科技政策10问

武夷山

美国亚利桑那州立大学 “科学与社会” 教授Daniel Sarewitz在Issues in Science and Technology杂志2007年第4期发表文章，Does Science Policy Matter？（科技政策重要吗？）。文章说：

科技政策应从关心“花多少钱”转为多问几个为什么。可以问以下10个问题：

1．推动某一具体科技政策的价值观念是什么？

2．谁秉持这样的价值观？

3．该政策欲实现的实际目标是什么？

4．研究与开发产生的信息或产品将付之应用的社会环境与制度环境是什么样的？

5．有什么理由相信，这些环境就能够有效地将研发成果转化为上述实际目标？

6．这一转化的最可能受益者是谁？

7．谁不太可能因这一成果转化而受益？

8．为实现前述目标，还可以有哪些其他路径（其他的研究路线，或科研以外的活动）？

9．选择其他路径的最可能受益者是谁？

10．            谁不太可能因采用其他路径而受益？

博主：对于中国发生的涉及科技决策的许多争论，无论是转基因研究、干细胞研究，还是核电工程、水电工程，我们都问问这10个问题，并试图回答一下，脑子就会清楚不少。

    以下是原文的开头部分（http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-166978683.html）：

It is not only axiomatic but also true that federal science policy is largely played out as federal science budget policy. Science advocacy organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the National Academies, and various disciplinary professional societies carefully monitor the budget process and publish periodic assessments, while issue-focused interest groups such as disease lobbies and environmental organizations focus on agencies and programs of specific relevance to their constituencies. Overall, it is fair to say that marginal budgetary changes are treated by the science and technology (S & T) community as surrogates for the well-being of the science enterprise, while the interested public considers such changes to be surrogates for progress toward particular societal goals (for example, budget increases for cancer research mean more rapid progress toward cures).

In this dominant science policy worldview, yearly budget increases mean that science is doing well, and doing good. When budgets are flat or declining--or even when rates of budget increases are slowing--then science must suffer and so, by extension, must the prospects for humanity. In recent years, this worldview was perhaps most starkly on display in discussions about the National Institutes of Health (NIH), whose budget doubled between 1998 and 2003 as a result of a highly effective lobbying effort, a sympathetic Congress, and a brief period of overall budgetary surplus. During this period, the NIH budget went from $13.6 billion to $27.0 billion, and the NIH share of all civilian federally funded research rose from its already dominant 37% to 48%. Nevertheless, when the fiscal year (FY) 2004 budget debates began, NIH and its advocates in the research community portrayed the situation as one of crisis arising from a sudden decline in the rate of budget increase. Said a representative of the Association of American Medical Colleges: "Two or three years of 2 or 3% increases, and you've pretty much lost what you've gained ... And you've certainly lost the morale of investigators who can't help but be demoralized by trying to compete for funding under those circumstances." In another notable example, the president-elect of the AAAS in 1990 solicited letters from 250 scientists and discovered that many were unhappy because they felt that they did not have enough funding. From this information he inferred an "impoverishment" of basic research even though, as he acknowledged, science funding had been growing steadily.

In this article I will argue that the annual obsession with marginal changes in the R & D budget tells us something important about the internal politics of science, but little, if anything, that's useful about the health of the science enterprise as a whole. In particular, marginal budget changes give almost no information about the capacity of the science enterprise to contribute to the wide array of social goals that justifies society's investment in science. I will return to this point later; first I will focus on the more parochial reality that the annual federal budget numbers for science cannot be understood unless they are placed in a broader political and historical context. A given year's marginal budget increase says as much about the health of the science enterprise as the nutritional value of a single meal says about the health of one's body.

One of the most astonishing aspects of science policy over the past 30 or so years is the consistency of R & D funding levels as a proportion of the discretionary budget (Figure 1). (Discretionary spending is the part of the budget that is subject to annual congressional decisions about spending levels.) Since the mid-1970s, nondefense R & D budgets have constituted between 10 and 12% of total nondefense discretionary spending. Total R & D (defense and non-defense) shows a similar stability at 13 to 14% of the total discretionary budget. This consistency tells us that marginal changes in the R & D budget are tightly coupled to trends in discretionary spending as a whole.

Given the Balkanized manner in which science budgets are determined, such stability at first blush may seem incomprehensible. After all, no capacity exists in the U.S. government to undertake centralized, strategic science policy planning across the gamut of federal R & D agencies and activities. The seat of U.S. science policy in the executive branch is the Office of Science and Technology Policy, whose director is the president's science advisor. The influence of this position has waxed and waned (mostly waned) with time, but it has never been sufficient to exercise significant control over budgetary planning. That control sits with the Office of Management …