Chapter One: Grassroots Science
Rupert s the organization of science becomes increasingly professional and institutional, big science increases in its scope and power. More research gets directed into huge projects like particle accelerators and the human genome project. Inevitably these attract funds, prestige and researchers away from the more traditional, low expense, low prestige branches of science. The tendency toward big science and fewer "centers of excellence" is going on all the time. Access to big money is coming to dominate the whole structure of science as we know it. This is merely a carrying further of the process of professionalization and institutionalization that's overtaken mainstream science in the present century.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the situation was very different. Charles Darwin, for example, never held an academic post in any institution. In his books, for example in my favorite one, The Variation Of Animals and Plants Under Domestication,'the research base on which he was drawing was that of practical plant and animal breeders, animal trainers, pigeon fanciers, colonial administrators, and so on. In other words, there was a vast wealth of knowledge and experience that fed into Darwin's kind of science, hardly any of which came out of government-funded scientific institutions.
We now see a completely different picture, as the non-professional experience becomes increasingly marginalized. You can't do research until you've got a Ph.D., and you're in an institution, and you've got a grant, and you can write the kind of proposal that impresses a committee of professional scientists.
Organized science is moving further and further in this direction, and is becoming increasingly commercialized as well. I question whether things have to be as they are. Is a new model possible? I think a new model of science is not only possible, but desirable; and not only desirable, but necessary.
On the one hand there's been a decline in public support for science. Genetic engineering is getting very bad press, and research in biotechnology excites more public fear than admiration. The same is true of nuclear research, particle physics research, star wars research, and many other aspects of big science. People blame the environmental crisis, nuclear pollution, factory farming, chemicals in food and toxic wastes, fairly or unfairly, on the scientific establishment. As public support for science declines, governments seeking to make cuts find it's quite easy to reduce science budgets. It does not cause many votes to be lost, in fact it may even be popular.
This declining public esteem and reduced funding has led to a reduction in scientific morale, and the proportion of young people who want to study is falling in Britain and in many other countries. Many scientists are very demoralized, and it looks as if the golden age of ever-expanding science budgets in the '60s and '70s is over, perhaps forever. In this context, a possible new approach to science becomes more feasible. It is necessary simply for economic and political reasons.
Fortunately, holistic research is much cheaper than reductionistic research. If you study whole systems you usually need relatively small funds. Conversely, the smaller the thing you study, the bigger the apparatus and the more the funding. When you get down to the most evanescent nuclear particles, you need accelerators many miles long, costing billions of dollars.
I have come to realize that interesting and important research projects can be done on very small budgets by students, or by amateurs outside the framework of institutional science. In my recent book, Seven Experiments that Could Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science,' I propose seven experiments, any one of which could break our current paradigms, most of which could be done for less than $50. One example is research with dogs or cats that know when their owner is coming home (Chapter 6).
I think the conditions are right for a new awakening, a new renaissance of research, a more democratic kind of science in which more people are empowered to take part. When you think about it, the kind of knowledge that Darwin drew on exists today, even more so. There are tens of thousands of amateur plant breeders, for example orchid growers, who lavish care and attention on the plants with their own funding, and some are breeding new varieties of orchids. There are rose societies, bamboo societies, cactus societies, and so on, where people swap specimens and share their experience and knowledge. There are probably more pigeon enthusiasts, dog breeders and rabbit fanciers than ever before; many millions of people worldwide. There are people who train horses and dogs, falconers who train falcons. There are old-style naturalists, such as bird-watchers, still around. There are also millions of computers, previously the preserve of big institutions, making sophisticated mathematical analysis available to almost anyone. In addition there's the whole realm of psychedelic experience, where professional research is very limited in scope but amateur research has accumulated a wealth of experience
In summary, a great body of knowledge is currently available through amateur networks and societies, at present almost completely disregarded by institutional science, and flourishing despite the lack of external funding. From this basis a new kind of grassroots science could arise, possibly through the extension of existing networks, possibly by building up regional research networks. This grassrots science need not be seen as a rival to existing science, but as complementary to it. These two systems could cross-fertilize and influence each other.
