Meeting Expectations: Reflecting On 30 Years Of Science

Of Science My big annual conference-the American Physical Society meeting-held in March, will have come and gone in St. Louis by the time you read this. That simple fact won't mean much to you, but it catapults me 33 years into the past. I gave my first scientific paper in St. Louis, in March 1963, at the same annual meeting of the same scientific society. I'm not one for the treacherous emotion of nostalgia, but this time I am giving in just a little. I remember how scared I was as a graduate student, and how I asked my adviser to hang around for moral support. (luckily, my post-talk questioning was benign.) Nostalgia soon palled, however. Instead, my excursion into the past made me think of how the 1996 meeting differs from the 1963 version, and of how science has changed in the intervening period. In 1963, American science was still galvanized by the Soviet Sputnik satellite that had been launched only six years earlier. I had not the least doubt that I could earn a living doing scientific research, the career I had always wanted. But when I looked for an academic job in 1969, science had hit a trough. In the late 1960s, unemployed Ph.D.'s drove cabs; had there been enough backward baseball caps, Generation X could have been born then and there. The only position I could find was at Emory University in Atlanta, then a smallish regional institution. Science has continued to undulate ever since, crest following trough following crest. Times of good funding came, driven by societal needs and intellectual excitement, and then faded. Science in the United States was about the Soviet threat, it was about curing cancer and AIDS, it was about winning the Gulf War, it was about exploring other planets. It would build the better chip to meet the technological challenge from Japan-until that challenge seemed to fade. It would find the ultimate bits of nature in the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC)-until the SSC was left an unfinished ditch in Texas. It would catalog the human genome, and that at least is still happening. I undulated too, from pretenure depression to a professorship and a chair, and my university crested as well. My research moved from well-known semiconductors and superconductors to novel solids, from a laboratory table to a huge synchrotron, and along new roads into biological systems and the mysteries of water. Papers poured out as I learned to run a group and keep the funding coming while doing the best science I knew how. Now science has again reached a trough. With the Soviet threat gone, with new visions of the federal budget, with mighty corporations shrinking their work forces, uncertainty abounds. Jobs are scarce, and so is funding. This was reflected at my meeting in St. Louis, where students and postdoctoral researchers roamed the halls in search of a job, and older scientists buttonholed potential funders. That happened in 1963 too, but now the search for jobs and money seems more intense, and people seem less resilient. Graduate students are questioning the value of a doctorate, which makes it hard to sustain intense commitment. My meeting in 1996 was also improved, compared to 1963: more women and minorities in the halls and lecture rooms; a broader view that values good applied science as well as the purest of the pure. And there are hints of new movements, but only hints: a concerted effort to broaden scientific education, merging rigorous quantitative thinking with other intellectual tools to prepare scientists for new kinds of jobs; an attempt to balance the number of new researchers against the number of open positions; a way to ensure that those trained in research are also educated to teach. My own career path ordains that I did not give a paper in St. Louis this year, as in 1963 and nearly every year since, because now I balance writing about science with doing it in the laboratory. Once that would have seemed unlikely; now it seems the natural step up to my next personal scientific crest. If we can encourage young scientists to use science in ways yet unimaginable, perhaps by the year 2005 my meeting will see fewer of them haunting the halls and greater numbers settled into satisfying careers - a variety of careers, so that the scientific undulations will flatten out, and scientists can again be sure that their training has value for them and for their world. Sidney Perkowitz is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Physics at Emory University. His book about the scientific and artistic meaning of light, Empire of Light (New York, Henry Holt and Co.), appears this year.

Meeting Expectations: Reflecting On 30 Years Of Science

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of