Pioneering Research : A Risk Worth Taking

Rating:
Summary: Politics of Scientific Research: A Must Read!
Review: Excerpt: To summarize my story therefore: The greatest long-term risks facing humanity will not come from such apocalyptic threats as terrible weapons of mass destruction, prolonged global war, devastating disease or famine, or extinction by a huge wayward meteor. Rather they will come from the debilitating attrition caused by the rising tides of bureaucracy and control. These trends are steadily strangling human ingenuity and undermining our very ability to cope.
The good news is that we can do something about these problems, and in principle, they should not be too difficult to solve. However, deeply entrenched attitudes can be a formidable barrier. Our major problem is that at the margin where greatness lies bureaucracy is strangling scientific creativity. Everything we value came out of the blue, out of the greatness of pioneering scientists and engineers. Such scientists as the Einsteins, driven solely by their restless spirits of enquiry, laid the foundations for a vast series of such unforeseen developments as the transistor and integrated circuitry, nuclear power, lasers and optoelectronics, and computers that today dominate everyday life. It is difficult to imagine life without them. Their work was not encouraged or stimulated. Revolutionary discoveries once emerged in the natural course of things. Human ingenuity does not need stimulating; we merely have to ensure that it is not being routinely suppressed. That vital condition was broadly satisfied from about the Renaissance until the 1970s, when the current obsessions with optimization and efficiency began. Our most urgent need, therefore, is to make the modest changes that will allow it to be satisfied once again.