Ralph This sounds wonderful and very promising, and if it can simply happen as you've described it, then the decline of science could be reversed. Clever young people would be attracted and more and better information and understanding could be developed. I certainly think that's desirable, although I share with many ordinary people a decline of confidence in science, for the reasons you've described. The acceptance of a new model of grassroots science by the scientific establishment seems somehow very unlikely. The population of the scientific establishment would have to be totally exchanged with new young people who had grown up in these new kinds of research groups. This would have to evolve through a series of developments difficult to envision at this time. I see a problem in the extension of networks and the sharing of results; the function of big science provided by publication in journals with the peer review process. The very growth of population, civilization, and the scientific establishment means there's an immense amount of data, that if not shared or made available or archived in libraries, can't be accessed. I think the key to development of a new model would be development of a new model of communication, for sharing the results of research. It won't be sufficient for each group of pigeon fanciers in South Burlington, Vermont to have a journal or regional newsletter. There would be too many newsletters to read. How will the regional networks be organized and communicate with each other? The secret key to empowering the success of this new development is the communications aspect of the computer revolution-electronic bulletin boards, computer networks, central electronic libraries, and developments not yet envisioned for the archiving and sharing of research information. Until everyone can access the results of previous research and easily survey all that has been done in a certain area, the dream can't really become a reality. It may be that the lack of this kind of successful means of communication is the very reason that big laboratories and big sciences actually evolved. The governments have tried, experimented and proved, to their own satisfaction, that the investment of big bucks in the big laboratory gives a bigger bang than granting smaller sums to a large number of small laboratories. Certainly these small groups will need grants. They'll need some support and equipment. Inexpensive science still costs.
From the easy problems to the hard problems in its evolution over the past thousand years; it's also moved from the cheap problems to the expensive problems. It's now wedded to instrumentalities of such size and cost that even nations seem to need to band together. For instance, I don't think there's any way for grassroots science to finance and execute a super-collider project or an expedition to Mars.
Science has been vastly transformed from the simple impulse to understand the natural world around us, into a kind of hellish marriage with instrumentality, technology, capitalism, and the military-industrial complex. Addressing these four areas of concern: (1) instrumentality refers to the great cost of scientific instruments; (2) Technology refers to the fact that science as the handmaiden of advanced product research has gained overwhelming sway over most of our lives. (3) Capitalism refers to the demands of an economic system that distorts the scientific impulse to understand the natural world, so that we spend hundreds of millions of dollars discovering whether chemicals that go into a facial soap are allergenic, while we wouldn't allocate $100 thousand to study a very basic and interesting question like how pigeons home; (4) The Military Industrial Complex refers to the largest governmental institutions which have largely appropriated major scientific research.
Science isn't done in the spirit of Greek curiosity about the order of nature, it's done to make money on a vast scale, and then to defend those fortunes. I dare say, no funding would be forthcoming if there was no anticipated payback from that funding.
I see your proposal as not so much leading to the reform of science, as to the creation of a parallel institution. We could call it the "people's science," or "hands-on science." I've named some of the most overwhelming and monolithic forces in our society. How can we rescue dame science from the hands of such intractable foes of the original Greek impulse to simply understand the world?
Rupert Part of the answer comes from the shift in paradigm which is happening for a variety of reasons independent of politics and economics, namely the move toward a more holistic model of science. As I said earlier, holistic research, looking at whole systems, is much cheaper than analytical research, looking at smaller systems. Atomism, which is the philosophy that underlies reductionism, puts the greatest emphasis on the smallest possible things. The smaller the thing, the bigger the apparatus. The highest prestige attaches to superconducting super colliders, which are the biggest pieces of apparatus you can make, and are for studying the smallest particles of matter. If we undergo a shift of models, as we are doing, reductionist science seems somewhat less interesting, less relevant, less attractive. They are being told already in Britain. Nuclear physicists are in shock.
Ralph Even if popular support remained tremendous for subnuclear particles, the budget crisis would make it impossible to continue in that line. Meanwhile, we have new crises. Nuclear physics was a response to an urgent need in the military-industrial complex. Now we have new military problems, and the defense departments of various nations are doing an about face to reorient themselves toward new kinds of enemies. We acknowledge that big science is going to continue to exist, but it must economize, reorient itself toward real problems in order to maintain popular support, and reintegrate with grassroots science because of economics and because the information on that level is needed. I foresee that the new model for big science is going to be data banks, together with scientific visualization strategies based on computer graphics, which as you correctly implied, is expensive. The "Mission to Planet Earth," NASA's proposal to monitor the temperature everywhere from satellites, will actually be very inexpensive compared to ground-based methods of collecting the same data. The problem is how to visualize it. Here we see groups working at the national laboratory level with enormous super computers that are really expensive, trying to devise ways to synthesize all this data and get the total picture. Until that's figured out, I don't think we'll benefit from all this grassroots science, either what exists today or what would be delivered in the future in response to some really exciting new questions proposed from a larger view of global planetary behavior. The piece of the budget pie for science is shrinking. To get the largest results from a fixed or shrinking budget, it will continue to be necessary to have big science lab centers, where the synthesis of all the information is handled. The largest problem of science in the future will be to manage this enormous database. The fact that physical scientists, rather than social and environmental scientists, have gotten a disproportionate piece of the pie so far is because they've not had to deal with databases that are of unmanageable size to deliver product that's adapted by business for high-tech commodities, gadgets and consumer products.
