The Philosopher's Stone: musings on scientific ideas and breakthroughs

Back in the day, alchemists strived to turn lead into gold. Today, the modern equivalent might be engineering some kind of "bug that eats carbon dioxide and poops oil" (to paraphrase a lecturer I heard).

What are some examples of other "philosopher's stone" type quests in science-- where scientists are actively trying to produce something but it requires some fundamental leaps in either technology or scientific knowledge? I'm looking for either historical examples or current examples of projects that were either reached or are still elusive. I'm talking about pie-in-the-sky dreams of scientists; the sorts of things that shape research paradigms. But I think "rogue" ideas (like cold fusion?) might also be a good example.

My questions are:

1. To what extent have concerted efforts towards fundamental breakthroughs been successful? (i.e. the Manhattan Project, or IRRI's "Miracle Rice")
2. Is there a "shelf life" of projects of this type? (i.e. a typical time span when ideas are adopted and then either developed or abandoned)
3. What causes a project like this to be abandoned?

I was thinking about this because the more I learn about the history of science, the more I see that ideas we use in modern conceptions of technological innovation have deep historical roots. For example, the modern quest for advances in evo-devo traces back to (at least) the early 18th century.

Adoption of innovations and path dependence

A few articles recently came up that clearly demonstrate some of the basic concepts of technological innovation. So let's see what I can do...

First, as the folks at the Breakthrough Institute explain, one of the key factors for technological innovation is in bringing down prices of technologies and their inputs. This is extremely relevant for clean-tech innovation, because one could argue that there is no way people will buy clean energy en masse if its more expensive than fossil-fuel-based energy. Unless clean energy proponents can demonstrate a substantial improvement in the end product, consumers aren't willing to pay more. Traditional economics tells us that this means the government should subsidize clean energy or tax fossil fuels in order to account for the positive/negative externalities, but Breakthrough makes a more compelling argument that we should invest in new technologies and consider technology a cause, rather than effect, of economic growth.

So what happens when innovation creates new inputs (cheaper energy, new drugs, better crops)? People adopt them, of course. Not all innovations are adopted; I went to a talk last year where the speaker said something like, "people have a million reason not to adopt an innovation, and only a few reasons to adopt it." The context was why people don't adopt things that we consider universally good, such as medicines, etc., especially in developing countries. But in general, an innovation that gains traction follows a standard pattern of adoption, as explained here (h/t Arijit). Since the comments on that article complained of the academic language, here it is in the simplest terms: 1) more innovative/networked/wealthier people adopt new technologies first, 2) other people see how cool/useful the innovations are and start adopting it themselves, and 3) adoption of that innovation reaches a "tipping point" where you just can't live without it. For example, once all farmers started growing hybrid corn, its much more difficult to not grow it because they will outcompete you. Also think about cell phones- those few people holding out without a cell (or smartphone, to a lesser extent) have more and more problems functioning in a wireless world.

But what happens when, for some reason or other, the wrong technologies got adopted? For example, we find out that the chemical we've been putting in furniture as a flame-retardant is actually harmful to human health? Regardless of why we decided to use that chemical, by this point its passed the tipping point and has now achieved path dependence. Path dependence is where you're literally stuck producing things in a certain way. For example, we fill our cars with gasoline not just because its cheaper, but because there is a lack of alternative infrastructure for other fuels or types of engines/cars. So this flame retardant, although maybe it was initially more expensive, is now a cheap way for furniture producers to claim their products as "flame retardant," and the chemical companies are more than happy to keep producing the same cheap chemicals. This is a fundamental problem technologies, and is called technological lock-in. Because one technology dominates, it limits our scope of future options. This concept is incredibly important to many fields, including agriculture, health, and energy, yet remains poorly understood.

Perhaps this is for another day, but here's a great piece from Slate on the "myth of the lone inventor." Quite applicable to what's going on at an ASU conference in DC today.

Are technologies political? Facebook and more

Are technologies political? While baking vegan chocolate chip cookies for a class last week, I wondered if my hand mixer—one of those amazingly durable 1970s machines passed down from my mother—might be imposing some sort of value judgment on me. OK, let’s not anthropomorphize my kitchen gadgets. But Ruth Schwartz Cowan, a feminist historian of technology, would argue that even household technologies have politics behind them, as well as profound social impacts. Consider this recent article in Wired: the design of the keyboard I’m typing on might have a minor impact on the words I unconsciously gravitate towards. Or consider the impact of Facebook on how teenage girls present themselves to the world. Today’s hyper-connected teenagers grow up in a world that is always “on,” and there are social consequences. Maybe I was just a teenage freak, but I when I was in junior high it was cool to wear pajamas to school...

In The Whale and the Reactor, Langdon Winner argues that we should more closely examine the politics behind technologies. He writes, "Over many decades technological optimists have been sustained by the belief that whatever happened to be created in the sphere of material/instrumental culture would certainly be compatible with freedom, democracy, and social justice" (Winner, p. 50). The kicker is, of course, that many of our technologies are not compatible with these ideals. The classic example in agriculture is how the University of California extension system introduced mechanical tomato harvesters. This not only changed the physical properties of tomatoes in the supermarket (bred to be durable, rather than tasty), but created an economic barrier that made smaller farmers go out of business. Other agricultural technologies, such as the fertilizer/seed/pesticide packages of the Green Revolution, and genetically modified foods, also favor larger farmers. This seems to not just be because larger farmers have more capital, stronger networks, and are thus earlier adopters of innovation, but there also something inherently autocratic in the technologies and throughout their development.

