Rita Colwell On Science Funding and Technological Advancement

“Our challenge is to fuel basic research, so it truly nourishes our technological advancement and helps us to spread the benefits of knowledge.” NSF Director Rita Colwell

Twice in recent weeks, NSF Director Rita Colwell spoke about her plans and vision for the future. She discussed the NSF FY 2000 budget request and priorities at an April 28 House Science subcommittee hearing, then gave a broader view of how those priorities will affect the future to the National Press Club the following day.

To the House Science Subcommittee on Basic Research, Colwell raised concerns about the recent shift in federal research funding to the biomedical sciences “at the expense of the physical sciences and engineering.” This trend “concerns many,” she warned, including some in the health sciences such as NIH Director Harold Varmus. NSF is the only agency that supports fundamental research in all fields, “from anthropology to zoology,” Colwell said. “NSF is the fulcrum for all of science and engineering.... We support the fundamental work that benefits the mission agencies, like NIH, right down the line.”

The NSF FY 2000 request of $3.95 billion represents a 5.8 percent overall increase, and an increase of 8.0 percent for research project support. Three elements have received top priority for FY 2000: information technology, biocomplexity, and science and math education. NSF is the lead agency for the IT initiative. It is “a classic example of a long-term investment in fundamental research that works for the common good,” Colwell explained. It will provide tools and capabilities to strengthen and benefit every field within the research and education enterprise.

The second initiative, biocomplexity, is a multidisciplinary approach to understanding how the world works as a whole, combining fields such as physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics in a comprehensive way. “One reason it’s time to tackle this task,” Colwell said, is that “we now have the ability and the technologies to grasp the complexity of our environment.” Finally, she added, science, math and engineering education remains a priority; “we still have a long way to go.”

Subcommittee chairman Nick Smith (R-MI) asked about the GPRA process for developing ways to measure “how good a job you’re doing.” Colwell thought GPRA was useful for managing the research portfolio, but noted that it was “an ongoing, rolling process” to develop measures of success for basic research.

Asked by Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-NC) what she would do if she had more money for K-12 education, Colwell saw “incredible opportunity in several directions.” One approach would be to enhance a new NSF fellowship program, which links school systems to universities by getting graduate students to teach in K-12 classrooms. Another area for increased support would be research on learning. “We’re only on the cusp of really understanding the cognitive process,” she stated. NSF is considering a proposal to focus on this issue in its FY 2001 budget request.

Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) pointed out that approximately three-quarters of NSF’s requested budget growth is for the IT initiative. She questioned what the foundation would do if it received significantly less than its request. “Obviously, we would have to make adjustments,” Colwell responded. " The challenge is to maintain leadership in basic disciplines such as physics and biology,” and at the same time “seize opportunities in areas like IT and biocomplexity.”

At the National Press Club, Colwell chose to “explore...some of the ramifications of our embrace of information technology.” “We assume that all this information makes us smarter,” she said. “But, I suppose if you believe that, it’s like believing that having a library card makes you well read.... We need to approach the avalanche of information with that rarer quantity, wisdom.”

Commenting that " IT has generated one-third of the recent growth in the U.S. economy,” Colwell said “few people realize that key advances in this technology were spurred by federally sponsored research.” But, she warned, “there’s a shadow on the horizon. Government support for innovation in computing has not been keeping up with inflation.” A recent presidential committee called the federal investment “dangerously inadequate.” By the year 2005, Colwell remarked, “we simply run out of physics” to continue the current progress on transistors. She urged more long-term, basic “visionary” research that might lead to DNA or quantum computing. “It makes sense, she said, “to look to science for the next stage in this revolution, because science and engineering are spurring it.... Science used to be composed of two endeavors, theory and experiment. Now it has a third component: computer simulation, which links the other two.” This technological advance is enabling science to become more interconnected and address more complex questions. Colwell cited examples from weather forecasting to prediction of disease outbreaks. “We have so many examples of how computing has expanded our options,” she noted, “but there are some who feel quite the opposite about the information revolution.” “We need to understand not only the economic but also the social impact of the Internet.”

Colwell cautioned that while information technology has the potential to lower barriers, it also has the potential to create new barriers of inequality in society. “All of this leads to perhaps the most pressing, promising, and controversial junction of computing and society -- education,” she said. “Information empowerment takes skill information literacy. This is the ability to find, assess, and use information for decision- making.... This skill...should become everyone’s right to possess, just like the ability to read is now.”

Colwell concluded: “Our challenge now is to design our digital future to reflect the light of the Information Age. Our challenge is to fuel basic research, so it truly nourishes our technological advancement and helps us to spread the benefits of knowledge. Our challenge, above all, is to make wise choices -- and that’s something we have to do inclusively, together as a society. That will be the way to transform the Age of Information into one of wisdom.”