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Leading Edge
Commentary
Cell 136, January 9, 2009 ©2009 Elsevier Inc. 9
Bill Gates, arguably the world’s most
famous technocrat, gave a remarkable
speech during the 2008 Davos World
Ec onom ic F orum , ca lli ng fo r a n ew f orm
of capitalism to go beyond traditional
philanthropy and government aid. Cit-
ing examples ranging from the develop-
ment o f s of tware fo r p eo pl e w ho ca nno t
read to developing vaccines at a price
that Africans can afford to pay, Gates
said such projects “…provide a hint of
what we can accomplish if people who
are experts on needs in the develop-
ing world meet with scientists who
understand what the break throughs
are, whether it’s in software or drugs”
(http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/
exec/billg/speeches/2008/01-24WEF-
Davos.mspx). He suggested that we
need to develop a new business model
that would allow a combination of the
motivation to help hum anity and the
pro t motive to drive development. He
called it “creative capitalism,” capital-
ism leavened by a pinch of idealism
and altruistic desire to bet ter the lot of
others.
Scientists and engineers have an
important role to play in creating what
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman
calls a “at world,” a world of economic
opportunity made equal through elec-
tronic communication technologies (http://
www.thomaslfriedman.com/ bookshelf/
the-world-is-at). This transformation has
not yet penetrated into the poorest parts
of the world and needs much more scien-
tic and technical investment. But today,
most scientists look to foreign institutions
for top-notch graduate students and post-
docs to populate their laboratories. The
notion of becoming a science diplomat, of
taking time out from a busy and competi-
tive career to teach, develop research col-
laborations, or start a business in the least
advanced countries is just not on the radar
screen for most scientists and engineers.
Yet there are such opportunities, both in
the US Depar tment of State and the US
Agency for International Development
(USAID), as well as in non-governmen-
tal organizations, such as the National
Academy of Sciences, for scientists
and engineers to use their scientic and
technical skills in the service of interna-
tional diplomacy.
I took one such opportunity last year
when, as a geneticist and molecular
biologist at the Pennsylvania State Uni-
versity, I was invited to serve as the Sci-
ence and Technology Adviser to the US
Secretary of State. My position is not a
political one: I have served current Sec-
retary of State Condoleeza Rice and I
will serve Secretary-designate Hillary
Clinton upon her assumption of ofce
this month. I accepted the position
because my involvement in scientic
interactions between US scientists and
scientists in the former Soviet Union
through the 1990s convinced me of the
profound stabilizing inuence that sci-
entic interactions can exert between
countries with deeply discordant ideolo-
gies and political systems. Not long after
I joined the State Department, I received
an invitation from USAID Administrator
Henrietta Fore to be her Science and
Technology Adviser, as well. The mission
she gave me was to assist her in restor-
ing the scientic and technical strength
of the agency to enable the better use of
science and technology for international
development.
My primary task at both the US
Department of State, the home base of
our international diplomatic co rps, and
USAID is to increase scientic input
into the many activities of the Depart-
ment and the Agency. The Ofce of
the Science Adviser to the Secretar y
of State was e stablis hed in 2000 in
response to a National Research Coun-
cil study, titled “ The Pervasive Role of
Science, Technolog y, a nd Health in
Foreign Policy” (http://books.nap.edu/
openbook.php?isbn=0309067855),
that highlighted the attrition of scien-
tists from State Department ranks at a
time when the importance of science
and technology was expanding in every
aspect of foreig n p olicy. Under the
leadership of the rst Science Adviser
to the Secretar y of State, Dr. N orman
Neureiter, the number of active scien-
tists in the depar tment began to grow
again as he promoted the expansion
of the AAAS Science Diplomacy Fel-
lows program (http://fellowships.aaas.
org/02_ Areas /02_index.shtml) within
the State Depar tment. Today we have
roughly 30 new AAAS Fellows joining
us every year for 1–2 years of service.
Many stay on to make careers in the
State Department, becoming science
diplomats serving either in Washington
DC or as Foreign Service Ofcers.
My predecessor as Science Adviser,
Dr. George Atkinson, created the Jef-
ferson Science Fellowship program
(http://www7.nationalacademies.org/
jefferson/), which provides an oppor-
tunity for tenured academic scientists
and engineers farther along in their
car eers than the t ypical AAAS fellow to
work in the State Department. Jeffer-
son Science Fellows c ome to the State
Department for a year, funded by their
own univer sit y as they would be on a
sabbatical leave. The State Depart-
ment covers their local living and travel
expenses. Fellows then consult for the
Science Diplomacy in the 21st Century
Nina V. Fedoroff1,*
1Science and Technology Adviser to the Secretary of State and to the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development
(USAID), U.S. Department of State, Washington DC 20520, USA
*Correspondence: fedoroffnv@state.gov
DOI 10.1016/j.cell.2008.12.030
Science diplomacy is the use of scientific collaborations among nations to address the common
problems facing 21st century humanity and to build constructive international partnerships. There
are many ways that scientists can contribute to this process.
