Area of Research: The Scientific Enterprise

This paper first appeared in: Scientific Cooperation, State Conflict: The Role of Scientists in Mitigating International Discord, A. L. de Cerreno and A. Keynan, eds, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (866): 253-258, 1998. Posted with permission.

INTRODUCTION

My task is to reflect on scientific social responsibility with respect to international environmental conflicts. First, I will mention a few cases of historical or prospective conflict relating to environment and resources and then I will offer some tentative conclusions. Adding the notion of resources to that of the environment may unfairly expand and ease my task. After all, humans are territorial animals, and probably the historical majority of conflicts have occurred over land. I will set aside land quarrels, though they continue, for example, between Peru and Ecuador. My cases are cod fish, Antarctica, atmospheric weapons testing, acid deposition, fresh water, and climate change.

CASES

Because war is the least ambiguous and usually the most serious form of conflict, I will begin with a war. My war, the Cod War, is obscure and was not lethal for humans.

The Cod War(s)

Iceland’s only international disputes have concerned fishing rights.¹ Collectively known as the Cod Wars, they involved British fishing vessels violating Iceland’s in-creasing self-declared territorial waters. In 1952 Iceland extended its offshore rights from three to four miles, and in 1958 to twelve. The first real Cod War ensued in 1959, when U.K. Royal Navy frigates steamed to protect, unsuccessfully, British trawlers from being evicted or arrested by Iceland’s tiny Coast Guard.

The dispute was temporarily resolved, only to be followed in 1972 by an extension of the Icelandic claim to 50 miles, which brought more ferocious clashes. British warships, equipped with sophisticated weapons, were several times larger than the Icelandic Coast Guard vessels, each with a single 57-mm gun. Unarmed fishing vessels commissioned by the Icelandic Coast Guard also patrolled during the disputes. The British warships rammed Icelandic Coast Guard vessels and shot over their bows, while the Icelanders used large clippers, like garden shears, to cut the nets of British fishing trawlers, causing the loss of both nets and catches. Iceland broke diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom for a short time, the first NATO rupture of this kind.

On one occasion, when a British frigate confronted an Icelandic gunboat on the high seas, the world’s press may have outnumbered naval personnel. Fortunately, the opposing captains sensed the occasion, and the ensuing exchange was not shots but Biblical quotations delivered broadside by loudspeaker. The journalists awarded victory in the Scriptural battle to the Icelanders. More formal arguments gradually swung international opinion to Iceland’s view, and the nations agreed to a truce in 1976, by which time both nations had announced a new 200-mile exclusive economic zone.

The limit that Iceland first established has since become the standard for international maritime legislation. Thus, the little country with no armed forces had sent its Coast Guard gunships to take on the mighty Royal Navy, and won. The National Museum in Reykjavik still proudly displays some of the clippers. The British suffered a total of more than $2 million in damage to their Navy frigates, and claimed the loss of more than 9,000 fisheries-related jobs. Since 1976, British fishing boats have respected the 200-mile limit, and no new violence has erupted between the two nations.

I offer this example not only as an appealing curiosity, but because it illustrates how conflict may flourish in the absence of reliable scientific information, in this case, with regard to the abundance and distribution of fish. A serious, admirable inter-governmental organization called the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) formed almost 100 years ago to better the collection, analysis, and dissemination of data on fish catches. However, only very recently have techniques for assessing and modeling fish stocks become sufficiently reliable to contribute to dispute resolution. The Cod Wars were partly about territory, but they were also partly about poor information about North Sea fisheries, which contributed to their decline.

Canada and Spain came to the brink of serious conflict over the cod on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland in the early 1990s. Widespread scientific agreement on the fragility of the fish stocks in the region, including the opinion of both Canadian and Spanish experts, helped avoid lethal outcomes. A worldwide Census of Marine Life might lessen conflicts over commercial fisheries as well as promote biodiversity. Biodiversity now finds itself with an international Convention, but uncharted national obligations and resources.

Let me more briefly mention the other cases of environmental and resource conflicts.