These themes are central tenants of Science and Technology Studies’ co-production idiom. Politics shape science and technology, and these in turn shape society. But society pushes back, too. From housewives who started using telephones for social calls rather than ‘business’ to farmers who use cell phones to monitor their crops and commodity prices, we have both formal and informal social means to regulate technologies. These would be considered the “social construction of technology” point of view, as opposed to the co-production or even technological determinism I hinted at earlier.

A really great thought experiment on the social construction of technology is the history of privacy. Despite the ever-shifting impacts of technology on electronic privacy and security, there may be a time in the future where no password is safe and every Cory Doctorow explores this in his short story, “Knights of the Rainbow Table” in the Tomorrow Project. When hackers can crack every password code, perhaps new social norms will catch up with technological advancement, in the same way that we don’t constantly rifle through our roommates, officemates, and neighbors’ belongings (unless you are living with a sociopath, in which case, I recommend you leave now!). 

Back to Facebook, I believe that many of these new norms are starting to form. While it may sound silly, teenagers swap online passwords with each other as a sign of trust and intimacy. Before the days of smartphones, I’ve shared passwords with my roommates in cases when I needed to call to check an email, submit an assignment, or banish myself from Facebook (i.e. letting your roommate change your password). I also trust that my Facebook friends won’t share my embarrassing photos beyond the network, but I’m also coming to terms that nothing I do on the internet will ever be completely private.

Although I have a certain faith in how social norms mediate our interactions with technologies, legal regulation is still important. I might trust my friends with silly photos from last Friday night, but I definitely don’t trust a stranger with my bank account.

Fights over electronic technologies: consumers vs. producers

This morning the New York Times online's technology section looks like a war zone. Most of the articles, both produced by the NYT and aggregated by their affiliated blogs, focused on conflicts over technology, either between consumers and producers, the government and producers or producers vs. each other.

Last year I co-wrote a technology assessment about credit cards, writing that the three biggest tradeoffs at the consumer frontier of electronic information are privacy, security, and efficiency. To differentiate between privacy and security, privacy is the idea that your electronic identity is not shared with third parties, whereas security is the idea that the transaction will not be compromised (why you trust Amazon.com more than a shady website with graphics from the 1990s). You can read some of project partner and my musings about credit cards here.

As electronic technologies advance, the trade-offs between these three concepts cause friction that can lead to lawsuits or federal regulation. So let's take a look at the headlines related to privacy, security, and efficiency of electronic technologies:

• An iPhone That’s Cheaper, but Fake
• AT&T Customer Wins $850 in Data-Throttling Case
• Not just Google: Facebook also bypasses privacy settings in IE
• White House, Consumers in Mind, Offers Online Privacy Guidelines
• Homeland Analysts Told to Monitor Policy Debates in Social Media
• Chinese Computer Games: Keeping Safe in Cyberspace Keeping Safe in Cyberspace (paywall)
• Behind the Google Goggles, Virtual Reality 
• Selecting a Seatmate to Make Skies Friendlier
• Why It’s So Hard to Transfer Cash to Your Friends

Someone over at "Federated Media Signal" had the same idea last week, and compiled a more comprehensive list of the how the rapid changes in technology produce both new opportunities and disputes. Because producers have an incentive to make money (despite Google's "Don't be evil" slogan), there are negative externalities in terms of consumer privacy and sometimes security, which is when the government should step in.

In addition to the half-dozen headlines related to battles over consumer privacy, security, and efficiency, there are the disputes between companies over intellectual property, copyrights, and trademarks.

• Flickr disables Pinterest pins on all copyrighted images
• Amazon Pulls Thousands of E-Books in Dispute
• Microsoft Files Complaint Against Motorola in Europe
• Apple Case in Shanghai Is Suspended
• The Week the Cloud Won

So... maybe I should drop out of grad school and become a patent lawyer?

States of Knowledge: Autism, bird flu, and co-production

This week for class we read selected chapters from the book, States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order, edited by Sheila Jasanoff. It's important to first understand the concept of "co-production" in the context of science and democracy. Jasanoff's co-production is the co-evolution, co-dependency, and obviously co-production of science and social order. This is a useful conceptual tool for studying science, technology, and society because it refuses to cede to technological or social determinism that is present in other social science scholarship. For example, the theories of Thomas Malthus are social determinist because they disregard the human capacity for innovation. More recently, the controversies around eugenics and intelligence testing (as I discussed last week) assume that intelligence is a "natural," or genetically determined, trait. A technologically determinist perspective would be how technology ultimately shapes our society. For example, one might argue that the confluence of highways, automobiles, and fast food restaurants are the cause of obesity in America. But this ignores the social determinants of obesity, and also the social transitions in post-WWII America that co-evolved with a car-centric, processed food-based society.

Jasanoff further separates co-production into two facets: constitutive and interactional. Constitutive co-production helps explain nationhood and legitimacy of knowledge; more simply, what we consider nature and society, and why. Interactional co-production is more concerned with how we know things. This is broadly referred to as "boundary work"- or interactions between science and society/politics. Looking to the Science section of the New York Times, I can easily find articles that resonate with each category. One article describes how "New Definition of Autism Will Exclude Many, Study Suggests." The American Psychiatric Association sets the standards of mental health diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), with the newest revision causing fears of under diagnosis of autism or autism spectrum disorders. This really clearly demonstrates constitutive co-production, because the DSM definitions of disorders are shaped by both social norms and scientific knowledge. And there are implications for both science and society: presumably, the concern is that people who are not properly diagnosed will miss out on crucial health and social services. The scientific implications are also important: statistics will shift, doctors will change their practices of diagnosis, and new standards are institutionalized.

