The Grand Challenge for Science and Math

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And the summit seems to have unleashed exactly the type of passion required to make the world a better place through science. After all, it is the students who, over the course of their scientific careers, will most likely be the solvers of the Grand Challenges. Take the case of Katrina Wisdom, a Duke freshman who is interested in aerospace engineering. Katrina wants to help develop lighter, more aerodynamic aircraft and spacecraft, which consume less fuel and are more environmentally friendly. At the conference she got to meet other undergrads who share her passion, as well as some of her science heroes. "It was amazing. I would not have missed it for the whole world," says Katrina. When she graduates and begins to build the plane of the future, perhaps the conference will have helped her with interesting ideas, useful contacts, and the type of perspective required to solve a Grand Challenge.

Time for a Scientific Renaissance

Such enthusiasm fills me with a deep sense of optimism. It is one thing for students to choose engineering over finance by necessity as the finance sector implodes. It's entirely another to have students so excited about engineering and science that they are willing to sit in an overflow room to watch video monitors of onstage proceedings. The sentiment of the students I spoke to reminds me of another era of science, harking back to the U.S. space program when NASA was trying to put a man on the moon and the whole country was pulling for it. Science was sexy, chic, and essential.

Today, the world faces more problems than perhaps at any point in recent history. The economy is collapsing. Greenhouse gases threaten to turn the earth into a giant steam room. Scarce natural resources such as food, water, and oil have already become international flash points as the developing and developed worlds jockey for position to sustain or improve their standards of living. Drug-resistant bacteria threaten us with doomsday plagues. In other words, if there ever was a time for a Scientific Renaissance, now is it.

Science can't fix all problems and it certainly won't provide fixes to every single one of the Grand Challenges in our lifetimes. But even solving one or two of these challenges could make the world a measurably more livable place for everyone. And those achievements would be worth far more to all of us than the king's ransoms reaped by all the overpaid hedge fund managers in the past decade, as many of the best minds on earth focused on Bloomberg terminals instead of the fragile blue globe that is our home, now and forever. The Duke experiment shows that engineering can be sexy and exciting. Perhaps our President needs to convene a national science summit and make the Grand Challenges part of the national agenda. The result might be a million more students like Katrina, passionate about both science and saving the world.

Wadhwa is senior research associate at the Labor & Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and executive in residence at Duke University. He is an entrepreneur who founded two technology companies. His research can be found at www.globalizationresearch.com.