A thought about science and innovation for development

The United Nations Computer Center was established in the 1940s. I worked in computer centers in Chile as a Peace Corps volunteer in the mid 1960s, and I worked on a project seeking to introduce computers in health planning in Colombia in the early 1970s. We got the first personal computer in USAID in our office in 1981, and under a project I managed the National Academy of Sciences held a series of meetings and published a series of reports on the role of microcomputers in development in the 1980s. My contractors organized a meeting for USAID on internetworking of computers in 1991. There has been a similar long term development of telephony, including fiber optics and satellite communications and importantly the development of low-cost mobile phones utilizing micro-electronics and improved battery technology. The Information Revolution is far from over and the diffusion of existing technology to developing nations is far from complete. I suggest that it was important to start six decades ago to initiate the capacity in developing nations to participate in the Information Revolution half a century ago, even though the major benefits from that participation would be long in the coming.

In 1981 the National Academy of Sciences program that I managed held a major project on the applications of biotechnology to development, leading to the creation of a number of programs in USAID to support the development of biotechnology capacity in developing nations through the 1980s and 1990s. It seems clear that it is only now that the applications of biotechnology to improving agriculture and health technologies are really taking off -- that there will be decades of productive effort to develop and diffuse biotech based technologies for developing nations. Yet I believe that the work starting three decades ago to build the technology to appreciate and utilize (and regulate) biotechnology was important to the diffusion of the technology now and in the future.

In the early 1990s I helped create an online database on the applications of nanotechnology for developing countries. That technology is now developing quickly and applications are beginning to appear for developing nations. Like biotechnology, there are concerns specific to nanotechnology that require unique capacities to be created in developing nations, including the capacity to regulate the use of the technology.

Last week the USAID Science Advisor asked me what might be the next emerging technology with potential revolutionary potential for developing nations. My response -- the technology to improve our ability to think and to teach. That technology will emerge from neurobiology, cognitive science and indeed artificial intelligence and computer science. I believe now is the time to begin making small grants for exploratory research in these fields in developing nations, perhaps funding collaborative research with centers of excellence in these sciences in the United States and other developed nations.

Whenever the funding for early efforts to build capacity in an emerging technology in developing nations is discussed, the issue is raised as to how such investments can be justified when there are so many competing needs for adaptations and applications of existing technologies, not to mention direct aid to the poor. Yet without the early capacity building efforts, the life saving applications of the emerging technologies in developing nations will be delayed by years or decades. Indeed, even with the early capacity building efforts in information and communications technology there has been an enormous "digital divide". So too, there is a huge bio divide between the applications of biotechnology that could have been possible in developing countries and those which have in fact emerged.

At the least, there need to be small programs to fund research and development using new and emerging technologies in developing nations -- efforts which will build capacity by working in the fields, the best of available approaches.