Another recent article helps demonstrate “interactional” co-production: “Scientists to Pause Research on Deadly Strain of Bird Flu.” As mentioned in the article, an absolute moratorium on research is seldom seen (even with stem cells, research could still continue under private funding). But it seems that cultural differences between America and Europe are playing a part. A Dutch virologist stated, “‘It is unfortunate that we need to take this step to help stop the controversy in the United States’… ‘I think if this were communicated better in the United States it might not have been needed to do this. In the Netherlands we have been very proactive in communicating to the press, politicians and public, and here we do not have such a heated debate.’” It’s funny how the same argument is used about agricultural biotechnology (genetic modification of foods); only switch the positions of the U.S. and Europe. And importantly, the article points out that although we have “never seen the scientific world so polarized, and that led him to urge the researchers to show good faith and flexibility by declaring the moratorium themselves.” This is a clear, although likely unintentional, reference to the idea that science governs itself, rooting back to Michael Polanyi’s “Republic of science,” and that science should be unfettered by government restrictions or impositions. In the realm of post-war science policy, old habits die hard.

Energy Innovation and the Department of Defense

Last spring I spent a lot of time learning about military history. Not really by choice, but rather in an effort to better understand technological innovation. In my classes with Dan Sarewitz and ASU's president Michael Crow, we constantly discussed how many of the core innovations of the 20th century had military origins. In other words, "Steve Jobs didn't just invent the computer in his garage" (paraphrasing my professors). Both computers and the internet have a distinct military heritage. 

The military often plays a role in technological innovation because most technologies need an "incubation" stage before they are commercialized. Since private firms are sometimes unwilling to take on this risk, the federal government often plays a role in incubating technologies (many of which will turn out to be failures) through research and development contracts (called procurement). Because of this connection between military spending and technological innovation, Sarewitz describes the possible backlash if defense budgets get cut in a NYT article yesterday. The article states, 

As the Pentagon confronts the prospect of cutting its budget by about 10 percent over the next decade, even some people who do not count themselves among its traditional allies warn that the potential impact on scientific innovation is being overlooked. Spending less on military research, they say, could reduce the economy’s long-term growth.

This is not good news, but Sarewitz and others are not calling for more weaponry, but rather more public-good oriented investments, such as in renewable energy. Because the military is a key user of technology, it has a stake in developing commercial technologies from airplanes to computers to renewable energy, which we reap the benefits of. And this shows the difference between the military’s capacity to promote technological innovation and, say, the Department of Energy’s (DoE). The DoE is ultimately not the end user, and is driven by different scientific and public policy motivations. This, plus relatively declining investments in renewable energy through the DoE, result in a stagnant pool of innovation. Yet soldiers’ lives depend on fuel efficiency, sources, and transportation for military aircraft and vehicles, prompting the Department of Defense to pay very close attention to energy issues and even climate change. 

There is an ongoing question throughout the history of science policy on the relationships between the military, industry, and universities. Eisenhower famously warned about the “military-industrial complex” in 1961. Yet regardless of the military applications of alternative energy technologies, this presents an interesting strategy for commercializing technologies on a national, if not global, scale. Many environmental advocates envision the government supporting an Apollo of Manhattan Project for clean energy. The Department of Defense can take on projects with a high risk of failure that other agencies and companies can't, because of their access to research and development funding.

We can relate energy systems back to Freeman and Louca’s work on Kondratian waves and core inputs in our sociotechnical system. They discuss how coal and iron became integral to England’s national industrial infrastructure only after railways brought down prices. Even so, there was political and cultural resistance to steam engines in some places (just like now, there's resistance to windmills, and other NIMBY issues with alternative energy). Energy is one of the most essential core inputs, and a change in this could fundamentally alter our society in ways that we cannot imagine (like how two-hundred years ago, it would seem preposterous that we could get fertilizer from the air). The military could play a role in incubating new alternative energy technologies that are not yet technologically possible or commercially viable. I agree with Sarewitz that I don't necessarily want to see more guns, but I also don't want to see energy security fall by the wayside.

Further reading: 

Chris Freeman and Francisco Louca,
As Time Goes By: From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution.

David Mowrey, Paths of Innovation: Technological Change in 20th-Century America.

Vernon Ruttan,
Is War Necessary for Economic Growth?: Military Procurement and Technology Development.

Conferences and sociotechnical systems

Flying is a constant, necessary (in)convenience in my life. While it’s great being only a 4-hour flight away from Michigan when I’m in Arizona, the endeavor requires careful planning, packing, arranging, and management of every little detail from my laptop’s battery life to remembering to drink water. I’m doing a lot of flying this month, and just got back from the joint conference of the History of Science Society, Society for the History of Technology, and the Society for Social Studies of Science. As a consequence of all this talk of science and technology, I can’t help but begin to see everything as “socio-technical system.”

If you’ve seen the movie “The Matrix,” you have an idea what graduate school is like for me. There’s a Facebook page for one of my advisors, Dan Sarewitz, that jokingly asks,

- Are you unable to sit through a traditional biology/chemistry/physics/engineering/economics course without constantly contemplating how your professor managed to "drink the kool-aid?"
- Do you constantly remind yourself that your science professors are but tiny cogs in a global innovation machine?
- Are you unable to look at a tomato without thinking about science, politics, labor economics, sociology, anthropology, Michael Crow, agriculture, geopolitics, innovation systems, the University of California, and climate change?
- Does the mere mention of the "linear model" make you shudder?
- Are you unable to synthesize your views on climate change in less than 5,000 words? 

If so, you are probably a former student of Dan Sarewitz. You will never hold a mainstream academic position, and your peers (and the public) will never quite be sure what your "deal" is. That's what you get for taking the red pill.

Yep, that sounds about right.

