Arati Prabhakar has been part of the U.S. research establishment for 3 decades. Now, the 64-year-old applied physicist stands at its epicenter, as science adviser to President Joe Biden and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Last week, in her first extended media interview since being confirmed by the Senate on 3 October 2022, she laid out her vision for that $700-billion-a-year enterprise.
Prabhakar, whose office is in a building adjacent to the White House, said the biggest challenge for U.S. scientists is to help demonstrate, in her boss’ words, “that democracy still works.” One of the best ways to achieve that goal, she believes, is through the government’s growing stable of small and agile research agencies modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), known for laying the foundation for the internet and GPS. (Prabhakar led DARPA from 2012 to 2017, after directing the National Institute of Standards and Technology from 1993 to 1997 and working as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.) Last year, the Biden administration launched the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which seeks to promote similar innovations in biomedicine.
The daughter of Indian immigrants who came to the United States when she was 3 years old, Prabhakar flagged a more diverse scientific workforce as another essential ingredient. But Prabhakar offered no olive branch to those scientists of Chinese ancestry who feel the U.S. government has unfairly targeted them in seeking to thwart China’s efforts to overtake the United States in science and innovation.
Here are excerpts from ScienceInsider’s 24 March conversation with Prabhakar.
Q: What niche do ARPAs fill?
A: When you hear someone call for an ARPA, what you are hearing is a cry for R&D that provides solutions to very hard problems. The whole point of an ARPA is that you’re going long and reaching for these big, bold goals. So it’s not surprising to me at all that we would want that kind of R&D for many missions besides national security. [DARPA was created in 1958; its success has led to six offspring, including ARPA-H and one for education that Biden proposed in his 2024 budget request to Congress.] But an ARPA organization is only one element in an ecosystem. Nothing from DARPA that has had a great impact on the world happens single-handedly. Because you need all the other parts of defense R&D, [the] defense industrial base, you need the academic research community, you need the National Science Foundation and all the other federal agencies.
Q: Is there any sector where that model is not applicable?
A: They’re very hard to build. But, you know, I think we have seen a version that works for energy that’s made important contributions. We’ve seen it for intelligence. If you look at how ARPA-H is building its plans, I have great hopes for where it’s headed. I spent a lot of time thinking about exactly this question: How do you adapt it to each sector? It’s not a copy and paste, right? The mission is different, the technologies you care about are different. But if you could have an organization for each of those national missions, where a cadre of incredibly bright people come to work every single day, and the only job that they have is to craft pathways to breakthroughs, that sounds pretty good to me.
Q: Scientists always think the federal government should spend more on research. Are they right?
A: There’s a natural tendency for everyone in the innovation system, whatever they do, to feel that their piece is the most important and needs to grow. But I think we have to be clear that what makes big progress happen is having this entire ecology of innovation. At one end is a foundation of basic research for all public purposes and for the private sector, because we know those are investments that companies won’t get a return on, but that the entire economy and everyone on the country will benefit from. But federal R&D also includes R&D focused on specific public purposes like national security or transportation or space or health or energy. So when you see a federal R&D budget [Biden’s 2024 request is for $209 billion], it’s a reflection of allocations in R&D in the future for each of those. There is no central pot of money.
Q: Should federally funded scientists spend more time on global problems, and less on curiosity-driven research with no obvious application?
A: I find in the real world that there aren’t these neat categories, with some people who just work on curiosity-driven research and other people who actually think about specific problems. We absolutely need a rich set of different kinds of basic research. And we need people who want to weave those components of research advances together into practical solutions and build prototypes to use in the real world. And we also need people who change their minds, who move into commercializing discoveries or who decide to focus on science policy. Again, I keep coming back to the whole system. That’s how you get real things done.
Q: Do you think that Chinese-born scientists working in the United States have been unfairly persecuted as agents of the Chinese Communist Party and are owed some kind of apology from the government?
A: I’m not in a position to comment on that. I don’t know enough about it. I don’t think it’s our role to determine precisely what happened in the past. … But the world has changed, and [China] has taken actions that are very concerning. And it’s very much our role to find a path forward for research security, one that treats people with respect but that also wrestles with this very tough issue.
Q: Looking ahead 10 years, what are the biggest challenges to maintaining U.S. leadership in science?
A: I tend not to think of the challenges we are facing as simply what impact they will have on science. What I’m really interested in is what science and technology can do to help us to succeed in the world. And as President Biden has said, we as a country have got to prove that democracy still works. We scientists and engineers love to think about experiments, and the most important experiment of all is democracy. … The world has changed. Dealing with China is very different than dealing with Japan and its economic rise a few decades ago. And China is not the only issue that we need to confront. But we’re not going to succeed at this experiment without science and technology. So that’s our role, and we’ve got to step up.
Source: Science Mag