Frictionless Science

In1996 Bill Gates in his book The Road Ahead predicted a future of "frictionless capitalism". In this world, buyers would have immediate and direct access through the Internet to a supplier of almost any good no matter its location in the world. The product could be made and transported efficiently through just-in-time manufacturing, computer-aided-design (CAD), computer numerical control (CNC) for precise machining, and a global transportation network. That world exists today. For example, a customized iPod music player ordered from Apple's web site is shipped within hours via Federal Express from Shenzhen, China, and delivered in two days to the customer in Ohio.

Time, distance, resources, education and politics are among the sources of friction in science. Money is the essential lubricant in overcoming that friction. Jesse Ausubel at Rockefeller University and director of the web-based “Encyclopedia of Life” points out that rich nations and fast-growing countries are developing and absorbing technologies at steeper rates in each new wave of innovation and that changing the pecking order requires an aspiring country to spend a lot.

China is definitely an example of the phenomena. The World Bank ranks China with the number two GDP in the world. China is now able to afford the creation of 100 new universities which produce almost the same number of scientists and engineers as the United States. According to Economist magazine, the result is that China, which has already overtaken Japan to become the world's second-largest investor after the United States in research and development in absolute terms, is a country to watch in terms of acceleration in the innovation market. In contrast is the Arab world, which continues to see a “brain drain” to western countries. Forty five per cent of Arab students who study abroad do not go back to their countries after graduating.

However, we are now entering into in an era of "frictionless science". The ubiquity of the Internet is eliminating time and distance factors to diffusing knowledge among scientists and innovators. This was in essence the vision of Tim Berners-Lee, who created the first World Wide Web (WWW) browser in 1990 to help physicists from around the world who needed to share data. Almost all major research physicists put their pre-publication papers on arXiv web site at Cornell for review. The papers, ranging from Astrophysics to Nuclear Theory, are instantly retrievable by scientists from S. Korea to Brazil.

As long as a person – scientist or hobbyist -- has access to the Internet, he can search the electronic archive of thousands of publications. Since 2000, a host of other organizations have opened up their electronic publication libraries to the world. For example, students in India can access journal articles in electrical engineering from the IEEE going back to 1913. Iranian engineers can access all US patents going back to 1790.

Moreover, according to Stuart Brand of the Long Now Foundation, there is a new diffusion phenomenon with the ubiquity of the Internet -- "Wiki-Science". "The average number of authors per paper continues to rise. With massive collaborations, the numbers will boom. Experiments involving thousands of investigators collaborating on a "paper" will be commonplace." Many of those "thousands of investigators" will be from outside the US.

The Internet is also creating on a global scale an eBay style market for science matching researchers to problems. InnoCentive, connects top scientists to relevant research and development challenges facing leading companies around the globe, for rewards up to $100,000 USD or more.

The Fifty Year Strategy

How did the US become the leader in technology?

At the end of World War II, the United States had only two major competitors in science and technology -- Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Continental Europe and Japan were in ruins, China was in civil war, and the rest of the world had few scientific resources as it recovered from six years of war. The United States quickly went on to capitalize on its post-war advantage by developing a national strategy for research proposed by Vannevar Bush, President Roosevelt's director of Office of Scientific Research and Development -- the office responsible for the atomic bomb.

The strategy promoted basic research as "the pacemaker of technological progress” and eventually became embodied in activities such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institute for Health, and the Defense laboratories. Furthermore, competition with the Soviet Union spurred a rapid expansion of the physical sciences which later gave the US a dominant position in such diverse areas as aerospace, computing, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and energy production technology.

The end of the Cold War in 1991 was as a culmination point for this strategy. It was also a moment of transition for science and technology in the US and in the world. The Internet was about to explode with the development of the Web browser and fiber-based communications. The Human Genome Project to sequence human DNA was just getting underway. Personal computing over local area networks (LANs) was reaching ubiquity in United States businesses. And foreign students accounted for 50% of Ph.D. production in the United States with China sending the largest contingent. Globalization was in full-swing.