A major project of the science studies is to give social, historical, and political context to the technologies we use in our everyday lives. For example, I’m reading a book by Maria Kaika about urban water infrastructures. We don’t really think about where our water comes from every day. We turn on the tap and expect water to be there (in the Western, developed world, at least). What we don’t think about is what it takes for that water to get there and for an assured, constant, and instant supply of water at our faucets. During the rare times when the tap might go out, we get a profound sense of “uncanny” because our expectations are suddenly jolted as we realize water doesn’t just appear form the walls. The author writes about the hidden infrastructure of urban water. For example, let’s say you visit a dam someplace out west. We don’t really connect this with out water supply, and also the enormous amount of energy needed to move water from the source to tap. All of this is hidden from view and out of mind. Kaika argues that this is because of the artificial divide between “wild” nature and the sanitized urban home. So here we have not only a sociotechnical system, but a socio-technical-environmental system.

Back to airplanes, since I’m actually writing this on the plane! Airplanes, and the process of air transportation, are a more visible form of sociotechnical systems. We stare in awe at the massive planes used for transcontinental flights. But from the second you walk into the airport, you become immediately aware that you are part of a finely tuned system of both humans and technologies. We are enrolled, inspected, standardized, and shuffled into our seats. Usually everything goes well, but today after our flight landed, the electricity went out as we were leaving the plane. This was also an example of “uncanny,” even though it is a more visible system. We can see the nuts and bolts of the plane (and don’t get me started on rivets… we read a painstaking paper last semester about the technological innovation behind airplane rivets), but we still expect everything work.

Think about the complex and heavily embedded system behind energy extraction and production, and the technological disaster that this has caused. These aren’t just technological disasters though, they are most definitely sociotechnical disasters. It’s crucially important to realize that humans design, maintain, and run these systems (to the extent that we have control). But inevitably, tightly coupled systems, such as energy, increase the severity of human error and technological failures. The take home message is that we often don’t notice sociotechnical systems until they fail.

UPDATE: Here's a great link via Arijit on the nation's water infrastructure being ignored.

Boserup vs. Malthus: Hope or despair?

In contrast to the eternal pessimism of Thomas Malthus, Ester Boserup was a 20th century social scientist who offered a more hopeful view of the future, even in the midst of a neo-Malthusian resurgence. Whereas Malthus predicted catastrophe from overpopulation outstripping food production, Boserup came up with her theory of induced intensification. This states that under pressure for more production, humans will develop new technologies that allow them to grow more crops on the same amount of land. See my previous post on Malthus and agricultural technology for more background.

One of my ASU professors, Billie Turner, tested the Boserup vs. Malthus hypotheses in a historical study of agricultural change in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh has long been viewed as a Malthusian crisis in waiting, given its extreme land pressures and impoverished agrarian sector. Yet, the country’s small-holders in fact increased agricultural production significantly from 1950 to 1986 through the intensification process, and the percentage of the population below the poverty line decreased, according to some sources. (Turner and Ali, 1996)

What they found is that neither model worked exactly well- on one hand, technology has kept up with population, and on the other, just barely. But innovations such as tube well irrigation, high yielding varieties, and other technologies have meant that Bangladesh is largely self-sufficient in food production.

Boserup's theory is still very much relevant to agriculture today. One of my research questions (broadly) is whether technological change can keep up with climate change and its impacts on agriculture? It's a different "demand" than population, but an important one. Also, Boserup helped pioneer gender studies of agriculture (see Billie Turner's homage to Boserup here), pointing out that traditional Western models of agricultural development ignored women's role in farming. This has been a persistant problem with agricultural development. So yay for Ester Boserup, an inspiration to me and many others!

Genetically modified foods and public engagement

A great blog you should check out this weekend is Jack Stilgoe's "Responsible Innovation." My grad colleagues and I recently enjoyed discussing his "'How' technologies and 'Why' technologies." An excerpt:

Some emerging technologies are defined by how they do things. So called ‘platform-technologies’ or ‘enabling technologies’ like synthetic biology provide new ways of doing a whole lot of different stuff.... Geoengineering, on the other hand, is defined by its intentions (I wrote about this here). Its target is a future in which we are able to influence the climate. This doesn’t mean that geoengineering researchers desire this future. Many of them would despise such a prospect. But they are interested in it. So while nano and syn bio are defined by the how, geo is defined by its why. This invites different sorts of governance and difference sorts of public engagement.

But his recent post that really intrigued me was an interview with Stilgoe on engaging the public in dialogues about genetically modified (GM) foods. Stilgoe discusses how going into a public dialogue about GM foods is different than with a more politically-neutral, or less entrenched, topic (see my previous post on GM and risk; also see my post on public dialogues). He also talks about "upstream engagement," which means involving the public in science throughout the research process, rather than just dealing with the possible consequences of the results. On engaging with stakeholders:

[Q:] The report speaks of engagement with both stakeholders and the public. In the case of GM, what do you perceive to be the difference, and do we need a different approach for each? 

[Stilgoe:] Absolutely we need a different approach for each. When you are engaging upstream, everyone is a potential stakeholder; yet at the same time there are no obvious direct stakeholders because there isn’t anything yet for people to have a stake in, except researchers and the people who govern that research. In a downstream discussion like GM, there are clearly established stakeholders: farmers, regulators, politicians, interest groups, supermarkets, and animal feed companies who all need to find a way to thrash things out in a fairly old fashioned way. I think that confusing this activity with public engagement is unhelpful and puts far too large a burden on public engagement. 

I think there’s another important set of lessons that need to be learnt which we didn’t cover in the report, particularly about how to engage with stakeholders. These more controversial issues involve direct action, lobbying and engagement in ‘uninvited spaces’ that government is not controlling and is less comfortable with. With an issue such as GM, working out mechanisms for this form of engagement may be more important than convening a formal public dialogue.

