Crease: Is China winning research race?

Robert P. Crease is chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University and author of the forthcoming "World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement."

News about China was scary in March. "China is on course to overtake the U.S. in scientific output," declared the BBC in a typical story. "The country that invented the compass, gunpowder, paper and printing is set for a globally important comeback."

These headlines were triggered by "Knowledge, Networks and Nations," a report by the Royal Society of London that discovered a steep rise in publications by Chinese scientists. They now publish more than their British counterparts, according to the report, and are on track to surpass Americans in two years. On top of last December's word that Shanghai 15-year-olds outpoint peers worldwide on standardized math and science tests, this seemed yet another Sputnik moment -- a dramatic signal that a dangerous rival is a sudden and unexpected threat.

Is it?

We have reasons to be skeptical. First, the study measured the number, not quality, of publications, and the Internet has dramatically changed the meaning of "publication."

Remember when, not long ago, "having a CD" meant that a musician was a success? It indicated that the music was approved by a music-industry gatekeeper, whose job was to enforce standards in the days when music was costly to produce and distribute. Today, such gatekeepers -- in music, print and other areas -- are gone, or their role is much reduced. A lengthy publication list measures quality less than it ever did. One traditional measure of the quality of a scientific paper, for instance, is the number of times it is cited in other scientific papers, and China's citations have not kept pace with its publication rate.

Furthermore, consider the relative populations of China and the United States: China has a population of well over 1.3 billion, while ours is around a quarter of that. Isn't it a normal expectation -- and better for the world's long-term prosperity and stability -- for a country's percentage of global publications to be roughly on a par with its percentage of scientists and overall population? Doesn't it smack of lingering colonialism and residual racism to think that an underdeveloped non-Western country that is bigger than ours but whose research output has been lower ought to stay that way?

Finally, and most important, competition in science isn't necessarily bad.

In political or military competition, the goal is to vanquish your opponents. It's good to win -- better to win bigger -- and the more power your opponents have the less you have. These are zero-sum competitions: Candidate or country A's strength is rival candidate or country B's weakness.

It's completely different in performance competitions, the kind, say, that company employees might have in vying for an achievement prize. Here the aim is to do better -- but in a seeming paradox, you better your own performance by sharing and cooperating with others. It's not zero-sum: The better each person does, the better off everyone is.

Scientific research can be like that. In the 1950s, for instance, Brookhaven National Laboratory and CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), an international laboratory outside Geneva, were competing to be the first to build the world's most powerful accelerator: the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) at Brookhaven, the Proton Synchrotron (PS) at CERN. A lot of prestige and discoveries were at stake. Still, the two labs shared information, traded notes and even exchanged scientists to make sure that each machine was as technologically advanced as it could be.

Scientific competition is often grossly distorted in the media as a ruthless quest for prizes and ego glorification. That makes for great headlines, but it's wrong. At its best, scientific competition fosters a creative community in which all benefit.

In that sense, China's new productivity is welcome. Many of the 21st century's global crises -- from food, energy and health to pollution and global warming -- have a scientific dimension. Word that a collaborator in our attempt to understand and address these issues is publishing more than ever is good news.

So why does China's new scientific research productivity feel ominous?

The answer relates to the fact that scientific research isn't like a game or a business. Scientific research is enmeshed, in a poorly understood though very real way, with networks of social and industrial processes in an ecological relationship, changes which have myriad and often unpredictable ripple effects. Many fruits of this ecology are things like new materials, instruments, devices and other apparatus with commercial uses that involve zero-sum competitions. In its involvements in these networks, science ceases to be important for its own sake; it's able to enrich nations and becomes vital to a nation's economic success.

Consider an example drawn from a 2006 White House report on the American Competitiveness Initiative. A decade ago the iPod, the iconic digital music player that is now the biggest-selling digital music player of all time, was put together by Apple in the space of about a year. The company's engineers could do that because they were able to pluck fruits of U.S. research that had been around for decades: the "giant magnetoresistive effect" that had emerged from thin-film metallic multilayer research in the 1980s; the lithium-ion battery invented in 1990, thanks to electrochemical research; thin film transistor LCDs that were a product of liquid crystal science in the 1980s; signal processing methods developed much earlier; and so forth. IPods often bear the label "Designed by Apple in California Assembled in China." It would have been more honest to add: "From Products of the American Research Ecology."

The Royal Society's finding merely reflects the fact that China is encouraging its own research ecology to flourish. That's no threat. Suppose China decided to devote more resources to medical research than the United States and were on track to have its spending surpass ours -- would that mean that China has better doctors than we do? Not necessarily. Would that mean that Chinese citizens are healthier than Americans? Not necessarily. What it might mean is that China is beginning to care more about health issues than we do -- which would be disturbing, though not because we don't want Chinese people to be healthy.

In this new Sputnik moment, unlike the last one, what should trouble us is the possibility that our research ecology might be stagnating, not that our competitors' might be growing more robust. Even if they did invent gunpowder.