• DOI:10.1086/368647
• Corpus ID: 144475553

Science and Technology

@article{Wise1985ScienceAT,
  title={Science and Technology},
  author={George Wise},
  journal={Osiris},
  year={1985},
  volume={1},
  pages={229 - 246}
}

• G. Wise
• Published 1 January 1985
• Education
• Osiris

THE RELATION OF SCIENCE TO TECHNOLOGY is not the stuff of front page news. But on 7 August 1984 it made the front page of the Science section of the New York Times. "Does Genius or Technology Rule Science?" a headline read. The story beneath described a "new school" of historical thought hat "lauds technology as an overlooked force in expanding the horizons of scientific knowledge." It attributed the new view to the late historian Derek de Solla Price, who had, in his last lecture and paper, rejected what he described as the "remarkably widespread wrong idea that has afflicted generations of science policy students . . . that science can in some mysterious way be applied to make technology." Instead, he had argued that technology, as embodied in scientific instrumentation, is "autonomous and did not arise from the cognitive core of science, but from other technologies devised for quite different purposes. Much more often than is commonly believed, the experimenter's craft is the force that moves science forward." The Times article described a wide range of other historians' reactions to Price's views. William Broad, the reporter, noted that the whole matter was of more than academic interest: at stake, he wrote, was "an ongoing debate on how to spend billions of dollars of federal funds."' The purpose of spending the money was to generate technological innovations (that is, inventions that are used). If science drives technology, the money should be spent on science. If technology drives both itself and science, then the money should be spent on technology. This review will examine two of the main issues raised in that newspaper article. Is technology dependent on science? And, if not, what is the relationship between the two? It will focus on what two groups of people in the United States-science-policy makers and historians-have, since 1945, thought he relationship of science and technology to be. An implicit argument ook place in which the policymakers based their policies on a simple but incorrect model, while the historians began to gather the pieces for a new model not yet built. The oversimplified model favored by the policymakers depicts science and technology as an assembly line. The beginning of the line is an idea in the head of the scientist. At subsequent work stations along that assembly line, operations labeled applied research, invention, development, engineering, and marketing transform that idea into an innovation. A society seeking innovations should, in the assembly-line view, put money into pure science at the front end of the process. In due time, innovation will come out of the other end. Historians of science and technology have not merely reversed the direction of the assembly line so that technology now generates science. Instead they