Antarctica

Systematic exploration and territorial claims on Antarctica extend back to the turn of the century.² After World War II these claims expanded and threatened to militarize the continent. Meteorology, oceanography, glaciology, and other kinds of environmental research in or near Antarctica figured prominently in the 1957–58 International Geophysical Year, the highly successful 18-month internationally coordinated scientific probing of Earth. The 1959 Antarctic Treaty, negotiated with U.S. and USSR leadership, calls for the continued absence of military activities and the suspension of all territorial claims. For Antarctica, scientific cooperation appears to have eased the way for political cooperation.

Atmospheric Testing

Atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons was a highly visible form of threat behavior during the Cold War. Many reinforcing events in the mid-1950s led to concern about radioactive fallout from the testing. The public most feared the health effects of fallout; radioactive elements were, for example, measurable in milk. The test ban soon became a cause of the nuclear disarmament movement (and still is).

Scientists in both the Soviet Union and the United States also feared test-induced climate changes, now little recalled in the ruckus over global warming.³ The succession of large nuclear yield tests that began in the late 1940s and ended, for the most part, in the early 1960s injected much NO₂ into the stratosphere. The oxides of nitrogen are mainly produced in the fireball, with heating and cooling of the captured air. The largest annual yield of nuclear tests occurred in 1962, 108 megatons, including two explosions of 30 megatons. The largest yield was an explosion in 1961 of 58 megatons. About three-fourths of total yield in the peak years around 1960 exploded in the atmosphere. The bulk of these detonations was in the upper troposphere and stratosphere, but Starfish detonated a yield of 1.4 megatons in the thermosphere at an altitude of 400 km. Altitude matters greatly for NO₂ production calculations. NO₂ absorbs solar radiation, and its enhanced presence in the stratosphere for a period of two decades could have reduced the sunlight reaching the surface by a few percent. Climatologists, in fact, observed a temporary cooling trend in the Northern hemisphere, where nearly all atomic tests occurred.

Part of the task of making nuclear bombs is performing the calculations of atmospheric effects, so several environmental scientists worrying about the climatic and other effects on both sides had ample access to high-level officials in government and the military. This access, and related trust, probably helped expedite the 1963 Limited Test Ban.

Acid Deposition

From the late 1960s, the Scandinavian countries began claiming that the acidity of their rain was increasing and that it was caused by European, especially English, emissions upwind.⁴ The acidity allegedly damaged Scandinavian lakes and woods. Beginning in 1972, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conducted a study of long-range transport of air pollutants to assess such claims. Later the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) would conduct sequel studies. Similar conflicts and joint study efforts arose between the United States and Canada in the late 1970s, and peaked, with harsh words but no violence, in the early 1980s.

Fresh Water

Much blood has been spilled over water. Water resources can be military goals (seize the water), military targets (bomb a hydro plant, reservoir, canal, or irrigation channel), and military means (cause a flood), and the absence of water can precipitate conflict.⁵ The problem, as for acid rain, is often the discrepancy between the borders of nature and politics. Ninety-seven percent of Egypt’s surface water flow originates outside its borders. Per capita water availability in Jordan, according to the UN, is about one-quarter of the minimum requirement for an efficient, moderately industrialized nation.

I must here mention another vital fluid, oil, one of the reasons for the Gulf War in 1990–1991. Though I believe the main motive for Iraq in the war was to raise its place in the international pecking order, oil resources certainly pointed the way. The use of the oil-field fires as a weapon also makes the Gulf War interesting in our present context.

