Sharing knowledge

Despite the technological weaponry deployed against it, global terrorism is likely to prosper in the foreseeable future. So too are nation-failure, poverty, the number of refugees and the rate of environmental loss.

These are consequences of a widening gap between a minority of humans with access to modern scientific knowledge, and the vast majority who have no such access.

Knowledge is growing faster today than at any period in history. By one estimate, it doubles every seven years. However, our ability to share human knowledge is not keeping pace at all.

The 20th Century saw the greatest flowering of knowledge in humanity’s million-year story. Yet, at its end there were more poor, more hungry, more sick, deprived, disempowered and angered than ever in history. More knowledge did not bring greater equity - but the opposite.

Knowledge, which was once generally shared among people and nations, is now kept secret, appropriated, or simply not communicated.

For almost 300 years science - or human knowledge - was held to belong to all people. Ordinary citizens could walk in off the street to listen to the Royal Society. In the Napoleonic Wars, when all other exchanges, were banned, scientists freely crossed the Channel to speak at one another’s academies. Knowledge was then thought to be higher than mere national interest.

However, the driving engine of 20th century innovation was war, and the secretive machinery set up to serve warlike purposes still dominates our innovation processes. Knowledge became the closely-guarded asset of the few - a handful of nations, a few corporations, a few societal elites.

There were grave warnings, even half a century ago. Sir Henry Dale, president of the British Royal Society, said in 1946:

I hold it to be our right and our duty to unite in telling the world insistently that if national policies fail to free science in peace from the secrecy it accepted as a necessity of war, they will poison its very spirit …

The founder of Australia’s CSIRO, Sir David Rivett, too, spoke of:

... the threat, now much more than a mere threat, to that free trade in scientific knowledge of all kinds, which has been the glory of these last 300 years that have seen the most rapid advance in human knowledge of Nature since man began his course.

While it has extended privileged lifetimes by decades and brought wealth and ease to one-in-ten, the greatest burgeoning of human knowledge has failed, on the whole, to deliver anything like a fair sharing of the benefits.

One explanation may be that the system that engendered it was built, not for sharing, but for exclusion and domination.

As humanity progresses into the 21st century, the world is dividing into those with easy access to knowledge and its fruits, and those without.

People denied knowledge are not merely subordinated, they are actually cast out, playing the role of spectators in the human race rather than runners in it. Canadian Minister Pierre Pettigrew said:

In the new economy, the victims are not only exploited, they’re excluded. You may be in a situation where you are not needed to create wealth. This phenomenon of exclusion is far more radical than the phenomenon of exploitation.

Every 15 minutes about 400 children, the equivalent of a jumbo-jet load, die from malnutrition-related disease. They are also dying from a lack of knowledge. The knowledge to save almost all of them exists, yet for various reasons it does not get through, at least in forms their community can access, afford or use.

Sixteen million hectares of forests vanish each year as poor people struggle to feed themselves, and rich ones exploit what is left. Three quarters of the world’s fisheries are fully- or over-exploited. One third of the world’s farmlands are degraded. Almost three billion people will experience severe water scarcity by 2025. Lacking the knowledge of how to farm, fish, forest or use water sustainably, this process will continue. All these spell loss of livelihoods for tens of millions, anger, conflict, global instability.

The number of international refugees has risen from 14 million to 22 million in the last decade - and this does not include a similar number displaced within their own countries.

Out of 110 conflicts worldwide since the Cold War ended in the 1990s, two thirds were driven or triggered by resource crises - shortages that for the most part could have been averted through the application of modern knowledge.

Today 25 million people are dying in Africa alone without access to patented anti-AIDS drugs. Every year, about two million people die for want of low-cost anti-malarials. Permitting so many to perish in this fashion is prompting questions about the morality of the global innovation system, who owns it, who controls it and whom it serves.

A few hundred million of the world’s richest citizens enjoy access to the fruits of modern science and technology. More than five billion are denied them or simply unable to access them. They are becoming both angry and resentful. Those who can, are solving the problem by fleeing to the rich countries in an ever-rising tide which no gunboats or detention camps can forestall.

