NSF director calls for more

NSF director calls for more ‘civic scientists’

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

With an ever-increasing portion of U.S. jobs requiring technical skills, and with increased competition for technological jobs from rapidly developing economies in China and India, the director of the nation’s leading science agency called upon Rice faculty and students to take a greater role in educating the public — particularly schoolchildren — about science and technology.

Arden Bement’s call to action came during the Nov. 9 inaugural lecture of the Civic Scientist Lecture Series, which was presented by the Science and Technology Policy Program at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. Bement, the director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), addressed more than 100 people in Baker Hall’s Doré Commons in a speech titled ”When the Jobs in the Nation Change, So Does the Job of the Scientist.”

JEFF FITLOW

National Science Foundation Director Arden Bement urged a Rice audience to give thought to how they would give back to society.

 
Bement contrasted today’s fast-changing economy with one where a worker could stay in the same job for decades and live out a comfortable retirement. He said jobs today require continual learning, due largely to the pervasiveness of information-age devices that become obsolete very quickly.

”Last year, human beings produced more transistors, and at a lower cost, than they did grains of rice,” Bement said. ”In terms of consumer electronics, in the world today there are more than 2 billion mobile phones, 1.5 billion TV sets, 820 million PCs and

190 million (Nintendo) Game Boys.”

Bement said that as society becomes more technologically intense, the role and responsibility of those highly trained in science and technology also expands. He said scientists today have an obligation to engage the public, both to educate them about the realities of science and to listen to them about what they want and fear from science.

”If you think the job of a civic scientist is to do more talking than listening, think again,” he said, saying scientists must learn to listen ”to what the public thinks about the directions that our science and technology are taking us.”

Bement gave particular attention to the topic of science and math education for elementary school students, urging scientists to do more to excite children about the possibilities of science while they are young. He noted that all NSF grants are judged on two criteria: intellectual merit and how broad an impact the research will have on society. He said scientists sometimes chafe at having to include ”societal impact” criteria in their grant proposals, but he defended the NSF’s use of the criteria, saying it has led to many successful science and math education programs for grade school children.

Bement recalled Jonas Salk’s quote, ”Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors,” and he urged students and faculty in the audience to give thought to how they would give back to society and become civic scientists.

”This does not mean that every single individual must solve some gigantic world problem but rather that each of us should choose a small piece of the big problem and make a difference,” Bement said. ”You may wish to find that piece in sub-Saharan Africa, but you can just as easily find it in Houston or Boston or rural Maine or New Mexico.

”Sometimes, if you change a direction or policy in one community, like (Rice and the Houston Independent School District’s) Model Science Lab, it becomes a model for the rest of the nation and soon it spreads like a vine,” Bement said.