Climatic Change

Global warming induced by greenhouse gases emitted by human activities seems just now to be emerging from the realm of hypotheticality. It could cause conflicts in at least two ways. Erratic, unfavorable weather and climate could raise pressures for migration, certainly an irritant for some receiving states, although usually a welcome escape for the movers themselves. In recent years refugees, the neediest subcategory of migrants, have numbered around 10 million annually. The bulk have been concentrated in a few countries, such as Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Burundi. Political threats to well-being, violence, and economic suffering as well as droughts and floods produce refugees. Studies attribute rather few refugees directly and solely to environmental disasters and shortages of resources, but some scientists warn of the growing potential for these factors to add to the number of persons fleeing.⁶

The second way climatic change could cause conflict is through inequitable or apparently inequitable means to reduce carbon emissions, especially from coal and oil. Conflict might arise between the rich, developed countries of the so-called North and those of the poorer South. The South wants to increase its use of carbon and continue exporting it, while the North is ambivalent about curbing its appetite. The idea of “joint implementation,” basically financial transfers from the North to the South (and the former Soviet Union) for emission reduction in the South that might also lower globally the cost of emission restraints, developed under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change (IPCC), a body of several thousand technical experts. The idea has now moved into the political and diplomatic arena.

The IPCC originated in volunteer efforts under the auspices of the scientist-controlled Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) of the non- governmental International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) to provide international equivalents of U.S. National Research Council studies on global warming. As these reports gained influence, and required reiteration and expansion and therefore more money, governments changed the mechanism from nongovernmental to inter-governmental. A ruckus occurred in late 1996, when a few scientists, dissatisfied with the IPCC’s reports, took note of government tinkering with the final version of a report submitted in Madrid. The apparent loss of substantive rationality was surely disturbing, as was the abandonment of correct procedure, but such is the occasional price for control.

CONCLUSIONS

From these environment-and resource-related cases, I reaffirm three familiar conclusions about conflict resolution, echoing the thinking of the late Kenneth Boulding.⁷

1. Taking national boundaries off political agendas is a step toward stable peace, and engineers and scientists can help make spatial boundaries much less crucial.

Consider state boundaries within a country such as the United States. Almost every economic activity can flourish almost anywhere: the level and composition of the GDP is not much different in dry Arizona, wet Oregon, and cold Minnesota, all of which have diverse environment and resources. The same is true for Finland, the Netherlands, and Australia. When information is the prime resource, we need not fight over minerals or land. Aquaculture is the long-run solution to the Cod Wars. Clever civil engineering can multiply the availability of water and lower demand for it. Ubiquitous, plentiful natural gas can shrink oil’s martial power. In an economic sense, geography hardly need matter any more.

On the other hand, it clearly helps when national boundaries coincide with cultural boundaries. Africa today is probably worse off in this regard than Europe was in 1913. In this sense, geography will continue to matter greatly.

2. A great problem in stable peace is fear of betrayal, and international cooperation between scientists may help reduce the payoffs of betrayal and strengthen taboos against it.

We can easily imagine sneaky, nasty behavior over fisheries, sulfur and carbon, water, and weapons testing. Joint analyses, symmetric information, and transparent reporting about national behavior are means to reduction. Scientific responsibility here in part takes the form of increasing factual content, thus promoting substantive rationality, in management. Those favoring substantive rationality seek to infuse government, and often seek to have their efforts invited by government; they run the risk of capture. The substantive rationality begins with the idea of government’s gaining the advice of a few leading experts. As time passes, the bureaucracies that fund and manage the processes tend to increase their control and complicate matters with finer procedures. An example is the IPCC. Nevertheless, the IPCC and equivalent bilateral and multilateral mechanisms may forestall or lower conflict. A great difficult is the paucity of scientists in the Southern countries.

3. Stable peace relies on national self-interest, and, while resources that cross boundaries may heighten conflict, the diffusion of pollutants on the wind, in rivers, and in the seas may evoke countervailing cooperation.

For the past fifty years, nuclear weapons created a common global interest, namely the desire to do away with them. The common threat of nuclear destruction was valuable. With the waning of nuclear fear, degradation of the environment has emerged as a substitute threat. The most powerful realizations are global climatic change from greenhouse gases, the loss of biodiversity, and the depletion of the ozone layer. Conserving concern, science fuels individual and often collective moral fervor, usually in reference to potentially catastrophic, irreversible, and inequitable developments. The expressions of social responsibility are almost always scientist- initiated and tend to favor ends over means. Recall the 1961 story about nuclear madness by Leo Szilard, one of the catalysts for the atomic bomb and later a fervent campaigner for disarmament. Science, especially now environmental science, is The Voice of the Dolphins.⁸

