Pop quiz: Which country is the world’s fastest growing producer of scientific research? If you don’t already know, smart guesses would be China, which has increased its R&D budget by 20 percent per year since 1999, or India or Brazil, two of the other recent big investors in scientific research. But the answer is, in fact, Iran, according to a fascinating study by Britain’s Royal Society, “Knowledge, Networks and Nations.”
In 1996, Iranian scientists published just 736 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, but in 2008, the total was 13,238. And these are just baby steps. In August 2009, Iran announced a “comprehensive plan” for science, which includes increasing national spending on research to 4 percent of its gross domestic product. To put that into perspective, China, which has turned into a research superpower in the past decade, aims to increase research spending to 2.5 percent of its GDP by 2020.
The story is that Iran is not alone. There is a new global race in scientific research and it’s so fast it may well be of world historical importance, a signal of a new, expanding Enlightenment, unconstrained by national boundaries, powered by multilateral institutions and open access publishing through the web, and, above all, by the belief, first put forward by one of the founders of the Royal Society, the Irish scientist Robert Boyle, that knowledge teems with profitable invention.
Reading through the 144-page report, one can almost sense the authors — some of Britain’s most distinguished scientists — marveling at the findings. Here is Tunisia, which spent just 0.03 percent of its GDP on research in 1996, increasing spending to 1.25 percent in 2009, and thereby adding 139 new research laboratories. There’s Turkey, now spending more on research than Denmark. And Saudi Arabia has just opened its first graduate research university with an endowment of $20 billion and a host of international partnerships.
Even Cambodia, which practically lost its entire educated class under Pol Pot, has boosted its scientific research from seven papers in 1996 to 114 in 2008.
“The story of 21st century science so far is one of dramatic growth and broadening horizons,” says the Royal Society. “There are more people conducting research, spending more money, publishing and accessing science than ever before,” driven, it says — quoting from a report by the Turkish Academy of Sciences — by “a burning curiosity, a tormenting need to know.”
Obviously, all this spending speaks to something else that burns brightly in the minds of governments and businesses, that all this spending on research will generate economic prosperity and a host of social benefits. Quantity, here, doesn’t necessarily mean quality.
Less obvious, but perhaps even more important is the collaborative nature of this global race. Buried in those thousands of Iranian research papers is the number 472, the percent increase in collaboration between Iranian and American scientists on co-authored papers.
And when the going gets tough between nation-states, it is this shared quest for knowledge, this common bond of curiosity, which keeps scientists talking. As the Royal Society reminds us, “Following the Iranian elections in June 2009, Iranian scientists called out to the international research community to ‘do everything possible to promote continued contact with colleagues in Iran, if only to promote détente between Iran and the West when relations are contentious.’”
A case in point of science bridging seemingly entrenched political divides is Iranian participation, along with scientists from Israel and the Palestinian Authority, in the Synchroton-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East, a costly technology for analyzing the structure of substances essential for doing world-class science. The project was inspired by Stanford University Professor Herman Winick, facilitated by a gift of equipment from Germany, developed by UNESCO, and built in Jordan.
While it would be reading too much into these collaborations to see evidence of a new kind of science-based geopolitics, these developments, when added to the power of the web to circulate research and connect scientists, are nothing short of amazing; at least, they certainly would have amazed all those 18th and 19th century botanists, chemists and engineers, amateurs and geniuses alike, who believed, passionately, in spreading knowledge for the betterment of mankind.
And yet, this portrait of a world in a state of transformation, sharing knowledge on a scale as never before, made little impression in the American media. The most excitement seemed to come from reporting that China is set to overtake the U.S. in scientific output in two years, a new take on the “Rising Sun” menace, which predicted our economic doom at the hands of Japan in the 1980s. The “trend lines are clear,” said USA Today.
