Science byZiauddin Sardar

Exactly 20 years ago, in my earlier incarnation as a science journalist, I covered the United Nations Conference on Science and Technology for Development (UNCSTD). Following on the heels of the various UN conferences on environment, population, water, desertification and habitat, UNCSTD, held in Vienna in August 1979, was the last of the mega conferences of the 1970s. What made UNCSTD different from other UN "issue" conferences was our faith in science. By making science and technology the focus of development, UNCSTD was going to usher a new international economic order. Well, that was the hope.

This week, science ministers and policy makers from all over the world gathered in Budapest to assess the progress made since UNCSTD. But, 20 years on, science has acquired a more humble garb. The similarities and differences between UNCSTD and this World Conference on Science (WCS) - held under the aegis of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) and the International Council for Science (ICSU) - provides us with a good measure of the change in our perception of science.

First, the similarities. The benefits of science are as unequally distributed now as they were in the late 1970s. In fact, third-world delegates in Budapest argued that the gap between industrialised and developing countries has widened. Moreover, developing countries find it just as hard to get access to scientific information. At UNCSTD, G77, as the third-world pressure group at the UN was known in those days, demanded a new Global Information Network that would facilitate the transfer of information to developing countries. Segments of this network have been set up; and, one would have thought, the evolution of the Internet would have gone a long way to meeting the demands of the developing world. Not at all. Secrecy in science is as ripe now as it ever was. So, WCS calls on scientists everywhere to "uphold the principle of full and open access to information". That's a good sentiment but, considering that so much science nowadays is corporate science, an unlikely practice.

And now the differences between UNCSTD and WCS. These are quite radical. In Vienna, the problem of development was seen solely in terms of science and technology. What the developing world needed was more science; and science was something that could be bought and transferred. One of the demands of G77, over which a pitched battle was fought, was for "the elimination of the monopolistic and oligopolistic conditions in the international flow of technology, as well as the restructuring of the existing legal framework for the transfer of technology". The Vienna Programme of Action on Science and Technology for Development also called for a $2 billion fund to help in the transfer of science to developing countries. While the demand for some sort of global fund for science is still there, Budapest has shifted the emphasis from science as a commodity to science as a culture. The developing countries need to foster a culture of science, rather than dream of buying science with western funds, if problems of development are to be solved.

For science to prosper in society, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) argued in a submission to WCS, a whole outlook needs to be activated, nourished and sustained. When, asked the OAU, will a calculus be accessible through Kiswahili? A chemistry class conducted in Xhosa? Africa still teaches science in a colonial language. But by using their own languages, Japan, Israel and South Korea have developed thriving cultures of science. African languages need similarly to be made purposefully more scientific; and only through a linguistic revolution can Africa create a culture of science.

UNCSTD saw science as something that only male scientists do. WCS widens the brief: participation in science is now seen as a basic right of all human beings. "All stakeholders" - governments, scientists, the media, national and international organisations and the public - have a right to participate in science policy debates. The Budapest Science Agenda identifies "discriminatory barriers" against women, particularly in the developing countries. Equal opportunities for women in "entering and pursuing a career in science", we read in the Framework for Action, "is one of the social and ethical requirements of human development". But this requires inevitable changes in the "decision- making . . . mechanisms of the institution of science".

The African delegates at the conference argued that "androgenisation" of science, providing it with balanced male and female characteristics after generations of masculine bias, should be pursued as an active policy, particularly in the developing world. Textbooks and training should be made more relevant to the daily concerns of women, and science teaching should focus on the custodial roles of women in traditional societies. For example, they should be encouraged to study agriculture, energy and water management and health-related sciences. When more and more women become scientifically sophisticated, the culture of science will influence not only their own lives, but also the lives of their children. Science would thus be able to make a true contribution to development. A larger proportion of women scientists would also reduce the brain drain from Africa as women have stronger ties to where they come from. The African delegates suggested that a string of professorships, similar to the Unesco chair in women and science and technology at the universities of Ghana and Swaziland, should be established.

In Vienna, science was seen as an absolute truth, indeed the only way to truth. Knowledge systems of traditional societies were dismissed as mumbo-jumbo, not worthy of our attention. In sharp contrast, Budapest's Framework for Action states categorically that "modern science does not constitute the only form of knowledge". Traditional societies with strong cultural roots, it suggests, "have nurtured and refined systems of knowledge of their own, relating to such diverse domains as astronomy, meteorology, geology, ecology, botany, agriculture, physiology, psychology and health". These systems are as valid as modern science and represent an enormous, untapped reservoir. "Not only do they harbour information as yet unknown to modern science, but they are also expressions of other ways of living in the world, other relationships between society and nature, and other approaches to the acquisition and construction of knowledge." The Budapest Science Agenda calls for urgent action to preserve and conserve indigenous knowledge systems from "the growing dominance of a single view of the natural world as espoused by science".

While UNCSTD paid lip service to environmental issues, it essentially saw science as a value-neutral and ethics-free terrain. Science itself had no inherent problems; the real problem was a serious lack of science. The WCS sees science riddled with "a variety of ethical problems". Moral dilemmas are now an integral part of all new discoveries and applications of science. There is thus a need for "an all-encompassing debate on ethics in science". But in Budapest, delegates did not see "ethics" in singular, universal terms. The Science Agenda adopted at the conference argues that there are as "many ethical frameworks" as there are "civilisations around the world". So science needs an "open dialogue" with these diverse value systems.

At last, the developing world has realised that science is not something out there that can be begged and borrowed. It is something that we do for ourselves. This, in my book, is serious progress.

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