ENDNOTES

1. Hannes Jonsson, Friends in Conflict (London: Hurst & Co., 1982); <https:// gurukul.ucc.american.edu/ted/ICEFISH.htm>.
2. Shirley Oakes Butler, “Owning Antarctica: Cooperation and Jurisdiction at the South Pole,” Journal of International Affairs 31 (1977): 35–52.
3. Kirill Ya Kondratyev, Climate Shocks: Natural and Anthropogenic (New York: Wiley, 1988).
4. Juan Carlos di Primio, “Data Quality and Compliance Control in the European Air Pollution Regime,” in The Implementation and Effectiveness of International Environmental Commitments: Theory and Practice, David K. Victor, Kal Raustiala, and Eugene B. Skolnikoff, eds., pp. 283–303 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).
5. Peter H. Gleick, “Water and Conflict: Fresh Water Resources and International Security,” International Security 18, 1 (1993): 79–112.
6. Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, “Policy Implications of Global Warming,” pp. 620–628 (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1992).
7. Kenneth E. Boulding, Conflict and Defense: A General Theory (New York: Harper, 1962).
8. Leo Szilard and Barton J. Bernstein, The Voice of the Dolphin and Other Stories (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).

The proletariat of American research, the graduate students and the postdocs, cry and whisper. Internet traffic even suggests they organize. At Yale, some struck. Meanwhile, William Massy of Stanford University and Charles Goldman of RAND Corp. present a fresh analysis to explain the doctoral system (W.F. Massy, C.A. Goldman, The Production and Utilization of Science and Engineering Doctorates in the United States, Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research, 1995), and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) complex releases two major assessments of American graduate education and research (Reshaping the Graduate Education of Scientists and Engineers and Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States, NAS, Washington, D.C., 1995). The bottom line is that alma mater is doctoring too many children.

Malthus’s classic negative checks on population were famine, war, and ill health. Here I would like to provide a backdrop for considering more positive checks on the burgeoning number of Ph.D.’s, drawing in part on the facts and findings in the three 1995 studies. Five features dominate: expansion of degree-granting franchises; the forgotten origin of the expansion, a need for teachers; emergence of a research enterprise recruiting students to sustain itself; a star system for faculty, further tipping graduate schools toward research; and, finally, too many doctorates. My positive checks, like those of Malthus, will involve better understanding and purposeful action as well as moral restraint.

Franchise Expansion

The number and size of universities granting doctorates have multiplied. Gaining status, the institutions awarding a Ph.D. in science and engineering (S&E) doubled from 1961 to 1991, reaching 299. Grantors of master’s degrees in S&E slightly more than doubled in the same period, reaching 442, and provide a ready pool to multiply the population of schools granting Ph.D.’s still more.

No convincing logic defines the optimal set of doctoral programs for America. However, absolute numbers now impress in almost every field. In each major sub-field within biology, 100 to 200 schools now award Ph.D.’s. Circa 1990, 182 granted degrees in physics, 169 in mathematics, and 130 in civil engineering. Even in a sub-sub field such as biomedical engineering 86 granted Ph.D.’s, and in the sub-field of physics and biology called oceanography, 50 did so.

Enrollment multiplied as the franchises expanded. From 1967 to 1992, graduate students of all kinds increased about half, twice the growth of the United States population. They multiplied from slightly less than a half-million to just over two-thirds million. The swelling number of schools increased the annual output of S&E Ph.D.’s from about 18,000 to 25,000 during the decade 1983-93.

If a franchise means spending $30 million or more of federal money annually for basic research, about 100 institutions have franchises. In 1970 only about 30 universities had large research programs. (The 100 produce about 90 percent of Ph.D.’s.)

From 1960 to now, major league baseball added more franchises, too, from 16 to 28. The New York Yankees could not maintain their dynasty in that expanding field. The 1995 NAS ranking of doctoral programs in dozens of fields showed predictably that the average rank of most universities declined with the expanding number of competitors, worsening morale and lengthening the climb to the top of the standings. Questions also arise about the qualifications of a larger absolute number of students and faculty.