Really interesting stuff to think about! Have a good weekend!

Defining my research question Part II

My big project of this semester is writing my prospectus, which is a full-length research proposal that I will later present and defend in front of my committee. I'm also working on my NSF GRFP proposal, which I got an honorable mention for last year and am really working on right now. So I'm working on the "big picture" prospectus, and then cramming it all into a 2-page (with detailed methodology, of course) research proposal for the NSF. Today I gave a presentation about my research, and was highly encouraged to look not only at public research organizations, but private as well. They looked at my figure (above) and asked the glaring question: where would a company like Monsanto be? I think we're onto something, so here goes...

Question 
How do crop varieties that are developed for short-term weather variability become promoted as a long-term climate adaptation strategy? What is the role of, and interaction between, international public and private research organizations in developing and promoting these varieties?

Motivating context
My research question revolves specifically around technological innovations in plant genetics, which are often promoted as a solution to climate change adaptation in agriculture. Drought-resistant, flood-tolerant, salt-tolerant, and heat-tolerant varieties can improve plant responses to weather variability, which is expected to increase under climate change. My research will examine how climate change is addressed in plant genetic research in the agricultural innovation system, and some of the farm-level implications of these technologies.

‘Agricultural innovation systems’ are typically viewed as the research pipeline from public international, to national, to local research and extension systems. The international research centers provide a centralized hub of knowledge production and, critically, innovations in plant genetics. Plant genetic improvement—such as “modern” (high-yielding) crop varieties, hybrids, and transgenics—has guided agricultural innovation systems over the past century. This concept has captured the imagination of scientists, policy-makers, and the public alike since the Green Revolution.

However, today’s agricultural innovation system is much more complex than the linear research pipeline. Farmers now participate in plant breeding research, and non-governmental organizations and private seed companies work in parallel with the public, Green Revolution-style research and extension infrastructure. Notably, the introduction of patents and intellectual property rights on genes and plant varieties frustrates the public-good-oriented public agricultural research, while providing an economic incentive for private agricultural research. The result is not a bifurcation of research goals, but rather a collaboration of public, private, and other agricultural organizations woven together in a “triple-helix” model of innovation, rather than the linear model. For example, this article shows the interactions between public and private research and funding:

Monsanto and BASF, for instance, are working with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center and national agricultural research programs in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and South Africa to develop drought-tolerant corn. The program is supported by a $47 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In March this year, the African Agricultural Technology Foundation announced that Monsanto and BASF have agreed to donate royalty-free drought-tolerant transgenes to the African researchers.

Innovation theory
The Hayami-Ruttan “Induced Innovation Hypothesis” seeks to explain how “supply” and “demand” factors influence the development of new agriculturally technologies. On the “supply” side is scientific agricultural research. On the “demand” side is farmers’ willingness to adopt new innovations. “Climate,” and other environmental forces, also affects the “demands” of agriculture, imposing new conditions that limit or provide opportunities for innovations. Can Hayami-Ruttan’s hypothesis provide insight into where we expect innovations to happen in the research pipeline, in light of the new organizational and institutional arrangements?

So what?
We imagine futures based on current technologies and past trajectories, thus certain innovations get “locked-in” and others “locked-out” of research and development. While climate is a relevant variable in the future of agriculture, it is not the only variable, especially in light of farmer livelihoods and the complexities of climate change adaptation and the overall resilience of agro-ecological systems. How does climate change influence farmers’ adoption of new crops, and facilitate or hamper longer-term climate adaptation strategies?


Further reading:
Parayil, G. (2003). Mapping technological trajectories of the Green Revolution and the Gene Revolution from modernization to globalization. Research Policy, 32, 971-990.

How the calorie shapes food politics, past and present

Despite feeling like I'm sinking into a puddle of quicksand as my work piles up this semester, there is one thing that always keeps me going: the excitement of reading about food and agricultural studies. I know this makes me the biggest nerd ever, but my dream job is for someone to pay me to write about whatever I want related to food and the environment. I might not be the next Michael Pollan, but I have a lot of academics and authors that I really look up to because of their work in this field.

One of my favorite authors that I discovered last year is Nick Cullather, a diplomatic historian. His most recent book, The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia, is a great read for anyone interested in foreign affairs, food politics, and the Cold War. The first chapter of this book is based on his previously published article, The Foreign Policy of the Calorie. It begins in the 1890s, in the beginning of the Progressive Era, with Wilbur O. Atwater and his invention of the calorimeter.

Cullather describes how the neutral technology of the calorimeter becomes a tool of foreign policy making, writing that, "With a numerical gauge, Americans could begin to imagine the influence to be gained by manipulating the diets of distant peoples. The calorie, Atwater declared, would determine the 'food supply of the future'" (Cullather, 2007, p. 341). Interestingly, Atwater worked for a time with Ellen Swallow Richards, who I wrote about earlier (much of her later life's work was in nutritional science).

The calorie became what we might call a "boundary object"- something at the interface of science and policy. It is used to co-produce both scientific knowledge and social order. Cullather shows how although the calorie is an extremely reductionist measure of health, it was used to define the post-world war foreign policy agendas. He writes: 

Beginning with India’s 1946 crisis, “famine” came to be understood as a national caloric deficit rather than the strictly localized emergency defined by imperial famine codes.... Caloric accounting reversed the flow of information about famine; international authorities decreed emergencies, while officials in stricken areas complied with mandated remedies. (Cullather, 2007, p. 362-363)

The invention of the calorie established a metric for modernization. Cullather shows "the capacity of science to renew positivism by inventing new metrics and new ways of deploying them. Quantitative reasoning was not a singular approach that could be disproved, but a succession of rhetorics tied to particular ways of counting. The inception of new numbering schemes revived a mandate for international social engineering" (2007, p. 364).

