Is today's scientific enterprise too cautious?
That's the provocative question at the center of an upcoming debate on Johns Hopkins University's Homewood campus over whether the systems and funding streams that have enabled countless scientific breakthroughs over the year, from lifesaving vaccines and gene editing to satellites and the internet, have come to dampen the potential for game-changing advancements that bolster our health, economy, and security.
Free and open to the public, the event takes place at Shriver Hall on Tuesday, May 5, at 6 p.m. Anyone interested in attending or in streaming the live broadcast online can register in advance.
"Science is funded by taxpayer dollars in the United States, and conversations like this offer a rare chance to reflect on how science can better serve the public and find bold solutions to problems in our communities," says political scientist Adam Seth Levine, a professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins who specializes in collaboration in civic life.
The event marks the academic year's final installment of the Hopkins Forum, a debate series hosted by the university's Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute and the nonpartisan, nonprofit media platform Open to Debate. The forum brings together voices with multiple viewpoints—researchers, policymakers, journalists, advocates, students, and community members—to engage in civil discourse on pressing issues related to global democracy at a time of deep polarization and division.
Previous Hopkins Forum debates focused on the degree to which artificial intelligence will make human workers obsolete and whether the federal government needs to more closely regulate or break up large technology conglomerates in the U.S. Another delved into the legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic—and the degree to which public health systems failed society or the opposite occurred: Society failed public health.
For Levine, "debate is the lifeblood and heartbeat of democracy," a force that involves "not just exchanging opinions, [but also] collectively stress-testing our reasoning and creating an environment to discover solutions that no single perspective could reach alone."
Levine, whose latest book is Collaborate Now! How Expertise Becomes Useful in Civic Life (Cambridge University Press, 2024), says the best ideas and innovations arise from debate, an ancient art form that requires us to "challenge consensus through evidence and argument," while "challenging our preconceptions and [harnessing] the intellectual courage to change our minds when presented with better evidence."
The upcoming debate
On May 5, panelists will consider how longstanding peer-review and publishing processes, funding structures, and institutional incentives shape the kind of research that gets pursued—and the possibilities left behind. The debate comes amid intensifying commentary, on both the left and the right, about the state of a federal funding model that has made the country a global leader in science, medicine, and technology over the past eight decades. Established after World War II (with roots dating farther back), this research enterprise represents a model in which the federal government funds large portions of research across universities, federal laboratories, private companies, and other organizations.
During the debate, the following panelists will argue that the existing enterprise is too risk-averse:
- Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University; founder of Emergent Ventures; and author of the New York Times bestselling book The Great Stagnation: How America Ate all the Low-hanging Fruit of Modern Society, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (Dutton 2011)
- Brandon Ogbunu, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University and a professor at the Santa Fe Institute
Arguing that the enterprise is not too risk-averse will be:
- Kate Biberdorf, a professor for the public understanding of science at the University of Notre Dame and a science entertainer ("Kate the Chemist")
- The Honorable Sethuraman Panchanathan, the 15th director of the National Science Foundation; a professor of technology and innovation and foundation chair in computing and augmented intelligence at Arizona State University; and the founder of the Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing, or CUbiC
Emmy award-winning journalist John Donvan, a correspondent for ABC News' "Nightline," will moderate the debate and field questions from the audience.
A critical conversation
For political economy historian Louis Hyman, a professor at Johns Hopkins, the debate asks a vital question that isn't easy to answer—and warrants discussion.
"Historically, long-term economic growth in our country has come from scientific and technological discovery," Hyman says.
Yet Cowen and other thought leaders have made compelling arguments that question this trajectory.
"Cowen's The Great Stagnation, published 15 years ago, argued that despite appearances, we were living through a desert of progress compared to earlier periods in the last two centuries," he says. "Yet in the following decade, basic science enabled advancements like the gene-editing tool CRISPR and LLMs (large language models) that are potentially reinventing the foundations of our future economy."
This begs the question: "Is science too risk-averse, or is it doing exactly what it needs to be doing?" Hyman asks.
The question comes at a timely moment.
"Trust in science is eroding among the broader public—it's been politicized and trending downward since the pandemic," Levine says. "Trust is tied to whether people think scientific research benefits them, and it's up to us as a university and larger society to have these important conversations about how science can safeguard the health, wealth, and security of our country and world."