10 Cell 136, January 9, 2009 ©2009 Elsevier Inc.
State D epartment for an additional
5 year s after returning to their home
institutions.
Jefferson Science Fellows are often
individuals who already have a keen
awareness of the importance of inter-
national collaborations and use their
association with the State Department
to broaden their inuence and involve-
ment in foreign relations and develop-
ment efforts. For example, Dr. Osama
Awadelkarim, a Sudanese-born Profes-
sor of Materials Science at the Penn-
sylvania State University, served as a
Jefferson Science Fellow in 2006. His
passionate devotion to enhancing scien-
tic and engineering expertise in Africa
took him to several African countries to
teach and to establish collaborations, as
well as to talk with government ofcials
and champion the importance of interna-
tional scientic interactions.
In a speech given at the 2006 World
Food Prize symposium, Secretary of
Defense Rober t Gates said the following:
“It could be argued that our inability to
continue our investment in human capi-
tal on a scale that we did in the 1960s
and 1970s is a factor that has contrib-
uted at least in some measure to insta-
bility in many places today and hostility
to the United States. ...The United States
was the key inuence in developing the
Indian agricultural university system,
the key contributor to the African agri-
cultural universities, and to Asian and
Latin American agricultural universities
as well. But such US programs are now
a pale shadow of what they once were.
Science has disappeared. Human capi-
tal development has disappeared. And
the investments for long-term institution
building have nearly disappeared.”
There remains a profound gap
between the citizens of af uent nations,
who have access to abundant food, up-
to-date technology, and excellent edu-
cational opportunities, and citizens of
the poorest countries of every continent,
many of whom lack adequate food, often
have no electricity, and have little access
to either the Internet or higher education.
The technological aspect of this gap has
been called the “digital divide” and much
has been written about it. Some believe
that the problems of the poorest coun-
tries are simply solved by cell phones
and inexpensive computers that can be
used even in places that lack electricity.
Certainly these technologies are impor-
tant and make the job possible, if not
ea sy.
But the problems are deep and stub-
born. Perhaps the most poignant dis-
parities exist between the countries of
the developed world and much of Africa,
where climate, disease, soil exhaustion,
and a host of other problems contribute.
In his book titled “The Bottom Billion,”
economist Paul Collier (http://users.ox.ac.
uk/~econpco/) offers an insightful analy-
sis of the many factors that contribute to
trapping the poorest nations in continuing
cycles of poverty and unrest.
The global food crisis of 2008 triggered
food riots in more than 30 countries and
calls for a new Green Revolution. The
rst Green Revolution, however, was
relatively straightforward, if not easy:
improved crop varieties and increased
fertilizer use. The next Green Revolution
will be more dif cult, even if we succeed
in overcoming the deep and widespread
mistrust of using modern molecular
methods for the genetic improvement of
crop plants. In a crowded world, we no
longer have the luxury of focusing on the
single variable of agricultural productiv-
ity. Food, water, energy, health, and eco-
nomic development are all intertwined.
Progress will depend on a high level of
education, particularly in science and
engineering. All will be impacted by cli-
mate change and politics—every where.
Climate change is a wake-up call to
the awareness that we live in a world
without borders. Airplanes can make
SARS and multidrug-resistant TB every-
one’s problem in a heartbeat. Trade
barriers between nations and farm sub-
sidies in developed nations stie agri-
cultural growth in developing countries.
The rush toward renewable energy from
biofuels accelerates deforestation in the
Amazon, however indirectly, and with
each acre lost, another multitude of spe-
cies goes extinct. Wall Street’s problems
echo around the world.
And all of these seemingly separate
problems turn out to be interconnected.
Food and energy are now viewed as
fungible. Growing the food—and feed
and ber and fuel—demanded by a still
expanding and increasingly afuent
human population requires innovations
not just in agricultural productivity but
also in water and land management,
food processing, and transpor tation.
Decimating what remains of the tropic’s
forests will as surely exacerbate climate
change as it will reduce biodiversity. It’s
one big thorny tangle: people, money,
food, energy, health, water, land, climate,
biodiversity.