The Forgotten Need For Teachers

In the 1950s, war veterans swelled the ranks of students. Recovering from the thin years of the Depression, colleges needed teachers quickly. Fresh Ph.D.’s staffed the rapidly expanding state universities and enlarging older institutions, too. Subsequently, democratization of educational opportunity and the baby boom sustained the college boom.

Secondarily, the government paid for training technical personnel to compete with the perceived scientific prowess of the Soviets. With fresh memories of the victories of science in World War II and ample tax revenues, the government paid for research campaigns, even a war on cancer. These payments to spend more time on research encouraged professors to cut their hours of contact with students from, say, nine to three per week, tripling-in this example-the need for teachers (or teaching assistants).

Notwithstanding the college boom, the fraction of Ph.D.’s employed in academe declined from about 55 percent in 1973 to about 45 percent in 1991. The fraction whose primary work is teaching dropped from 36 percent in 1972 to 23 percent in 1991. Meanwhile, the fraction no longer performing research, the presumed goal of a Ph.D., or whose work was unclear, doubled to about one-third of those surveyed. When the investment in a degree totals $250,000, one wonders for these lost researchers whether doctoral training was a wise choice, for them or the nation.

Sustaining Research

By the 1980s, the demand for full-fledged teachers slowed, a large cadre of principal investigators was in place, and the research enterprise needed skilled workers. The market for Ph.D.’s no longer drove the production of Ph.D.’s but rather the need of the research enterprise for low-cost labor called graduate students and postdocs. The enterprise perfumes this reality by praising the effectiveness of joint education and research. Of course, no oppressive conspiracy existed. Rather, individual faculty and funders have acted rationally in their self-interest, heedless until recently of possibly harmful collective effects.

Objective understanding of doctoral production and use demystifies many current features of the system. These include the lengthening time to get a degree and the growing number of foreign students. Doctoral students and postdocs substitute for faculty in research. They also unburden faculty, more in the humanities and social sciences, in undergraduate teaching and evaluation. Expanding graduate enrollments and postdocs costs less than hiring new faculty. Moreover, faculty-especially young faculty-competing for promotion and eminence through research logically recruit yet more graduate students but lack an incentive to speed them to a degree.

Recruits to S&E face a dim future: six or seven years registered for a degree, eight or nine years from B.S. to Ph.D., then one or more postdocs, and thus no substantial income until past age 30. In the life sciences, for example, the Ph.D.’s age to a median of 33 years by the time they land their first permanent job.

American undergraduates with exceptional talent likely spy the opportunity costs posed by the long apprenticeship. Far superior incomes in other careers leave science attracting only those young Americans who hear a profound calling. In fact, the number of American male Ph.D.’s has shrunk for a quarter-century. Women and foreign students account for the growth. In many schools and fields, roughly half of graduate students and postdocs are foreign.

Foreign youth still know graduate training in America will propel them upward. Preferring to remain in the U.S., they may accept slow progression to the degree and a succession of low-paying postdocs. The practically infinite availability of young foreign talent could maintain the system as it exists, although politics, prosperity, and currencies cause fluctuations. Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and China send the most students. China, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia send particularly high fractions for engineering and science.

The Star System

Senior faculty have evolved a strategy of horizontally mobile stars, akin to “free agency” in baseball. The stars auction themselves to the highest bidder, driving up the cost of their services. Ratcheting up the top-most compensation packages, they restrict the dollars for expansion of the middle class of permanent faculty. The recent end to mandatory retirement at age 70 works in the same direction. At the same time the middle class is restricted, the enterprise tilts from teaching toward the research that brightens the stars.

The stars’ ambitions and tastes require not more undergraduates but more workers. Thus, institutions offer or accommodate more graduate students and postdocs as part of their bid for a star, and also hire more cheap adjunct teaching faculty to moderate the wage bill. The number and years of the postdocs expanded most dramatically in biology, where the fraction of postdocs so employed one to four years after an American Ph.D. first climbed rapidly during the 1970s and now hovers around 40 percent. As almost all fields boarded the bandwagon, the number of S&E postdocs tripled from about 8,000 in 1975 to 24,000 in 1992. The stars are well served.

