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CONTENTS
IN FOCUS
p 2 - Measuring progress towards knowledge societies
NEWS
p 7 - Keeping tabs on human genetic data
p 8 - Africa vows to step up investment in R&D
p 9 - Rebuilding Iraq’s universities
p 9 - Mondialogo challenges students to engineer a better
world
p 10 - Islam and Science author among UNESCO laureates
INTERVIEW
p 10 - Lídia Brito on NEPAD in general and Mozambique
in particular
HORIZONS
p 13 - The floating university
p 17 - Margaret’s story
IN BRIEF
p 19 - Governing bodies
p 20 - Diary
p 20 - New releases
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'The
quiet revolution'
Science
is not a global endeavour, alas. Just as the world has its
info-rich and info-poor, so too it has its research-rich and
research-poor. The digital divide is but a symptom of the
scientific divide.
But
after the economy and communication, could science, in turn,
be globalizing? Caroline Wagner thinks so. A Research Fellow
at RAND, a non-profit think tank, she is convinced that ‘science
is becoming a world system’. Wagner notes a 50% increase
(to 15% of the total) in the number of articles being internationally
co-authored in the ten years to 1997 – still the early
days of Internet – and calculates that the global network
of scientific collaboration consisted of 128 core countries
in 2000.
One
of the motors of broader international collaboration has been
the development of ties between the diaspora and scientists
at home, a process facilitated by the Web. Ana María
Cetto wrote in UNESCO’s World Science Report 1998 that
an estimated 40–60% of all Argentinian, Chilean, Colombian
and Peruvian researchers were working in industrialized countries
‘where their work is recognized and valued’. In
Africa, Bience Gawanas has just deplored, at the First NEPAD
Ministerial Conference on Science and Technology (S&T),
the haemorrhage of highly trained experts lost to the continent
on account of poor working conditions.
Decent
working conditions demand sustained investment. It is thus
gratifying that the NEPAD meeting should have vowed to raise
spending on research and development to 1% of GDP – at
least – by 2008, a level which would place Africa, in
percentage terms, on a par with Central and Eastern Europe.
A quantum leap, in sum, if the promise can be realized; most
of the world’s least developed nations are Sub-Saharan.
There
does seem to be a growing awareness of the importance of S&T
for development. A study by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics
(UIS) in this issue reveals that the gap between developed
and developing countries is gradually shrinking, albeit at
a pedestrian pace with the notable exception of China and
the Asian ‘dragons’.
Any global survey of S&T today is hampered by imprecise
data for many countries. The UIS and UNESCO’s science
policy analysts are currently preparing a review of progress
worldwide in developing-relevant S&T statistics and the
difficulties countries encounter in collecting and interpreting
such data.
The
ultimate goal is to build national statistical systems which
are highly responsive to policy and information needs, with
UNESCO facilitating this process through standardsetting and
the gathering of cross-nationally harmonized data, in particular.
W.
Erdelen
Assistant Director-General for Natural Sciences
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UNESCO
Scientific 