This obviously has a lot of links to later international development, including the Green Revolution and the population bomb. The complex ideas of food security and family networks were reduced to the simple metrics of calories, land area, and population size, and used to justify large-scale modernization interventions in developing countries. Today, I often think about how we have perhaps replaced the rhetoric around calories with the rhetoric of carbon. Instead of calorimeters we have climate models. Instead of a mismatch of calorie production and consumption, we have a mismatch of carbon emissions and climate impacts. What sort of inventions are we justifying through the normative lens of science and technology?

References:

Cravens, Hamilton, 1990. Establishing the Science of Nutrition at the USDA: Ellen Swallow Richards and Her Allies. Agricultural History 64(2):122-133.

Cullather, Nick, 2007. The Foreign Policy of the Calorie. The American Historical Review 112(2): 337-364.

Is agricultural technology the answer to Malthus?

Just a quick update today, based on some interesting articles I've come across related to agricultural technology and climate change. To start, maybe you'd like to refresh your memory with some of my previous posts on this topic? For a few years now, I've been following news articles about agriculture and climate change, and I'm noticing a pretty obvious theme. Biotechnology(!) Climate models(!) Nanotechnology(!) and other promising new technologies in the pipeline are heralded as the next big thing in adapting agriculture to climate change. Listen, I don't want to sound like a ranting environmentalist here, but I believe there's value in taking a slightly more critical approach to these technological fixes. As I've said before, technology and technological innovation plays a hugely important role in global agriculture. Yet social contexts of innovation are equally important.

Rodrigo Cortes-Lobos, a graduate student at Georgia Institute of Technology, explores this is at CSPO's Soapbox. He proposes a participatory, adaptive management approach to developing agricultural technologies for smallholder farmers:

No matter the location, small farmers require new technology development, but under frameworks that foresee potential risks or disadvantage that the new technology can produce, with enough time to amend those negative consequences before the cost to the users is too high.

Related, here's an interesting article on the importance of farmer communication networks in adopting innovations: in this case, a radio program about new agricultural technologies.

Finally, two articles on food prices, climate change, and Malthusian predictions. This NYTimes article is from a few weeks ago, on Jeremy Grantham and his reframing of climate change as a resource depletion issue. His argument seems to be that if we can frame it this way, it will attract rich investors who respond to market signals. Grantham reflects classic neo-Malthusian views about population growth, soil degradation, and now climate change. He is hoping for a second Green Revolution, driven by commodity markets. The second article is by Michael J. Roberts, an agricultural economist and writer of this blog. Roberts has a great analysis of food price volatility, market signals, and climate change. But his proposed policy solutions are as follows:

First, we could restore some of the funding to crop sciences. Research dollars could be directed toward the basic research that private companies are less inclined to undertake. Some might also be aimed at developing crop varieties more tolerant of warmer temperatures. 

Second, we could persuade countries to reform their processes for approving new genetically modified crops. Ingo Potrykus’s genetically engineered golden rice, developed in 1999, promises to substantially reduce the millions of deaths worldwide each year that stem from vitamin A deficiency. But due to regulatory hurdles, this life-saving variety of rice will not reach the market until at least next year.

Sure, it might be great if we could have global regulatory standards for GMOs. But the likelihood of this happening? GMOs are one of the most value-laden, contentious topics in agriculture. Patent rights are a huge problem. And when are we going to get over Golden Rice? The chances of it ever significantly catching on seem to be getting slimmer. As for funding more basic research, it's one of the easiest to make because it sounds so apolitical. But research, from the outset, can be inherently political. Scientists and donors are driven by humanitarian pursuits, but how do we know they are the right ones? Who gets to decide what are appropriate research goals? Is it possible to ignore the reality that private research is driving the global agricultural agenda? Why are we so obsessed with sustaining staple crop production in regions that are struggling to keep up with market prices as is? What about developing livelihoods rather than substituting technological inputs? 

I'm wondering whether this blog post comes off as ranting? My goal is not to be anti-science or technology at all; but I think anytime we bring up accepted tropes such as Malthusianism, the Tragedy of the Commons, and other narratives that really don't have any empirical backing (again, "miracle rice"), it's worth delving a little deeper into these embedded assumptions about human behavior.

[UPDATE]
Here's some interesting opposing viewpoints to Malthus. Population: more than a number. Agroecology as the next green revolution. An academic article on agricultural research and technological lock-in. World Bank paper on seeds, biodiversity, and patents.

I promise that the pika blog post is coming soon! In the meantime, do a google image search for pikas.

Seeds and sociotechnical imaginaries

Image source.

One of the coolest things about Science & Technology Studies is that it blurs the line between the social sciences and humanities. Scholars from the disciplines of anthropology, history, sociology, women's studies, and political science (among others) all collaborate to understand the world from this unique lens. The benefit I enjoy from this perspective is that I can take a more creative, literary approach to some of my research. For example, just today I was thinking about this post, and something about these pictures reminded me of none other than the Jack and the Beanstalk fairy tale! Stick with me, and I'll actually try to make a convincing argument for the connection to climate change.

Image source.

Image source.

I've been thinking about how we use the "imagination" of plant DNA, genetics, breeding, biotechnology, as a future technology to help crops adapt to climate change. For example, if you take the DNA from a warmer climate plant and breed it (either through conventional crossing, or biotechnology/recombinant DNA methods) with another plant with desired characteristics, farmers can then grow that plant without having to radically change their methods or machinery. I am developing a fair amount of criticism of this imagination because of two main things:

1) Agricultural technologies and practices have radically changed over the past 50 years, and will continue to do so (thus projecting a predicable, stable yield output is somewhat futile).
2) We cannot ignore the social and economic context of global agriculture and the scope of challenges that farmers face every day (reducing the complexity of climate change adaptation).

