After the success of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science's conference in Vancouver, it is time Canada developed its own
dedicated science-policy conference.In February, Vancouver hosted one of the most exciting science festivals in the world: the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual General Meeting (AAAS 2012). Hosting the meeting is a source of pride for Canada. AAAS is the largest general scientific organization in the world, with a significant international membership including thousands of Canadians. By any measure, the conference was a great success. With hundreds of panels and more than 1,000 speakers, it hosted nearly 6,000 delegates from more than 50 nations, as well as more than 6,000 members of the general public who visited the exhibition on public science days. Under the theme “Flattening the World: Building a Global Knowledge Society,” AAAS 2012 added much to the discourse on the connection between innovation, development, and international science and technology collaboration.
The AAAS meeting is not merely a conference – its mission and impact
go beyond that. It is a showcase of science enterprise, where scientific
work emerges from the laboratory and the annals of the academic
research community to present itself to the public and society at large,
showing, in particular, where and how science is most relevant to
policy-making, the environment, and other issues that impact
international affairs. It is where we discuss how science and technology
can flatten the world, creating a level playing field so that
scientific innovators and academics around the globe have an equal
opportunity for achievement.Prior to this year, the last time Canada hosted AAAS was in 1981 in Toronto. Thirty years later, AAAS 2012 created huge excitement and activity among the Canadian scientific community, and mobilized a number of scientific organizations to showcase their achievements. More importantly, it was a source of inspiration for thousands of children and adults who visited the exhibition on public science days and participated in the wide range of scientific activities designed for children and families. In addition, hundreds of university students experienced first-hand how science can be relevant to our daily lives. They discovered that science can be discussed in the context of a healthier community, better diplomacy, and a more just world.
A number of notable Canadian personalities spoke at the conference, including Mike Lazaridis, the visionary entrepreneur, philanthropist, and founder and former CEO of Research in Motion. Lazaridis focused on the importance of investment in science: Science, he said, has the potential to fundamentally change the direction of the century. As he noted, when the first international urban planning conference convened in 1898, the most critical issue of the day was horse manure – namely, what to do about the large quantities of it that were filling the streets of 19th-century cities whose daily functioning depended on thousands of urban horses. Had someone like Albert Einstein been looking for funding in the early days of the 20th century, he would have had trouble getting it, since his research was not concerned with horse manure, the most important issue of the day. Lazaridis rightfully concluded that science’s governing policies should not be blinded by the urgent issues of the day, and should instead exercise more foresight.
Among dozens of international speakers at the conference, Ismail Serageldin, director of the New Library of Alexandria, was perhaps the most unforgettable. In his speech, titled “Science and Democracy,” (which was broadcast from Egypt) Serageldin suggested that the Arab countries going through the post-Arab Spring period should adopt the values of scientific culture – the same values that once led to the golden age of Islamic scientific advances in the Middle East in the glorious era of the 8th-13th century C.E.
Notwithstanding AAAS’s outstanding successes as a science festival, Canada cannot and should not wait another five, 10, or possibly 30 years for another AAAS meeting for the opportunity to showcase its scientific advances and engage the public’s interest in science and technology. We should come to embrace Canada’s need for its own general science and policy forum. Relying only on international resources, particularly those of the United States, has brought us to where we are, with no organization of our own that can match AAAS (with the exception of ACFAS in Quebec ), and with no dedicated science magazine devoted to topics of interest to the Canadian science community.
Canada has access to enormous resources that give us the capacity to stage our own large-scale meeting on the intersection of science and society, without waiting for the next AAAS conference. Currently, the closest example of such a gathering in Canada, though on a much smaller scale, is the Canadian Science Policy Conference (CSPC), which was imagined and created based on the AAAS model. With greater support from the community, CSPC, as a successful grassroots effort, has the potential to become Canada’s main hub for scientific discussion.
Finally, if there is one lesson to be learned from CSPC events and AAAS 2012, it is that there is an enormous appetite and energy for new vision, direction, and discourse in the scientific community. We should take advantage of this enthusiasm by using existing structures such as CSPC, and by striving to create other, larger-scale events like the AAAS to show the world what the scientific community in Canada has to offer.
Original Article
Source: the Mark
Author: Mehrdad Hariri
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