private firms in these areas, to the often high social costs of strong patents and the possibility for reducing the importance of patents in these areas, to the possible desirability of a larger role for public R and D funding. The possibility of making greater use of a prize system also was considered, particularly in the context of African agriculture, but also more generally.

In the near future, the program will support a variety of activities concerned with this class of questions. Some of the orientation will be toward the situation and the problems in advanced industrial nations. However, an important component of the work will be concerned with problems for poor countries.

This year, after an extended period of discussion and fund gathering, the program will launch a major new project concerned with the processes through which countries significantly behind the frontier have in the past gained access to the scientific and technological know-how they have needed to master in order to catch up, and the processes and vehicles that are available to such countries in the contemporary world. The Columbia program has as partners in this venture groups of scholars at the Science Policy Research Unit in the United Kingdom, at Hitosubashi University in Japan, and École Polytechnique in France. While scholars at Columbia and these host institutions will be active in the research, our intention is that the bulk of the research will be done by individuals and groups of scholars in developing countries, with the host institutions providing a forum for regular meetings of the involved researchers.

There are several important things that differentiate the current context from the past. First, both business and finance operations are increasingly global in scope, and at the same time the scientific communities of different parts of the world are better connected. Second, international treaties have tightened up the constraints on protection and subsidy of infant industry, and have strengthened the ability of firms in developed countries to protect their intellectual property rights in developing countries. As a result, the processes involved in catch-up in the twenty-first century probably will be somewhat different from the processes of successful catch-up in the twentieth century. We are very interested in mapping out the routes that have been closed, and the ones that have been opened.

Both the particular actors who will be involved in the project, and the subjects that will be given particular attention, are still taking shape. However, already three topics are attracting particular attention. One is the changing role of international corporations, and the pattern of interaction between international companies and indigenous ones. A second is the role of public research capabilities at universities and public laboratories in the catch-up process, and the extent to which these institutions are becoming increasingly important, both because of the greater importance today of scientific knowledge underpinning technologies, and because by and large government R&D support is relatively unhindered by current international trade treaties. A third topic is the complex set of issues associated with the tightening of national and international patent regimes under TRIPs.

July 20, 2004

Richard Nelson
Director, Program on Science, Technology, and Global Development
Tel : 212-854-8720
rrn2@columbia.edu
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/sipa/RESEARCH/bios/rrn2.html