Chapter 2: Science, technology, and society

(Executive Summary)

National S&T strategies identify priorities for addressing critical needs. Each nation requires a coherent national framework for actions that directly affect the promotion of science and technology. Such a national S&T strategy should be developed by the government in consultation with scientific, engineering, and medical academies of the country. The strategy should benefit from the experiences of other countries, and it should spell out the government's commitments to funding, standards of excellence, openness to innovation, dissemination of knowledge, regional consortia and networks, private-public interactions, and entry into partnerships with others - locally, regionally, and globally.

Every nation should develop an S&T strategy that specifies the national priorities for research and development and spells out national funding commitments.
National governments should develop national strategies for science and technology in full consultation with the country's science, engineering, and medical academies, its professional societies, and the industrial sector.
The national strategies should include support for basic science and recognize the need for high-level training to develop, as much as possible, national competence in selected frontier areas of science and technology that are most suitable for sustainable economic development and social well-being.
National funding commitments for science and technology should rise to at least 1 percent - preferably 1.5 percent - of Gross Domestic Product for each developing nation, and should be disbursed using a merit-based approach.

Independent scientific advice improves decisionmaking for public policies. The effectiveness of government programs can be greatly increased if they are subject to independent review by scientific and engineering experts - honest brokers who bridge the gap between what is technically possible and politically achievable in areas such as agriculture, education, energy, environment, and health. Each country therefore needs to create open and reliable mechanisms for providing impartial scientific and technological advice to government policymakers.

Each national government should establish trusted indigenous mechanisms for obtaining advice on scientific and technological questions related to policies, programs, and international negotiations.
Each nation involved in the development, production, or use of new technologies, such as those deriving from biotechnology, should have the means to assess and manage their benefits and risks. Governments should therefore ensure that indigenous S&T capacities are in place (with international inputs when necessary) not only for effective adoption of a new technology, but also for help in implementing public-health, human-safety, and environmental guidelines or regulations that address potential side-effects of the new technology. The possibility of long-term effects should be kept in mind when setting up such systems, which must remain fully adaptable to rapid advances in scientific and engineering knowledge.
The coordination of such efforts among nations to permit the sharing of experience and the standardization of some types of risk assessment is highly desirable.
The public requires dissemination of new knowledge for addressing critical issues. Through the global system that the S&T community is creating on the Internet, local investigators can stay up to date on, and participate in, cutting-edge research. And because these indigenous professionals generally understand their nation's culture and can easily communicate with its people, they are uniquely placed to be disseminators of advanced knowledge and know-how to other critical local actors, ultimately increasing the likelihood that new technologies will be well adapted to that society's needs and cultures. Any nation without such a core of local scientists and technologists will be at a severe disadvantage.
With the help of the S&T communities, each national and local government should encourage innovation in disseminating the results of publicly funded research and in turning them into new products and services that address local needs.
Each nation's media should assume major responsibility for educating the public in S&T-related issues.
A wide array of communications technologies - print, television, radio, cellular telephone, World Wide Web, the Internet, among others - should be utilized in disseminating to the public the results and public policy implications of publicly or privately funded research that addresses national or local needs.