Distraction - Bruce Sterling [45]
“As opposed to the nightmare you have now,” Oscar prompted. “Endless paperwork, bad accounting, senseless ethics hassles …”
Greta nodded reflexively. “It’s hard to believe how far we’ve fallen. Science funding used to be allocated by peer review from within the science community. It wasn’t doled out by Congress in pork-barrel grants for domestic political advantage. Nowadays, scientists spend forty percent of their working time mooching around for funds. Life in science was very direct, in the good old days. The very same person who swung the grant would do her own benchwork and write up her own results. Science was a handicraft, really. You’d have scientific papers written by three, four co-authors—never huge krewes of sixty or eighty, like we’ve got now.”
“So it’s economics, basically,” Oscar coaxed.
She leaned forward tautly. “No, it’s much deeper than that. Twentieth-century science had an entirely different arrangement. There was understanding between the government and the science community. It was a frontier mentality. Those were the gold-rush days. National Science Foundation. NIH. NASA. ARPA.… And the science agencies held up their end of the deal. Miracle drugs, plastics, whole new industries … people literally flew to the moon!”
Oscar nodded. “Producing miracles,” he said. “That sounds like a steady line of work.”
“Sure, there was job security back then,” Greta said. “Tenure was nice, in particular. Have you ever heard of that old term ‘tenure’?”
“No,” Oscar said.
“It was all too good to last,” Greta said. “National government controlled the budgets, but scientific knowledge is global. Take the Internet—that was a specialized science network at first, but it exploded. Now tribesmen in the Serengeti can log on directly over Chinese satellites.”
“So the Golden Age stopped when the First Cold War ended?” Oscar said.
She nodded. “Once we’d won, Congress wanted to redesign American science for national competitiveness, for global economic warfare. But that never suited us at all. We never had a chance.”
“Why not?” Oscar said.
“Well, basic research gets you two economic benefits: intellectual property and patents. To recoup the investment in R&D, you need a gentlemen’s agreement that inventors get exclusive rights to their own discoveries. But the Chinese never liked ‘intellectual property.’ We never stopped pressuring them about the issue, and finally a major trade war broke out, and the Chinese just called our bluff. They made all English-language intellectual property freely available on their satellite networks to anybody in the world. They gave away our store for nothing, and it bankrupted us. So now, thanks to the Chinese, basic science has lost its economic underpinnings. We have to live on pure prestige now, and that’s a very thin way to live.”
“China bashing’s out of style this year,” Oscar said. “How about bashing the Dutch?”
“Yeah, Dutch appropriate-technology.… The Dutch have been going to every island, every seashore, every low-lying area in the world, making billions building dikes. They’ve built an alliance against us of islands and low-lying states, they get in our face in every international arena.… They want to reshape global scientific research for purposes of ecological survival. They don’t want to waste time and money on things like neutrinos or spacecraft. The Dutch are very troublesome.”
“Cold War Two isn’t on the agenda of the Senate Science Committee,” Oscar said. “But it certainly could be, if we could build a national security case.”
“Why would that help?” Greta shrugged. “Bright people will make huge sacrifices, if you’ll just let them work on the things that really interest them. But if you have to spend your life grinding out results for the military, you’re just another cubicle monkey.”
“This is good!” Oscar said. “This is just what I was hoping for—a frank and open exchange of views.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You want me to be really frank, Oscar?”
“Try me.”
“What did the Golden Age get us? The public couldn’t handle the miracles. We