How do we as scientists begin to
think—and act—on a global scale to
address such complicated problems? It
seems to me that we must rst become
citizens not ju st of our own nations, but
of this world without borders. We need
to see, experience, and identify with
the peoples and the problems of other
nations and to recognize the complex-
ity and interconnec tions among the
challenges facing 21st century human-
ity. And perhaps most importantly of
all, we ne ed to understand, at a deep
gut level, that all our fates are truly
intertwined.
We must move quickly to develop the
science that will allow us to model and
understand the complex system that is
our planet and its crust of human activi-
ties. We need to invent efcient, nonpol-
luting means of local power generation.
We need to invest in the research that
will allow us to improve how we manage
water, grow food, battle disease, and
build economies into the next genera-
tion—and the next. Science, of course,
provides the common language to build
bridges between cultures.
Education is a stumbling block. The
US has educated talented students from
around the world for many years. Today
virtually every developed country real-
izes the value to the economy of such
talent—and actively seeks to recruit it.
But herein lies a paradox: sending its
best students to be educated in more
developed countries exacerbates a poor
country’s problems because the edu-
cation itself—whether it is a teacher’s
certicate, a nursing degree, or a PhD—
makes it easier to nd employment and
a more stable life in a developed country.
Such “brain drain” has robbed—and is
continuing to rob—many poor countries
of their educated people.
These are the people who design,
develop, and maintain society’s infra-
structure—its agriculture, its schools,
its clinics, its power, and telecommuni-
cations networks. As well, they are the
Cell 136, January 9, 2009 ©2009 Elsevier Inc. 11
professors and researchers who gen-
erate and propagate the knowledge—
the science and technology—that are
essential in every aspect of life and that
are increasingly recognized as the driv-
ing forces of successful economies.
I believe that we need a deep para-
digm shift in our interactions with the
less developed world: from distant aid
recipients to partners in building a global
future. We need to bring the science,
the engineering, and technology and the
educational systems of developed coun-
tries to bear directly and in new ways to
create a world in which all people have
the educational and economic opportu-
nities now available almost exclusively in
the developed world.
I believe this paradigm shift is get-
ting underway—among governments,
in foundations, in the business world,
and in the academic world. It is driven
in some measure by necessity and per-
haps in some measure by the fact that
modern communications media make
the disparities among the nations of the
world harshly and constantly apparent to
everyone.
But there is much, much more to be
done and not all of it can be done by
governments. In April, Secretar y of State
Rice, Secretary of Education Spellings,
and USAID Administrator Fore convened
a global conference of college and uni-
versity presidents, companies, and foun-
dations (Higher Education Summit for
Global Development, April 29–30, 2008;
http://ww w.state.gov/g/sta s/events/
c26110.htm). Its purpose was to explore
new ways of connecting the institutions
of higher education in the developed
and developing worlds across the entire
spectrum of what contemporary univer-
sities do, from teaching and research,
to supporting technology transfer and
entrepreneurship.
The means of connecting educational
resources and people between conti-
nen ts ha ve ne ve r b ee n r ic he r, m or e v ar ie d,
or easier. From MIT OpenCourseWare to
digital videoconferencing and collab-
orative software, we can teach and work
between countries and continents—and
in real time. The Internet and broadband
connections are critical; availability is
increasing and cost is decreasing but in
places remains prohibitive. This is where
governments, companies, and founda-
tions can help.
Yet the challenge of connecting people
and resources remains, of making global
service—what I’ve called science diplo-
macy—a part of what we do as scientists
and engineers, whether we work in a gov-
ernment agency, a university, a research
institute, or a company. The traditional
approach of educating students in our
institutions and laboratories is increas-
ingly unacceptable. President Paul Kag-
ame of Rwanda, arguably the African
leader most supportive of science and
technology in developing and modern-
izing his country, gave an articulate and
moving talk at the recent Higher Education
Summit for Global Development. Bluntly
paraphrased, his most salient points are
these: “We provide you with foreign aid in
the form of trained and educated people.
You send us expensive consultants to
tell us what we already know” ( President
Kagame’s full speech is available at http://
www.gov.rw/government/president/
speeches/2008/29_04_08_education_
usa.html).
We ne ed ou r s ci en ti st s and en gi ne er s,
our experts of all kinds, whether in the
lab or in the diplomatic corps, to help us
jump the digital divide, both technically
and personally. We need scientists,
engineers, and entrepreneurs to coach
and teach until the world is truly at, to
call on Friedman’s metaphor again; that
is, until all peoples have the educational
and economic opportunities to build and
live in sustainable knowledge societies.
That’s 21st century science diplomacy.
