International meetings in Europe last month gathered experts from around the world to deal with two significant global issues. At one, in England, 200 leading climatologists from 30 countries discussed global warming. They warned that dangerous climate change is taking place and that the time for solutions is running out. This warning was reiterated at the annual AAAS meeting The Nexus: Where Science Meets Society (Washington DC, Feb 17–21). There, Tim Barnett (Scripps Institution of Oceanography) stated, “If you take [our] data and combine it with a decade of earlier results, the debate about whether or not there is a global warming signal here and now is over, at least for rational people.”

Another meeting grappled with a different but related global issue that, while clearly more subtle, also has serious consequences. At the 2^nd Living Knowledge Conference—Advancing Science and Society Interactions, 286 people from 34 countries gathered in Seville, Spain, to confront what we refer to as the “Science-Society Split”.

What is this Split? It is widely recognized that advances in science increasingly drive economic growth across all levels of society. This is particularly evident within the United States, which historically has been the preeminent scientific and technology based society, as measured by patents awarded, the quality of scientific publications, and Nobel Prizes received. The products of science/technology have taken an unrivaled centrality in the daily life of Americans, from the pharmaco-medicalization of procreation, birth, well-being, and death, to the digital world of the wireless internet and cell phone. Yet this leaves the majority of US citizens adrift with complex and contradictory attitudes. There is an ambivalence towards science/technology characterized not only by a solid appreciation of the benefits, but also deep-seated fear and skepticism.

This ambivalence is fueled by the prospect of profound change heralded by progress in mammalian cloning, genetic modification of organisms, development and maintenance of stem cells, and even the implementation of electronic voting systems. These changes are poorly understood due to the general lack of scientific literacy. For example: in 2000 47% of US high school seniors did not meet basic standards for science knowledge, up from 43% in 1996¹; students in their last year of high school performed last in physics and advanced mathematics amongst developed countries²; and approximately half of Americans do not know that it takes a year for the earth to go around the sun and think the earliest humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs³. As Carl Sagan has quipped: “We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces”⁴.

Such ambivalence has the capacity to undermine public funding of science and thus the democratic institutions that science serves. Particularly visible is the increase in fundamentalist restrictions on science (e.g. stem cell research), outright rejection of demonstrated scientific fact (e.g. rejection of the human contribution to global warming), and attacks on scientific culture (e.g. the re-emergence of creationism). With increased public ambivalence and a lowering public priority for science/technology, it becomes more difficult to maintain Congressional funding. For example, 2005 is the first year since 1964 that the NIH budget was increased by less than 1%. Funding decreases lead to ever fewer Ph.D.s, a smaller scientific workforce, and a gradual but significant reduction in innovation, social benefits, productivity, global competitiveness, and ultimately, national decline.