Culture the future dimension of science and technology for development in Asia

Abstract

Patterns of Change in Asian S&T Policies and Practice: Framework for a Cultural Renaissance? Twenty five years ago, at the University of Sydney in my own country, Australia, Asian science and technology policy and management first appeared on the agenda of international discourse. The meeting, sponsored by UNESCO and hosted by CSIRO, drew together some of the key players in the path that science and technology took over the next two decades. With comparative luxury of 1960s time, the meeting lasted five weeks; but time allowed key friendships between scientific leaders of the region to flower, and thereby set the pattern for some of the main regional science and technology relationships that followed. I had the doubtful personal privilege as Assistant Director of the Conference to be Rapporteur for the whole five weeks a task that left me mindful of the meeting's historical detail, but absent of youthful sleep. It is the historical detail I want to start with in this address. - Amongst the people attending the conference were three people, each of whom represented the different science paths that were emerging throughout the region in the 1960s. The first was Dr. Cyril Ponnamperuma from Sri Lanka. Involved in fundamental molecular biology, he subsequently became Science Advisor to the President of Sri Lanka and was involved in the NASA program analysing soil samples from the moon for signs of biological life before returning (in the anarchic violence of Sri Lankan politics) to his position as Director of his Institute of Fundamental Science at Kandy, in the mountains out of Colombo. Within the context of the deep ethnic divisions that were fueled by government corruption and Indian imperialism, Sri Lanka (and Ponnamperuma) never became forces in Asian models of development. However, what Ponnamperuma represented was the model that many in the Third World wished to adopt - that ascribed a fashionable status to theory and fundamental research, assumed development would follow, and considered exclusion from the deeper reaches of theoretical science was yet another way in which the advanced industrial nations were exercising hegemony over third world potential. This image of science and development persists in its attractiveness particularly amongst scientists rather than science managers; it was assiduously promoted by Michael Moravcek, the perepetetic American theoretical physicist who constantly appeared over the next twenty years in the region - looking in his 7 foot 2 inch height, as he emerged from the many aeroplanes by which he commuted, like an unfolding deckchair. The theory view of science and development continues to be championed by Dr. Abdul Salem, Nobel Prize Laureate from Pakistan, now the Director of the UNESCO-funded Third World Academy in Trieste. Although the Third World Academy is presently promoting the development of new Centres of Excellence throughout developing countries, the view that developing countries need to develop basic research as a platform for development has now lost currency and credibility under the onslaught of pragmatic commercialisable newly industrialising country (NIC) research. In the middle of the 1960s however, and within the 1965 Australian regional meeting, the 'Ponnamperuma' view was the accepted model of how science would lead to development.