Too Many Ph.D.’s

At the bottom line, one finds the “natural production rate” of Ph.D.’s in the American system based on the population of professors in doctorate programs and the total fertility rate of each professor. Physicist David Goodstein of the California Institute of Technology puts that fertility rate at about 15 Ph.D.’s per professorial career in fields he knows, while I guess the rate necessary for breeding professors to replace the national population of S&E Ph.D.’s is about five per career. The present outcome exceeds the steady-state intake of faculty into U.S. schools more than the demand from American industry and government and from abroad can absorb. Students stretch out their school years, partly because job prospects are poor, and partly because funders and peers of the discipline favor money for students or recruits. The life of the postdoc provides a further way to stretch the years, but even their numbers may be near saturation.

Persuasive recent findings by Massy and Goldman, funded by the New York-based Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, hint Ph.D.’s in engineering, math, and some sciences are currently overproduced fully 25 percent.

An expansion of universities or research could temporarily absorb the excess doctorates, but within a few years, sponsoring more university research would worsen Ph.D. job prospects in S&E. Immediate gains from faculty expansion would give way to more oversupply as expanded doctoral programs produce yet more graduates.

Challenges And Opportunities

Universities must reconsider production of Ph.D.’s and the invisible hands of franchise expansion, recruiting to sustain the enterprise, and stars that propel it. We should seek positive checks on population rather than suffer the academic equivalents of famine, war, and ill health.

The prescription must produce research without producing the disillusioned. During a period when money from research remains steady or falls, some universities might well revisit an antiquated system of staffing that makes durable commitments to technicians and shelters faculty who do not hold the high expectations of fresh Ph.D.’s and postdocs. Universities could reward students who finish fast, and penalize faculty whose students loiter.

Valorizing the master’s degree in sciences would reduce exploitation. In engineering, the master’s is respected and lucrative, while in scientific fields it is a stigmatized consolation. Consider students who look forward to careers in business or secondary schools, which might be where the elusive third of the Ph.D.’s went. For them, instead of a protracted and disillusioning Ph.D., an intensive two years of science courses after a B.S. program might meet their needs while benefiting the nation and reflecting glory instead of disenchantment on the university.

Another positive prescription is reducing the cost of research without a youthful army of exploited inductees minimizing labor cost. The late Yale historian of science Derek de Solla Price resignedly conjectured that scientific results grow at the discouraging price of the cube root of the expense (Little Science, Big Science . . . and Beyond, Columbia University Press, 1986). Cannot science find routes to increase its productivity, as other service industries now aggressively do? Surely, for example, scientists in America should spend more time doing research and less time proposing and reviewing.

Affection for alma mater and recognition of the invisible hands driving her causes several of us to try seriously to create “SimU.” Opportunities come from understanding the university as a system, in particular how the actors make their decisions. In more and more useful ways, simulation games raise questions about how agents behave and how the parts of a system interact. Such tools now simulate oil refineries and factories, the oceans and the atmosphere.

Maxis Software Inc. of Orinda, Calif., has created educational and commercially successful games, engagingly called SimEarth and SimCity. Seeking a learning tool for the many people and organizations concerned with the problems and solutions discussed here, experts in universities and simulations are beginning to create a virtual alma mater of Malthusian forces, invisible hands, and stakeholders. It may help universities manage better. The proletariat who cry and whisper on the Internet deserve at least this much.

Jesse H. Ausubel is director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University and a program officer for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York, where he leads the foundation’s program on “The University as a System and the System of Universities.”(The Scientist, Vol:10, #3, pg.11 , February 5, 1996)(Copyright © The Scientist, Inc.)The Scientist, 3600 Market Street, Suite 450, Philadelphia, PA 19104, U.S.A.[This article appeared on The Scientist web page, used with permission – psm].