Terence Institutions expect a payoff on the investments they make and the people they train, and big science has been the tent under which product development has led to a pay-back for the university, so that laboratories can be endowed and so forth. It's very hard to see how the small science model closes the loop and pays its own way. It reminds me of the English squire or naturalist, who carries out observations in his local area that are very interesting, but that only his private wealth allows him the luxury of pursuing. How will grassroots science support itself? How will it be other than something in the hands of hobbyists and
dilettantes?
Rupert There are two things that can happen. Already amateurs do these things on quite a large scale. Pigeon fanciers, of whom there are about 250,000 in Britain, are mostly working class and some are on social security. It's so cheap that you can do it on that level. This wouldn't just involve squires. We live in a far more prosperous society than ever before, so that this kind of expenditure of money on what people really enjoy, is widely available. Even if it's only at the level of gardening, one of the most popular of all hobbies, people don't need grants to buy plants for their garden, and they wouldn't need grants to graft different ones together or to breed different ones by crossing them. When it comes to the need for additional funding for things like data banks, there could be a new system of regional research councils, where a tiny fraction, less than 1% of existing science budgets, would be put into funding grassroots science. A tiny fraction of existing science or education budgets devoted to funding this grassroots network would be politically popular, and help to regenerate interest in science.
Terence Don't you think, though, that the public support for science is based on an expectation that it will usher in new technologies which the mass of people have a great faith will deliver them into a somehow better world? If you break that chain of expectations, saying, "We're now going to do science in such a way that you can forget about new technologies," that the interest in science will decline to the level of the interest and support of tournament Chess?
Ralph Forget the old model. We're talking about a revolution of science in the context of a major paradigm shift in which it would be one component. One of the things we're anticipating is global environmental problems. They're already here, in fact. People thinking of the future are going to expect from science, from government, from religion, from themselves, salvation from these serious problems. just as from medical science people want cures for cancer and AIDS. They want solutions, they don't want only products. In order for grassroots science to participate in the solution of these problems, it isn't sufficient to develop a new and parallel scientific establishment living on its own and doing its best work on a low budget. We need to integrate that with a new model for society which would emerge under the evolutionary pressure of environmental problems. The new grassroots science would have to link up in an effective way with scientific journals and glossy magazines like Scientific American, presenting the progress they make toward solutions of major problems, alongside the results of big laboratories and everybody else. It's not enough to offer competitions and prizes. You must offer the possibility of publication, and access to the public support that nourishes amateur as well as professional scientists.
Terence Take as a test case the depletion of the ozone. To study this requires the cooperation of several national Air Forces with massive data acquisition and analysis facilities. When you move from studying it to doing something about it, it may take a significant portion of every dollar we all make for the rest of our lives. The fate of the planet may hang in the balance. How can a grassroots science make a contribution to that?
Ralph The ozone hole was first observed in Federal laboratories, which was correcting old data that it had neglected to study. If amateur scientists would have had access to the data sitting in this archives then they might have made the discovery. The hole was originally thought to be totally isolated over the poles, but now they've discovered a vortex that is gradually sucking ozone from the temperate regions. If amateur scientists had ozone observers, which are simple little telescope devices, they could measure the ozone density over their own home, then the rate at which the ozone depletion is diffusing over population centers would be observed when it might very well be overlooked by the large laboratories who exclusively devote their research to the activity over the polar regions.
Terence And what about doing something about it?
Ralph I can envision a new model in which big science existed as it is today on a lower budget, grassroots science existed as it does today on a larger budget, and the two are coupled together much more tightly, through information sharing mechanisms. The National Science Foundation, for example, of the United States, might have as its main mission, the storage and provision of access to this enormous data, so that people can come up with a new hypothesis, a new question. The small competition would stimulate high school students who could then actually obtain the data that no one else is looking at, about the ozone depletion or whatever, and win the prize for making a phenomenal new discovery of data.
