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Three Rules Proposed For Technological Fixes Print E-mail
SciMed - Horizons
TS-Si News Service   
Tuesday, 23 December 2008 16:00
What are the rules?Tempe, AZ, USA. Is it reasonable to expect that social problems will yield to the fruits of scientific research and technological innovation? While technology can do many great things, it is often over sold as panacea for a host of social ills. Can we really apply technology to everything?
 
Historian Daniel Sarewitz and economist Richard Nelson argue in Nature that we can't and that we need to find ways of working out which problems to invest time and money on, and which are not ripe for a technological solution. A better use of technology can be gained if those who guide technology policy, and thus investment, are clear about how to apply it and know what to expect from their efforts.
 
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Sarewitz (Arizona State University - ASU) and Nelson (Columbia University) describe three rules that can help technology and science policy makers become smarter about where to apply technological fixes and what to expect as a result.
 
"These three rules can provide policy makers more clues about the appropriate types of investments and appropriate expectations for the outcomes of those investments," said Sarewitz, a professor of science and society and co-director of the ASU Consortium for Science and Policy Outcomes (CSPO).
 
"They will help us be smarter about identifying situations where we can expect investments in R&D (research & development) to lead to rapid progress on social problems," Sarewitz added. "It also will help in distinguishing such situations from those where more R&D is unlikely to make much of a short- or medium-term contribution."
 
In Three Rules for Technological Fixes, Sarewitz and Nelson use literacy education and disease prevention as contrasting examples of the complexity of applying technology in today's society. Both are seen as important for society, and both are the subjects of much research. But the existence of vaccines has allowed for great progress in disease prevention, whereas no comparably effective technology or methods exists for teaching children to read.
  • Rule Number One: Technology must largely embody the cause-effect relationship connecting problem to solution.

    For example, vaccines work with great reliability because they address almost all of the important variables necessary for preventing the disease. So, the application of vaccines is routinely done with great success despite "a notoriously dysfunctional health care system in the U.S."
     
  • Rule Number Two: The effects of the technological fix must be assessable using relatively unambiguous or uncontroversial criteria.

    That is, the benefits of the fix must be obvious to all. "Such clarity (in benefit) allows policy and operational coordination to emerge among diverse actors and institutions, ranging from doctors and parents to school districts, insurance companies, vaccine manufacturers and regulatory bodies," Sarewitz and Nelson state.

    From their earliest use, vaccines have provoked opposition on moral and practical grounds, a trend that continues today. But opposition to vaccines has not stemmed the long-term advance of vaccine technology. This is in part because their effectiveness is hard to argue against, and because continual improvement has tended to answer objections about efficacy and risk.

    This success is in stark contrast to the teaching of reading (education) "for which no particular method or theory has been able to achieve long-term or widespread dominance, and for which compelling evidence of improved efficacy even over timescales of a century is lacking," they state — despite the many methods and technologies that have been developed to improve literacy.
     
  • Rule Number Three: Research & Development (R&D) is most likely to contribute decisively to solving a social problem when it focuses on improving a standardized technical core that already exists.

    In other words, science is at its best when it improves upon a scientific base (like vaccine technology) than elucidating theoretical foundations, causes or dynamics of a problem (like how people do or do not learn).

    "For vaccination, the standardized core, the vaccine — first developed more than two centuries ago not through basic research but through empiricism guided by folk wisdom — remains the fulcrum on which cumulative learning and improved practice can be leveraged," they add.

    Sarewitz and Nelson state that when knowledge is not largely embodied in an effective technology, but must be applied to practice, through training, incentives, organizational structures or public policies, the difficulty of improving outcomes is greatly amplified.
In summary, Sarewitz says: "When technologies meet our three rules, they are particularly powerful because they are better able to overcome the political and organizational obstacles that often make social progress so frustratingly slow."
 
Sarewitz said that in addition to these three rules, it is important for policy makers to know when to be skeptical about the social value of technology.
 
When the three rules are not met, "R&D programs aimed at solving particular social problems should neither be expected to succeed, nor be advertised as having much promise of succeeding in the short or medium term," he said. "Rather, they should be understood and described as creating fundamental knowledge and the exploration of new approaches with success possible only over the long term and with a significant chance of failure."
 
"In a world of limited resources, the trick is to distinguish problems that are amenable to technological fixes from those that are not," he added.
Authors[A1] Daniel Sarewitz is co-director of the ASU Consortium for Science and Policy Outcomes (CSPO), and Professor of Science and Society, at Arizona State University (ASU).

[A2] Richard Nelson is George Blumenthal Professor of International and Public Affairs Emeritus at Columbia University, New York 10027, USA, and visiting professor at the University of Manchester Business School.
CitationThree rules for technological fixes. Daniel Sarewitz1 & Richard Nelson. Nature 456: 871-872. doi: 10.1038 / 456871a

Editor's Summary (Nature)

Can we expect all of society's problems to yield to the fruits of scientific research and technological innovation? Historian Daniel Sarewitz and economist Richard Nelson say that we can't, and that we need to find ways of working out which problems to invest time and money on, and which are not ripe for a technological solution.

Abstract

Not all problems will yield to technology. Deciding which will and which won't should be central to setting innovation policy, say Daniel Sarewitz and Richard Nelson.

For some social problems, scientific research and technological innovation deliver significant progress, whereas for others, such activities lead to little if any improvement. Remarkable advances have been made in disease reduction through vaccination efforts, for example.
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Last Updated on Tuesday, 23 December 2008 09:24