What the Royal Society actually said was that China would not overtake the U.S. in practice. China started from a low baseline of research, so when it expanded, the only way was up; this doesn’t mean it can keep expanding at the same rate. A more challenging trend for China to reverse is that 70 percent of the 1.06 million Chinese students who studied abroad between 1978 and 2006 didn’t return.
In 1996, Iranian scientists published just 736 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, but in 2008, the total was 13,238. And these are just baby steps. In August 2009, Iran announced a “comprehensive plan” for science, which includes increasing national spending on research to 4 percent of its gross domestic product. To put that into perspective, China, which has turned into a research superpower in the past decade, aims to increase research spending to 2.5 percent of its GDP by 2020.
The story is that Iran is not alone. There is a new global race in scientific research and it’s so fast it may well be of world historical importance, a signal of a new, expanding Enlightenment, unconstrained by national boundaries, powered by multilateral institutions and open access publishing through the web, and, above all, by the belief, first put forward by one of the founders of the Royal Society, the Irish scientist Robert Boyle, that knowledge teems with profitable invention.
Reading through the 144-page report, one can almost sense the authors — some of Britain’s most distinguished scientists — marveling at the findings. Here is Tunisia, which spent just 0.03 percent of its GDP on research in 1996, increasing spending to 1.25 percent in 2009, and thereby adding 139 new research laboratories. There’s Turkey, now spending more on research than Denmark. And Saudi Arabia has just opened its first graduate research university with an endowment of $20 billion and a host of international partnerships.
Even Cambodia, which practically lost its entire educated class under Pol Pot, has boosted its scientific research from seven papers in 1996 to 114 in 2008.
“The story of 21st century science so far is one of dramatic growth and broadening horizons,” says the Royal Society. “There are more people conducting research, spending more money, publishing and accessing science than ever before,” driven, it says — quoting from a report by the Turkish Academy of Sciences — by “a burning curiosity, a tormenting need to know.”
Obviously, all this spending speaks to something else that burns brightly in the minds of governments and businesses, that all this spending on research will generate economic prosperity and a host of social benefits. Quantity, here, doesn’t necessarily mean quality.
Less obvious, but perhaps even more important is the collaborative nature of this global race. Buried in those thousands of Iranian research papers is the number 472, the percent increase in collaboration between Iranian and American scientists on co-authored papers.
And when the going gets tough between nation-states, it is this shared quest for knowledge, this common bond of curiosity, which keeps scientists talking. As the Royal Society reminds us, “Following the Iranian elections in June 2009, Iranian scientists called out to the international research community to ‘do everything possible to promote continued contact with colleagues in Iran, if only to promote détente between Iran and the West when relations are contentious.’”
A case in point of science bridging seemingly entrenched political divides is Iranian participation, along with scientists from Israel and the Palestinian Authority, in the Synchroton-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East, a costly technology for analyzing the structure of substances essential for doing world-class science. The project was inspired by Stanford University Professor Herman Winick, facilitated by a gift of equipment from Germany, developed by UNESCO, and built in Jordan.
While it would be reading too much into these collaborations to see evidence of a new kind of science-based geopolitics, these developments, when added to the power of the web to circulate research and connect scientists, are nothing short of amazing; at least, they certainly would have amazed all those 18th and 19th century botanists, chemists and engineers, amateurs and geniuses alike, who believed, passionately, in spreading knowledge for the betterment of mankind.
And yet, this portrait of a world in a state of transformation, sharing knowledge on a scale as never before, made little impression in the American media. The most excitement seemed to come from reporting that China is set to overtake the U.S. in scientific output in two years, a new take on the “Rising Sun” menace, which predicted our economic doom at the hands of Japan in the 1980s. The “trend lines are clear,” said USA Today.
What the Royal Society actually said was that China would not overtake the U.S. in practice. China started from a low baseline of research, so when it expanded, the only way was up; this doesn’t mean it can keep expanding at the same rate. A more challenging trend for China to reverse is that 70 percent of the 1.06 million Chinese students who studied abroad between 1978 and 2006 didn’t return.