White House science advisor Arati Prabhakar expressed confidence in U.S. science and technology capacities during a chat on Wednesday about major issues the country must tackle.
“Let me start with the aim of science and technology and innovation, which is to open possibilities in order that we are able to achieve our great aspirations,” said Prabhakar, who’s the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and a co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
“The aspirations that we now have as a rustic today are as great as they’ve ever been,” she added.
Much of Prabhakar’s talk focused on three major issues in science and technology development: cancer prevention, climate change, and AI. In the method, she also emphasized the need for the U.S. to sustain its global leadership in research across domains of science and technology, which she called “one among America’s long-time strengths.”
“Ever for the reason that end of the Second World War, we said we’re getting in on basic research, we’re going to construct our universities’ capability to do it, we now have an unparalleled basic research capability, and we must always all the time have that,” said Prabhakar.
“We’ve gotten higher, I believe, lately at commercializing technology from our basic research,” Prabhakar added, noting, “Capital moves when you’ll be able to see profit and growth.” The Biden administration, she said, has invested in quite a lot of recent ways for the private and non-private sector to work together to massively speed up the movement of technology into the market.
Wednesday’s talk drew a capability audience of nearly 300 people in MIT’s Wong Auditorium and was hosted by the Manufacturing@MIT Working Group. The event included introductory remarks by Suzanne Berger, an Institute Professor and a longtime expert on the innovation economy, and Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the School of Science and an astrophysicist and leader in gravitational-wave detection.
Introducing Mavalvala, Berger said the 2015 announcement of the invention of gravitational waves “was the day I felt proudest and most elated to be a member of the MIT community,” and noted that U.S. government support helped make the research possible. Mavalvala, in turn, said MIT was “especially honored” to listen to Prabhakar discuss leading-edge research and acknowledge the role of universities in strengthening the country’s science and technology sectors.
Prabhakar has extensive experience in each government and the private sector. She has been OSTP director and co-chair of PCAST since October of 2022. She served as director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) from 2012 to 2017 and director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from 1993 to 1997.
She has also held executive positions at Raychem and Interval Research, and spent a decade on the investment firm U.S. Enterprise Partners. An engineer by training, Prabhakar earned a BS in electrical engineering from Texas Tech University in 1979, an MA in electrical engineering from Caltech in 1980, and a PhD in applied physics from Caltech in 1984.
Amongst other remarks about medicine, Prabhakar touted the Biden administration’s “Cancer Moonshot” program, which goals to chop the cancer death rate in half over the following 25 years through multiple approaches, from higher health care provision and cancer detection to limiting public exposure to carcinogens. We ought to be striving, Prabhakar said, for “a future during which people take good health as a right and might get on with their lives.”
On AI, she heralded each the promise and concerns about technology, saying, “I believe it’s time for energetic steps to get on a path to where it actually allows people to do more and earn more.”
In relation to climate change, Prabhakar said, “All of us understand that the climate goes to vary. However it’s in our hands how severe those changes get. And it’s possible that we are able to construct a greater future.” She noted the bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law in 2021 and the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act as essential steps forward on this fight.
“Together those are making the only biggest investment anyone anywhere on the planet has ever made within the clean energy transition,” she said. “I used to feel hopeless about our ability to try this, and it gives me tremendous hope.”
After her talk, Prabhakar was joined onstage for a bunch discussion with the three co-presidents of the MIT Energy and Climate Club: Laurentiu Anton, a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering and computer science; Rosie Keller, an MBA candidate on the MIT Sloan School of Management; and Thomas Lee, a doctoral candidate in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.
Asked in regards to the seemingly sagging public confidence in science today, Prabhakar offered a couple of thoughts.
“The very first thing I’d say is, don’t take it personally,” Prabhakar said, noting that any dip in public regard for science is less severe than the diminished public confidence in other institutions.
Adding some levity, she observed that in polling about which occupations are thought to be being desirable for a wedding partner to have, “scientist” still ranks highly.
“Scientists still do very well on that front, we’ve got that going for us,” she quipped.
More seriously, Prabhakar observed, somewhat than “preaching” at the general public, scientists should recognize that “a part of the job for us is to proceed to be clear about what we all know are the facts, and to present them clearly but humbly, and to be clear that we’re going to proceed working to learn more.” At the identical time, she continued, scientists can all the time reinforce that “oh, by the way in which, facts are helpful things that may actually aid you make higher selections about how the long run seems. I believe that may be higher in my opinion.”
Prabhakar said that her White House work had been guided, partly, by one among the overarching themes that President Biden has often reinforced.
“He thinks about America as a nation that might be described in a single word, and that word is ‘possibilities,’” she said. “And that concept, that’s such an enormous idea, it lights me up. I believe of what we do on the earth of science and technology and innovation as really part and parcel of making those possibilities.”
Ultimately, Prabhakar said, in any respect times and all points in American history, scientists and technologists must proceed “to prove over again that when people come together and do that work … we do it in a way that builds opportunity and expands opportunity for everybody in our country. I believe that is the good privilege all of us have within the work we do, and it’s also our responsibility.”