Once this problem was regarded as largely due to the unequal distribution of wealth and it was assumed that money could fix it. It can’t, because the problem is more profound. It is about our failure to share knowledge, with all that implies - food, prosperity, security, health, power, sustainability, jobs, sound government.

The explosion in knowledge in the advanced centres of the world, and the accompanying failure to share it, is tilting the balance ever-more radically to the few and away from the other 5 billion people. Historically, such events have often presaged a violent counter-reaction.

Mistrust of science

The exclusion of people from advancing human knowledge not only accentuates the gap between developed and developing nations. Increasingly it is dividing our own societies also and building suspicion and mistrust of modern science and technology.

US Physics professor Juan Roederer observes "an alarming erosion of public trust" in science, which is causing many societies and politicians to suspect the motives of the research community, to set in place measures to scrutinize it, and even to limit its scope and freedoms.

The "crisis of trust" in modern science was highlighted in the UK House of Lords Third Report on Science and Technology, which recorded "much interest but little trust among the public in science today":

Many communities and groups are starting to protest their exclusion from the scientific and innovative process. While grateful for the life-saving and life-enhancing benefits of science, in western democracies the community is already jerking the reins, resisting the relentless onward thrust of knowledge acquisition and application.

Some are retreating into age-old beliefs, new-age beliefs, superstitions, pseudosciences, alternative medicines, conspiracies and there is a general questioning, in almost all societies, of the morality, ethics, practices, motives, ownership and control of modern science.

A knowledge democracy

For the "knowledge society" to exist, there needs to be a change in the culture of science: its practitioners must come to recognise that the knowledge possessed by the community in the form of values, beliefs, traditions, morality, feelings, behaviours is critical to the successful uptake of scientific knowledge.

These values, traditions and beliefs are rooted in millennia of experience in the identification and avoidance of risk.

Science needs to recognise "lay knowledge" and "scientific knowledge" are equal, and necessary, partners in the innovation and adoption process. Without this, the support of society for technological advancement cannot be taken for granted.

A recent British Council international seminar on science and society strongly urged the "democratisation of science", cautioning that many of the institutional structures and practices of science today prevent this.

Citizens should be permitted to be active partners and participants in the innovation process, it said. Efforts to promote a democratic science need to encourage:

• openness;
• transparency;
• responsibility and accountability;
• independence of research and advice;
• negotiation of appropriate technological trajectories; and
• meaningful dialogues.

Such advice about ways to share knowledge applies not only to western democracies - but especially also to the developing world where it is most urgently needed to give people the power and opportunity to improve their health, wellbeing and sustainability and take control of their own destinies.

Much of the knowledge referred to here is free. It is not industrially secret, and it requires no difficult or costly process to transmit. It is readily available - yet little is being done to share it. Instead the effort is going to create more and more of it.

The 1999 UNESCO World Conference on Science, in its closing declaration, emphasised these issues:

• that there is a need for a vigorous and informed democratic debate on the production and use of scientific knowledge;
• the benefits of science are unevenly distributed; equal access to science is a social and ethical requirement for human development;
• that science is indispensable to human progress - but its applications can have detrimental consequences for individuals, societies and the environment; and
• all scientists should commit themselves to high ethical standards, based on human rights instruments. Political authorities must respect this.

In a new book Sharing Knowledge, I argue that the democratisation of science is not merely desirable from a societal viewpoint, but also from a scientific one.

The community can bring to science many ideas and perspectives which will result in the science being more widely accepted, rapidly adopted or commercialised, and of greater value to more people than would otherwise be the case.

The community can be a partner in the process of advancement and innovation, instead of an uninformed recipient or opponent. That is the true meaning of "knowledge society".

Democratising science will ease fear of change, allay concerns about loss of control or failure of ethical standards. It will limit exclusion. It will curb the growing fear and perception of risk.

The book proposes four-point charters for global science, technology and innovation:

• knowledge is the rightful inheritance of all the world’s people;
• the sharing of knowledge is as important as its discovery;
• science will engage the community in a dialogue, each recognising the other as an equal partner in human advancement; and
• partnership between all nations, developed and developing, in knowledge sharing is central to the peace, wellbeing, health, progress and sustainability of humanity.