STS

• The relationship between science and technology is complex and interdependent, with each contributing to the other in various ways.
• Science contributes to technology in six ways: as a source of new knowledge, tools, techniques, research instrumentation, laboratory techniques, and analytical methods.
• Technology impacts science by providing a fertile source of novel scientific questions and instrumentation needed to address these questions more efficiently.
• The research portfolio of potential social benefit is much broader and more diverse than would be suggested by looking only at the direct connections between science and technology.
• Much public debate about science and technology policy has been implicitly dominated by a 'pipeline' model of the innovation process in which new technological ideas emerge as a result of new discoveries in science and move through a progression from applied research, design, manufacturing and, finally, commercialization and marketing.
• This model seemed to correspond with some of the most visible success stories of World War II, such as the atomic bomb, radar, and the proximity fuze, and appeared to be further exemplified by developments such as the transistor, the laser, the computer, and, most recently, the nascent biotechnology industry arising out of the discovery of recombinant DNA techniques.
• The relationship between science and technology is often dependent on commercial revenue for support, meaning promising concepts cannot be pursued unless their potential application is fairly clear and immediate.
• Many important observations made incidentally during the course of major industrial or military technological developments may never get into the general scientific literature, nor get properly documented so that they can be understood and appreciated by other industrial researchers or basic scientists interested in their broader scientific significance.
• Technological development indirectly stimulates basic research by attracting new financial resources into research areas shown to have practical implications.
• The search for radical technological breakthroughs has been unusually important in defense and health care, where improved performance almost regardless of its cost, not only in R&D but also in ultimate societal performance, has played a fundamental role in stimulating not only technological development but also related fields of basic research.
• The more radical the invention, the more likely it is to stimulate wholly new areas of basic research or to rejuvenate older areas of research that were losing the interest of the most innovative scientists, such as classical optics and atomic and molecular spectroscopy in the case of the laser, and basic metallurgy and crystal growth and crystal physics in the case of the transistor.
• In the defense case, it has been generally believed that even a small technological edge in the performance of individual weapons systems could make all the difference between victory and defeat.
• The Edison effect, originally discovered by Thomas A. Edison, was not pursued because he was too “preoccupied with matters of short-run utility”.
• Almost all countries with successful diffusion-oriented technology policies emphasize the rapid adoption and diffusion of new technology, especially production technology, as a national strategic objective.
• The performance of R&D is necessary for the absorption and appraisal of technology because scientists engaged in research spend a large fraction of their time and effort communicating with others in order to take the fullest advantage of the progress made by others in planning their own research strategy.
• Weed (1991) has studied the problem of matching scientists' information retrieval behavior to the information needs of the down-stream phases of the innovation process from the standpoint of medical practitioners delivering health care appropriate to unique individual patients, a process he describes as "problem-knowledge coupling".
• The most effective way to remain plugged into the scientific network is to be a participant in the research process.
• Training through basic research enables more informed choices and recruitment into the technological research community.
• Scientists engaged in research are not automatically matched in their information retrieval behavior to the information needs of the down-stream phases of the innovation process.
• Countries with successful diffusion-oriented technology policies have among the highest ratios of R&D expenditure (public and private) to GDP among industrialized countries, as well as exceptionally high levels of educational performance at all levels.
• There is a trade-off between investment in R&D and investment in information infrastructure for the efficient distribution of R&D results to their potential users.
• The 'pure public good' assumption about basic science neglects the fact that a substantial research capability (and actual ongoing participation in research) is required to understand, interpret and appraise knowledge that has been placed on the shelf, whether basic or applied.
• A significant fraction of R&D support in countries with successful diffusion-oriented technology policies is for the purpose of enhancing awareness of what is going on in the world of S&T rather than necessarily for generating new knowledge for the first time.
• Rosenberg suggests that there is no obvious reason for failing to examine the hardware consequences of even the most fundamental scientific research.
• Examples of instrumentation technologies that have made this transition include electron diffraction, the scanning electron microscope (SEMI), ion implantation, synchrotron radiation sources, phase-shifted lithography, high vacuum technology, industrial cryogenics, and superconducting magnets.
• This research is very much in the style of other basic research in the pure sciences and is supported in a similar manner by the Engineering Division of the National Science Foundation, i.e., as unsolicited, investigator-originated project research.
• Laboratory techniques or analytical methods used in basic research, particularly in physics, often find their way either directly, or indirectly via other disciplines, into industrial processes and process controls.
• The contributions of science to technology are widely understood and acknowledged by both the public and scientists and engineers, but the reciprocal dependence of science on technology both for its agenda and for many of its tools is much less well appreciated.
• Much of the technical knowledge used in design and the comparative analytical evaluation of alternative designs is developed as engineering science by engineers, and is the major activity comprising engineering research in academic engineering departments.
• Very creative engineers and inventors tend to read widely and eclectically both in the history of science and technology, and about contemporary scientific developments.
• One can also envision ultimate industrial process applications from many other techniques now restricted to the research laboratory.
• Chemists using commercial instruments are free to devote their efforts to extracting the useful chemical information that application of the device affords.
• Such understanding often requires basic scientific knowledge well outside the scope of what was clearly relevant in the development of the technology.
• An important function of academic research often neglected in estimating its economic benefits is that it imparts research skills to graduate students and other advanced trainees, many of whom “go on to work in applied activities and take with them not just the knowledge resulting from their research, but also the skills, methods, and a web of professional contacts that will help them succeed in their future careers.
• The skills acquired in graduate training in nuclear physics had been readily turned to the development and improvement of solid state devices.
• The pattern of development of optical, infrared and radio frequency spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, and X-ray crystallography involves close collaboration between vendors and scientific users, and between engineers and scientists, so that instruments and laboratory techniques often become a mechanism by which some of the pathologies of overspecialization in science are moderated.
• Rosenberg also points out that the common denominator running through and connecting all these experiences is that instrumentation developed in the pursuit of scientific knowledge eventually had direct applications as part of a manufacturing process.
• The assessment of technology, whether for evaluating its feasibility to assess entrepreneurial risk, or for foreseeing its societal side-effects, requires a deeper and more fundamental scientific understanding of the basis of the technology than does its original creation, which can often be carried out by empirical trial-and-error methods.
• The latter interpretation has led to a rapidly growing view that the generous public support for academic research in the US has been, in effect, a subsidy to our overseas competitors who have beat us out in the marketplace by taking advantage of the openness of our academic system to commercially exploit research results for which they have not paid.
• According to Rosenberg (1991), “this involves the movement of new instrumentation technologies from the status of a tool of basic research, often in universities, to the status of a production tool, or capital good, in private industry.