Towards A Quality Future

12/18/2005

December 18, 2005

If you are into Science or Engineering then these are exciting times.

In Medicine and Pharmaceuticals the mapping of the human genome is ushering in a new era of being able to potentially create designer medicines and drugs fully customized to treat your personal genetic inheritance. They will be able to stomp out disease before it begins. For physicians and pharmacists their field will undergo profound change.

In both Chemistry and Engineering, fields that normally evolve rapidly, a search is on to create alternative energy solutions made possible by the change in economics for petroleum based energy products. This will impact every consumer product imaginable.

In transportation a search is on for more energy efficient cars and trucks. Aircraft engineers are designing hyper-speed aircraft designs that can fly coast to coast in an hour. High speed rail is also now possible and some of the high speed corridors are coming online. Rapid interstate trucking is also being researched.

In computing, we are about to see $100 lap top systems and Internet marketing is taking off once again as energy costs require a more cost effective approach to consumer based shopping. We are entering an era where the application of computers is going to be more exciting than the evolution of the computer itself was. Telephony, TV, and computers are all merging.

In nuclear physics the field of particle physics is once more searching for new elementary particles in the atomic structure of matter and in Astronomy new insights into the creation of matter are complementing the fields of Physics.

These are all world-wide competition for basic discovery, some being conducted because the human psyche is curious about the building blocks of life while others are done to the tune of the cash register as patents and copyrights are sought to assure future corporate cash flow.

No matter though because for those with active minds, active imaginations, and great curiosity, there is a world of excitement and discovery ahead. Financial rewards will accrue to those able to effectively compete. 

It is sad that the American political establishment is out of phase with these opportunities. Normally our government would encourage the advance of science but it has chosen to ignore it and the opportunity for invention, investment, and job creation that goes hand in hand with discovery and applied development in science and engineering.

Not only is our government rejecting national participation on the world stage for alternative energy, and reduction of pollution and green house gasses, but we are also not funding the R&D that is needed. Congress is not putting in the R&D tax credits to get companies to invest. We are als ohalting much of NASA’s role as we are not able to sustain war and science at the same time. The Department of Energy should be bursting at the seams with creative ideas and is suffering from a lack of imagination right now while the Center for Disease Control is beside itself as they watch the Bush Administration soft peddle the possibility of a pandemic of avian flu that can kill 50% of those infected. 

These are fields that the human race knows how to use as job generators yet we are failing to educate our kids to be versatile in their science and technology knowledge so they can gravitate toward these industries. Schools cannot even hire science teachers today and generations are being trained who are less knowledgeable than previous generations in the subject matters of science and engineering. Calls for improvement have not produced satisfactory results so far and the ‘No Child Left Behind Act,’ is a cruel mockery for meeting our national need.

Thus America has entered the new millennium with a great track record and is now failing, falling behind, and is not able to compete effectively with the rest of the world. That is happening at a time when globalization is causing low skilled jobs to go to low wage countries. Americans are just pretending that these problems will somehow go away. They won’t

At the local level, our property owners are taxed out. We have no more money to pump into education mostly due to a labor market where our wages are capped and our benefits are falling and our middle class is shrinking. That’s a failure of macro economics.

At the Federal level, the deficit and wars are preventing meaningful economic investment by government in our national future.

The state level of governing seems a place where mainly federal money is channeled through the states agencies to meet local needs. In Minnesota our schools were taken over by the State and then immediately politicized over the intersection of religion and academic freedom even as the State failed to adequately fund our schools. We are seeing local property tax levies rise to unacceptable levels and the 2006 legislative session is going to have to deal with these problems. All of this was sold to voters as enlightened leadership that could hold down taxes and it has accomplished neither goal. The result is children who are ignorant of science, taxed out property owners, and under-funded schools.

This position is costing us big time as we loose our pre-eminence in science and engineering. When a 3M plant produces products based upon science and engineering discoveries then jobs are generated for U.S. workers. When that is done by Farber in Germany for example, then the Germans get those jobs. Even to the skeptic who says – “Oh no, it’s the West Indians who benefit,” they are correct over the long run but that’s not true until such time as the product becomes well established and somewhat rote and passes into world demand as a necessary low cost volume product. In the meantime, production is kept in the U.S.A. while product improvements and product refinements are created to fuel world demand. The economic trick for America is to keep a chain of such cash cows grazing in our corporate fields. To create the cash cows we need a skilled scientific and engineering community and investment. We are in trouble concerning the loss of such skills and we are doing nothing to fix our troubles. We are not turning out the educated product that we need for dominance either.

At the University level we are in good shape right now. Foreign nations and foreign companies send their best and brightest to attend U.S. schools of Science and Engineering. If we don’t get our house in order then our preeminence will change as we fail to find replacements for our college level teachers. What we need now is to take the best and brightest in our Universities and to have them create high school level course material that can be taught over our school Intranets and as foundation material for University training. Then we can get ourselves back on track again.

It wouldn’t hurt us to put in an Administration and a Congress that is pro-science and pro-engineering and determined to fix our national problems in these areas. When Gov. Pawlenty calls for creation of an alternative energy research center for Minnesota we should hop onto that bandwagon and ride it through for success on a bi-partisan basis. That is a good proposal but it requires an investment in our high schools to produce students that can be hired into the research and development labs and to create finished products. We need both and in parallel.

Let’s vote this November to get what we need.