The U.S. can no longer think of itself as the most technologically advanced country, so new modes of operation are required to remain competitive, Arden Bement, director of the National Science Foundation, told an audience at the UC Davis Conference Center on March 5.

Bement was speaking at the first in a series of colloquia sponsored by Chancellor Linda Katehi. During a day-long visit to UC Davis, Bement toured the MIND Institute and the NSF-funded Center for Biophotonics Science and Technology in Sacramento, and met with the Council of Deans and Vice Chancellors, chairs of graduate groups and of NSF-funded graduate programs, and researchers leading genomics projects supported by the foundation.

“I’m very impressed with what the MIND Institute has been able to accomplish in a relatively short time, how many potential breakthroughs they’ve been able to achieve,” Bement said. “The Biophotonics Institute I’ve been familiar with for some time because it’s a science and technology center that we’re very proud of. To be able to see the laboratories and talk to some of the students was very rewarding.”

In her introduction, Katehi praised Bement’s achievements in raising the foundation’s budget to $6 billion, and his “heroic” role in developing and promoting the American Competitiveness Initiative, leading to the 2006 America Competes Act, which increased funding for science and technology education and training.

“Universities are amazing sources of inspiration, because universities give their students the resources to launch bold ideas, and most essentially the freedom to try and fail,” Bement said.

Innovation, defined as the process of turning ideas into things, is an old American virtue, with Benjamin Franklin as its most enduring example, Bement said.

But new modes of operation are now required, he noted.

This means greater collaboration between disciplines and between nations, better preparation of school graduates who are capable in science and math as well as entrepreneurial, and greater involvement between scientists and policy makers.

U.S. science investment down

There is a growing group of nations that are highly accomplished in science and technology, Bement said, and more investment than ever in science and technology worldwide, while the U.S. share is in relative decline.

Federal research and development spending stands at about $150 billion per year, or about $500 for every American. Taxpayers legitimately ask, “what am I getting for my $500?” he said. A good scientist wants to show a convincing value for that investment, he said, to justify federal support. But how do we choose priorities?

Some priorities are a result of necessity: for example, there is a strong national need to move away from oil and coal to clean energy systems. Training a new generation of scientists in clean energy is a priority for the foundation, he said. Toward this, the NSF has collaborated with the Department of Energy to create a research program that by 2015 will train 8,500 scientists and engineers in clean energy.

The traditional, linear model of technology transfer — “academy proposes, industry disposes” — is no longer adequate for the pace of research, Bement said. Instead, he called for local “innovation ecosystems” with feedback loops, information exchange and problem solving between industry, academia and government.

“It’s clear that UC Davis has a lot of experience in know-how in what it takes to cultivate this ecosystem,” Bement said, citing the Center for Biophotonics as an example.

“The links to industry, the experience they’ve gained in working with new startups, the fact that they are moving forward a new technology — applications of biophysics to medicine — that has already achieved a number of important innovations that will lead to new industry, will reflect on the investment that NSF has made at UC Davis, the strong leadership at the center and the investment that UC Davis has made at the center,” Bement said.

“Not all of our innovations are widgets and rockets,” Bement said. In the past decade, most job growth now comes from “intangibles”: human capital, produced by the education system, and intellectual capital such as accumulated scientific knowledge, business and financial know-how and artistic achievement, Bement said, citing Businessweek economist Michael Mandel.

Better science education at all levels is a high priority for the NSF, Bement said, including increasing the number of teachers in K-12 schools with a solid grounding in math and science.

“Science and technology play a role in medicine, play a role in law, play a role in business. So almost all the professional fields benefit from a background in science, technology and mathematics,” he said.

Stimulus funding

To help create a 21st century workforce, the foundation aims to triple the number of graduate research fellowships to 3,000 by 2013 and create more CAREER grants to support young investigators. That is how the foundation used part of its funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Bement estimated that ARRA stimulus funds spent by the foundation created one direct job for every $60,000, almost half the cost of jobs in construction. And each of those science jobs creates two or three service jobs as well.

Furthermore, there’s a value to supporting bright people at an early stage in their careers. Some of them go on to become billionaires, such as Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who was supported by an NSF fellowship during the early stages of his work on applying Markov chain mathematics to data mining.

At the same time, the foundation will continue to support the best science at the frontiers of discovery, Bement said. The foundation uses the term “transformative research” to describe science and engineering endeavors that revolutionize research thinking, create new fields, disrupt existing theories and perspectives and open new markets, Bement said. Supporting transformative research is critical to NSF’s mission and mandate and to America’s success, he said.

The dilemma is how to know that a given approach is transformative before the research is completed. That’s part of a wider question about science and policy: How to make decisions on issues like climate change, health care, fisheries and water resources in the face of scientific uncertainty and rampant disagreement?

“Nations are capable of making great commitments to meet great challenges, such as energy, environment and economic sustainability,” he said.

‘Something amazing is afoot’

Meeting those challenges requires a more effective collaboration between policy makers, scientists and the public than currently exists.

Yet, “something amazing is afoot,” Bement said, from the computer user groups of the late 20th century to the growth of social networking today.

Scientific consensus can take much longer to achieve than policy consensus, yet for scientists to influence policy those timescales must converge. With a sufficiently sound foundation of basic knowledge we can anticipate possible futures and put a range of options on the table for policy makers to consider, Bement said.

The role of scientists is to act as the objective “honest broker” in laying out those options, he said.