Terence We keep on returning to the fact that big science provides the data or else the data is accessible by non-expensive, local means; that somehow the problem is to acquire the data. For many problems, like the ozone hole, or the danger of planetesimal impact on the earth, or analyzing the effect of the Philippine volcanic eruption, the acquisition of this data is going to keep big science in business for a while. I absolutely agree with you that there should be no such thing as classified scientific data, but I wonder if at least in this stage of the technological revolution, a Mac is sufficient to deal with the data collected. Perhaps it is. If not, then the small scientist remains at a disadvantage, because number crunching is an important part of the analysis of the huge data stream that is coming in. Maybe the answer is to concentrate on dropping the cost of super computing.
Ralph Well, that's happening.
Terence Won't that require an enormous governmental project costing billions of dollars, the very thing we're trying to get away from?
Ralph The computer revolution is actually the answer to the main problem. The prices are spontaneously dropping. Your personal super computer on the desk is a reality today. It'll be cheaper tomorrow; we can take that for granted.
Terence Brought to us by Microsoft, one of the largest corporate entities in the American capitalist System. It won't be done by two guys in a garage. That era is gone forever.
Rupert In concentrating on these huge problems, like the ozone hole, what do you do about it? While I don't deny there's a problem at that level, there are problems at much lower levels, where an enormously greater amount can be done by amateur data collection without vast number crunching, and where doing something about it can come about much sooner and quicker than solving enormous climate problems. A lot more has been done, in Britain at least, by amateur groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. These things don't need huge number crunchers. Fairly simple data is needed to turn doing something about it into political action through existing pressure groups. Friends of the Earth collects samples in rivers downstream from industrial firms and from drinking water supplies. For example, they find that in much of Britain the nitrate levels permitted by British and European regulations are exceeded, pesticide residue levels are far too high, etc. This kind of data, if collected at all by our government, is kept secret. When it is collected and published, requiring no great sophistication or enormous number crunching, it can lead to enormous political effects, and pressure to do something about these things. Environmental groups already use rather simple analytical techniques, and very simple data processing methods, to great effect.
Terence I think we're left with the conclusion that there has to be a parallelism that somehow leaves room for both of these approaches; that they address different areas of concern; and when they can make common cause, that's all well and good, but they're really directed toward, in most cases, different ends.
Rupert Not necessarily. You said that people wanted science to give a product or something useful, but that's not really true in some cases. One of the most popular things in the whole of science, of interest even to three-year-olds, are dinosaurs. The interesting thing is that one of the most useless branches of science, paleontology, has enormous grassroots support.
Terence A major paleontological project has the character of a major dam-building or excavation project. It costs millions.
Rupert Most of these bones were collected in the last century by amateurs for virtually nothing. But it may cost millions to build huge plastic models of dinosaurs that emit roaring noises.
Terence I'm talking about sinking a fossil shaft somewhere in the Gobi Desert and extracting in a proper scientific manner the fossils therein. This requires maintaining hundreds of people in the field, from staff scientists down to coolies, over two years, along with air transport of hundreds of tons of rock back to the museums.
Rupert Paleontology was already a well-established science in the 19th century, on incredibly low budgets, mostly funded by amateurs. A wonderful example of low-cost, grassroots science.
Terence I don't have that great a familiarity with paleontology, but I do know something about archeology, and it costs a fortune to do it right. Today, when you go into Guatemala or the Yucatan to excavate a Mayan site, you have to keep a team in the rainforest for six months.
Ralph Rupert hasn't suggested slashing all budgets to zero. Presumably most of the expensive projects will continue to be funded according to the degree by which they can gain public support, provide exciting results, and solve important problems. Simultaneously, they could be influenced enormously by discoveries of the grassroots science groups, feeding into the determination of how this budget is supposed to be spent.
Sticking with archaeology for a moment, it's an interesting science in that it doesn't generate new products, or give us a sense of progress. It doesn't feed into the military industrial complex. It seems almost the model of what we're talking about, and yet for all those reasons it's absolutely famished for money, finding it very difficult to obtain funding. An enormous amount of archaeology is funded only by the patronage of wealthy enthusiasts. It's not a happy experience to spend an evening with archaeologists listening to them discuss the difficulties they're having funding projects that they can in a few minutes convince you are very worthy and interesting. Archaeology may show us problems that we can anticipate if we try to expand this model.
