US spirit is willing, but funds are still weak
7 January 1999 (Nature. Vol. 397, page 7)
[WASHINGTON ] International collaboration has never been a higher priority for the United States, at least if public pronouncements by the leaders of the scientific establishment are anything to go by.
Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences , has made collaboration with the developing world one of his top two priorities (the other being science education in schools). "A generous sharing of knowledge resources by our nation’s scientists and engineers can improve the lives of those who are most in need around the globe," he told the academy’s annual meeting last April.
Harold Varmus, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has placed new emphasis in the past year on the need for the NIH to confront global public health problems, such as malaria and African strains of AIDS, which do not afflict many people in the United States.
And Rita Colwell, the new director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), has spent much of her first few months in office travelling abroad, talking in particular about her collaborative experiences in cholera research (see Nature 396, 202; 1998).
But critics say there is more talk about such collaboration than action. And, by raising the issue now, these three scientific leaders are perhaps acknowledging that, in practice, the large and well-funded US scientific community has never been more isolated from the rest of the world.
"We’ve moved a long way backwards in the past 40 years," says Alberts, adding that a new generation of researchers "has little knowledge about the opportunities and challenges" of working with scientists abroad. "The young people have enormous potential interest" in such research, "but they don’t see how to do it," he says.
Of the $75 billion that the US government will spend on research and development this year a quarter of it on basic research only a small fraction will involve collaboration with foreigners. The NIH, the science agency least constrained in spending money abroad, says that it will spend $200 million 1.5 per cent of its budget on international projects.
The international division of the NSF will spend $20 million, although other activities at the agency involving foreign partners will cost ten times as much. "They get crumbs from the table," mutters an international official at one leading US scientific society.
Some critics go further in taunting the US track record in supporting international collaboration in science. In the current issue of the journal Issues in Science and Technology, Congressman George Brown (Democrat, California) and Daniel Sarewitz of Columbia University’s science policy unit write that "although there was little evidence that [international science and technology agreements] have led to significant scientific partnerships, there is plenty of evidence that they support a healthy bureaucratic infrastructure in the US government".
Critics also contend that the international division at NSF and the Fogarty International Center , which performs an analogous function at the NIH, have a marginal impact on the powerful directorates and institutes that dominate the two agencies.
One man planning to change that is Gerald Keusch, a biologist with a strong track record in researching infectious diseases in Africa, who was picked by Varmus last September to direct the Fogarty centre. Keusch says Varmus left him in no doubt that the NIH is ready to pursue "a global public health agenda — which is something different from NIH’s agenda in the past". In the coming year, the centre’s budget will grow by 25 per cent, to $35 million, although it will remain the smallest budget of any NIH institute.
The Fogarty centre has been steadily shifting its collaborative emphasis from work with scientists in developed countries to work in developing countries and the former Soviet bloc. Between 1987 and 1996, the proportion of its spending on the latter two groups doubled, to more than 40 per cent of the total.
Keusch expects this trend to continue. "My goal is to steadily focus on the developing and transitional countries where needs are greatest," he says. He adds that other mechanisms exist to support collaboration between developed countries.
Keusch is the first director of the centre to also be appointed associate director at the NIH — at the recommendation of an external study into Fogarty’s effectiveness. He hopes that this, together with his own scientific relationship with the directors of several powerful NIH institutes, will enable him to increase the centre’s influence.
He is also working to improve relations with the World Health Organization , the World Bank and the US Agency for International Development , and pledges to track "more effectively" what NIH really spends on international work. The $200 million, he says, "is only the part that is easily tracked. There are other expenditures that aren’t included."
Under Alberts’ presidency, the National Academy of Sciences has pursued a phalanx of initiatives to foster collaboration with developing countries. These include a study with China and India into the impact of population growth on land use, to be published in February, and a major conference on sustainability planned for May 2000 in Tokyo.
John Boright, director of international affairs at the academy, says it is also working to bring together groups of young scientists with common interests. But he does not have the money to do this on a significant scale. "We’re planting some seeds, but planting the whole field is a different story," Boright says.
Many scientists assume that isolationists in the Congress are the main obstacle to substantial US investment in international science. But congressional staff say the scientific agencies have not asked for more money for international work.
"The agencies use Congress as a bogeyman," says one staffer, who favours spending on international collaboration. "All the major scientific collaborative programmes began under President Reagan, when money was tight. Now that the money’s fine, they don’t want to do anything with people overseas."
But some top scientists, at least, beg to differ. "The opportunities for the United States to play a role [in the developing world] are enormous," says Sherwood Rowland, foreign secretary of the national academy. "The scientific community is willing to do it, but there isn’t sufficient funding. And that reflects the political will of the country."
Colin Macilwain
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Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 1999 Registered No. 785998 England.