There are also questions of what are we adapting, what are we sustaining, and who will benefit/lose out? Many people attempt to address the first two questions with science; however, they are fundamentally based on human values.

STS provides some useful tools for dealing with scientific imaginations of the future: Sheila Jasanoff calls these "sociotechnical imaginaries," which, similar to the co-production of science and society, are visions of the future that embed and prescribe certain social assumptions. Jasanoff and Kim (2009) use the example of how the United States and North Korea had very different visions of how nuclear power should be used. One technology, but two different interpretations. This goes to show another theme of STS, which is how within "sociotechnical systems," you cannot always separate technologies from their social context. The two are deeply intertwined. This also means that there are no socially-neutral technologies- they will always benefit some, harm some, and have unforeseen consequences.

So imaginaries tend to reduce the complexity of global issues, and also obscure the social implications with scientific certainties. This is very problematic, and I wonder how the continued imagination of plant genetics as a savior will hold up under climate change. Until next time, read this.

Global science policy for innovation and adaptation in agriculture

Image source.

All summer I've been working on a paper, long overdue, for my Innovation Studies class. My main focus is how technological innovation in agriculture promotes or constrains adaptive capacity to climate change. Here is a review and my response to some recent global reports. (If you're wondering why I choose Google's Mendel-themed logo today, scroll to the bottom!)

Due to the importance of agriculture to international development efforts, international consortiums such as the World Bank have examined the prospects for future agricultural research and innovation, increasingly in the context of climate change adaptation. Especially in Africa, agriculture-based technology transfer has been a main focus of organizations like the United Nations Development Programme’s Climate Change Adaptation Team (Tessa & Kurukulasuriya, 2010). The "technology transfer" model has been upheld since the Green Revolution, but agricultural development paradigms are beginning to shift towards an "innovation systems" approach (McIntyre et al., 2009).

The international development literature also examines the synergies between agricultural innovation and adaptive capacity. A World Bank report on agricultural innovation addresses adaptive capacity, though not specifically with regards to climate change, stating that:

Using technical assistance... does not build capacity to innovate unless it is linked to specific efforts to learn from these experiences and develop networks that can both anticipate changes and bring in the expertise to deal with them as needed. In other words, firefighting approaches result in ad hoc responses but not in a sustainable capacity to respond…. Sectors or organizations require an adaptive capacity, whereby they are plugged into sources of information about the changing environment. The other facet of adaptive capacity is that it requires links to the sources of knowledge and expertise needed to tackle a varied and unpredictable set of innovation tasks. (World Bank, 2006, p. 70)

Based on a 2009 World Bank report on the same topic, innovative capacity and adaptive capacity are used somewhat interchangeably (again, not necessarily in the context of climate change, but rather broader economic, social, and environmental change) (Rajalahti, Janssen, & Pehu, 2009). However, as opposed to the emerging innovation systems approach of major development organizations, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and also under the World Bank umbrella, tends to take a more reductionist approach to science and technology innovation. They often make broad claims such as, “Even without climate change, greater investments in agricultural science and technology are needed to meet the demands of a world population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050… Agricultural science- and technology-based solutions are essential to meet those demands,” based on global models and metrics of yield and calories (Nelson et al., 2010, p. viii).

The CGIAR recently launched a “Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security” (CCAFS) program area that brings together global experts on climate change and agriculture. The CCFAS, like many mainstream international development agencies, takes a vulnerability approach to climate change and rural livelihoods. Despite some focus on reconciling the supply and demand of science (for example, through boundary work), linear models such as “Feeding climate information into climate-limited livelihood systems holds a great deal of promise” often prevail (CGIAR, 2009, p. 19). In the case of the CGIAR, there are constraints on both the supply and demand side of innovation in international agricultural research systems. The CGIAR has a history of investing in plant genetic research, so there is a bias towards plant breeding and biotechnology that can result in narrow research objectives (Dalrymple, 2006). On the demand side, adoption of technological innovations is constrained by farmers’ perspectives, which are often highly local and limited by time-scale (Dalrymple, 2006). Lybbert and Sumner (2010) explicitly address the opportunities and constraints for technological innovation and adoption of climate-relevant technologies (for both mitigation and adaptation) in developing countries. They point out government interventions that can have a significant impact on technological developments and farmers’ adaptive capacity, such as intellectual property rights and research and development priorities.

A report titled “The top 100 questions of importance to the future of global agriculture” identifies climate change impacts as one of the most pressing concerns of global agriculture (Pretty et al., 2010). The authors frame climate change adaptation in the context of tradeoffs in the ‘food, energy and environment trilemma’ (Tilman et al., 2009), and ask questions such as, “How can the resilience of agricultural systems be improved to both gradual climate change and increased climatic variability and extremes?” (Pretty et al., 2010, p. 225). Questions 59-72 deal explicitly with increasing farmers’ innovativeness and adaptive capacity through models of agricultural extension, participatory research, gender-equity at all levels of research and extension efforts, and improving overall rural livelihoods (Pretty et al., 2010).