Rupert At the moment, the archaeology budget, I'm sure, is a tiny fraction of the budget for the genome project or the super collider. Archaeology is actually a good case to use as a model. There's a large grassroots base, amateur participation, popular interest, and even the biggest projects are relatively cheap compared with large-scale science. What I am proposing is not that a hundred percent of available funding should go to grassroots science and zero to existing institutional science, but rather that we change the present situation where 100 percent goes to existing institutional science. If 99 percent went to institutional science and I percent to grassroots science, it would turn around the situation, changing the base of science's popular appeal and I think bringing a whole new vigor and a whole new spirit into the scientific endeavor. Another case in point is in your particular realm of expertise, Terence. Psychedelic research seems to me a very important component of consciousness research. We hear a lot about the need for consciousness research because we know so little about the human mind. A lot of funding goes into cognitive psychology, particularly if it involves computer models, because it can feed the development of new generations of computers. Relatively low funding goes into research that's to do with psychotherapy, because it's mostly the province of practicing psychotherapists who are funded by the people that go to see them. A certain amount goes into official psychiatric and drug research to do with tranquillizers, and so on. But the vast majority of psychedelic research, which has a lot to say about the nature of consciousness, the range of the imagination, and the powers of the human mind, is not funded at all by official agencies. In fact every effort is made to suppress it. Yet, in spite of official discouragement and suppression, research actually continues. Here's an area where for legal and other reasons, virtually the whole of the research effort is in the amateur domain. Here's an area where the formulation of appropriate questions could lead to interesting research being undertaken by explorers of the psychedelic realm.
Terence I quite agree. This would be an obvious area where the simple codification and making available of data would have a tremendous impact on the models being developed within the field.
Rupert A related area is astrology, and the so-called pseudosciences, altogether funded by amateur groups. If the means existed for sharing the information that already is known, it could result in various experiments that would lead psychedelic research, pseudosciences and other theories, now totally rejected by regular science, to reemerge back into the mainstream and begin making a contribution toward the solution of our global problems.
Terence Human sexuality is another area where data is not gathered because of institutional biases that are conscious or unconscious. lt is probably one of the least organized areas of social research that exists, and yet it's central to our psychological health and our sense of equilibrium in the world. Nutrition is another.
Ralph One of the faults of big science is associated with the reductionist perspective, which has led to a gradual, progressive, never-ending elimination, trimming, pruning off of different things that are labeled pseudoscience, amateur science, fringe science, and so on. The paranormal, nutrition, all kinds of alternative medicine-all these things that are rejected comprise a daily growing group, while the number of natural phenomena studied by big science, official science, and establishment science is always shrinking. One of the important gains of the new model for alternative science would be to open up cracks in the structure for the reintegration of all these different threads, which represent a kind of a holistic approach to the field of knowledge, especially when you include archaeology, history, and social science. What we're talking about is bigger than science really; the reintegration of
the entire intellectual sphere.
Rupert So how can all this be implemented?
Ralph We've sort of derived a workable alternative system here, assuming that other paradigms in society will shift simultaneously. The key for the transformation into this new model would be changes in the universities and high schools. We mentioned several times high school students responding to prizes offered for solving problems. Universities have been one of the main institutions supporting the restrictive peer review, super professional, and archaic model of science. If universities were reformed so that they had departments of integration, interdisciplinary programs, and a holistic approach, they could play a tremendous role in preparing people to be amateur scientists.
The questions being proposed by the question centers should become part of the curriculum in universities.The kind of change we want is a recognition that the full holistic range of intellectual endeavor, including what we call research, is nothing more than participation. A person who's going to participate in life, in evolution, in building the future of the planet and the species, will find that among other things, it's necessary to do research. One can be an amateur athlete and an amateur scientist and an amateur historian and so on. If universities are preparing people with a model of self-education which can be continued indefinitely, then of course they would be teaching grassroots science. They would be teaching where to find the questions, where to publish the answers, how to use the computer to, and generally how to do it.
Rupert In a sense, the move in science education towards students doing projects is working in this direction. The only trouble is that most of the projects they do are banal and derivative. It's assumed that a student cannot really do a truly original and interesting project. There are very few student projects that I've come across that can be seen as real research. But the system of student projects is already in place; it is mainstream. It's just that taking its potential seriously hasn't happened yet.
Ralph Students are demanding more interesting problems, and if they aren't forthcoming, they abandon science and go to something which is more interesting; where they have real problems that students can address, like computer science. The creation of a new model for grassroots science would actually give universities the opportunity to revitalize their science curriculum, thereby attracting better students, giving them something to aim at in their lifetime of research, without large grants and working in big laboratories for the military-industrial complex.
NotesCharles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (London: Murray, 1875).
Rupert Sheldrake, Seven Experiments that Could Change the World (London: Fourth Estate, 1994).