The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development Global Report is another recent and comprehensive article on the state of global agriculture and science and technology policy. On the topic of climate change, it states that, “Agricultural households and enterprises need to adapt to climate change but they do not yet have the experience in and knowledge of handling these processes, including increased pressure due to biofuel production” (McIntyre et al., 2009, p. 3). The authors propose to increase the reach of extension education and access to natural and financial capital as ways to promote farmer adoption of technologies, as well as exploiting synergies between knowledge and technological innovation. In terms of climate change adaptation, the authors lay out two pathways: high technology (crop, soil, and climate modeling, plant genetic improvement) and low technology (irrigation, farm management practices). It is worth noting that the high technology approach of biotechnology and climate models are “supply heavy” and rely significantly on future technological breakthroughs, whereas the low technology approaches are “win-win” adaptations for smallholder farmers that both improve yields and increase adaptive capacity. 

However, one of the climate take-home messages of agricultural innovation scholars is that future technological innovation and global market trends are likely to be more important than the negative impacts of climate change. The predicted gradual climatic shifts will allow institutional innovation to occur in agricultural research, especially in light of the United States’ history of making cheap food a priority through market structures (such as subsidies and disaster insurance) and investment in technology. Bill Easterling (1996) predicts that farmers may face some climate related losses, an increase in global demand (thus the need for higher yields or more cropland), and overall increased constraints on farm finances. Technological innovations such as land management techniques, crop genetic diversity, and rapid response to inputs such as energy prices will be more important.

In my paper I examined how different agricultural technologies- from plant breeding and varieties, to irrigation, to climate forecasts- can present opportunities and constraints for adaptation. Something that's been on my mind lately is the utilization of plant genetic resources (hence the Gregor Mendel logo!) for climate adaptation in agriculture. More on that soon!

On innovation and saving the world: What does Google have to do with the Green Revolution?

Image source.

Do you think Google will save the world? A recent article in The New Republic by Evengy Morozov posits that Google thinks that it can. But will Google be brought down by the structures of corporate greed and profit-mongering? The author sets up a dualism between the forces of good and evil in Google's quest for cyber-domination. While the author tends to paint Google in pejorative terms, and undervalues the positive benefits of technological innovation, he touches on themes that resonate with my own research.

According to the author, Google sees itself as a neo-Enlightenment institution to organize and diffuse knowledge. Readers of my blog will recognize that this Enlightenment-based, linear model of science and society interactions is mostly false. Certainly, we can use information as a tool in decision-making, but it's also now easier to pick and choose the information you want to believe using Google. And as Morozov points out, Google's "algorithmic neutrality" is embedded with assumptions that turn out to be fundamentally value-based. This is a theme I see over and over again in Science and Technology Studies.

Altogether, the author quite adeptly navigates the ethical quandaries of a huge corporation like Google. His core argument is that Google can hide from it's value-based agenda using technocratic ideals. The article's main flaw, however, is ignoring the co-production of science and society that is going on here. Google doesn't have monolithic control over the internet, and is constantly shaped by feedback from its users and how they choose to adapt Google to their own needs. 

This whole article reminded me of something I read in The Economist earlier this summer, about whether the technological advances of IBM or the philanthropy of the Carnegie Foundation have made a larger impact on our society:

At the same time, there was growing excitement about the capacity of expert knowledge to transform not just business but society, too. Carnegie and Rockefeller reflected this in calling their thoughtful, long-term approach to giving “scientific philanthropy” (today’s donors call it “strategic philanthropy”), which they contrasted with the short-term wastefulness of much of the charity of the time.

In a way, therefore, IBM and the Carnegie Corporation had similar missions. The Carnegie Corporation’s explicit goal was to “promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding”. Thomas Watson senior, who ran IBM for over 40 years, made “Think” its motto and built the business around “the idea that information was going to be the big thing in the 20th century”, according to Richard Tedlow, author of “The Watson Dynasty”. He established a research arm in 1917, which went on to generate world-class, blue-sky research as well as more patents than any other corporate laboratory. (The Economist, 2011)

 And of course, this brings us to a discussion of mid-century agricultural development efforts that are collectively referred to as the Green Revolution. Morozov also makes this connection, writing,

[Google's] efforts at spreading connectivity, building Internet infrastructure, and promoting geek culture in the developing world are a logical extension of the American-led modernization project—aimed at bringing underdeveloped societies to Western standards of living, often by touting fancy technological fixes such as contraceptives (to stabilize population growth) and high-yield crops (to solve the undernourishment problem)—that began in the 1960s... Google’s caveat to the classical modernization theory—stemming from Walt Rostow’s belief in take-off points, whereby countries, once they reach certain levels in their economic development, tend to move in the same direction—is intriguing. (Morozov, 2011).

I wrote a paper last semester about how the imagination of the food crisis and population bomb, from about the 1940s to 1970s, drove the U.S.'s international aid agendas from food aid to agricultural development (self-sufficiency of developing countries). This also reflects the influence of philanthropy of private foundations, although the U.S. Department of State got involved starting in the 1960s. While the Green Revolution ultimately resulted in higher yielding crops, this was by no means a politically-neutral path of technological development. Inherent values about the connections between higher yields as a technological fix to both hunger and population pressure shaped the research institutions that developed during this time. This impacts have also been unequally distributed, as technological innovations tend to spread first to more affluent "early adopters." One of the main things I learned from my historical research on the Green Revolution is that good intentions most often lead to complex and unintended outcomes, given the nature of technology and its interactions with society.

Google, however, is different than the Green Revolution. The capital required to purchase a simple smart phone and access Google's features is almost minuscule. end users, especially in developing countries, are terrifically proficient at adapting phones, and even entire telecommunication networks, to local needs and conditions.

Image source.

Fortunately, international development agencies increasingly recognize the importance of technological innovation, in sectors as diverse as food security to maternal health. I sometimes wonder, if I could sit down with the founders of Google, or the administrator of USAID, what would I tell them about technological innovtion? Based on the story of Google, IBM, and philanthropists, what would you say?