Underdeveloped science in underdeveloped countries

Abstract

I am writing this paper in the hope that it will come to the attention of a select audience of the presidents and prime ministers of those countries where science does not yet exist on any significant scale. Roughly five out of six prime ministers in the world belong to this group. Today between 15 and 30 of the 120 countries of the world, with less than one-third of its population, possess practically all of its science. They spend more than 95 per cent, of the world's research and development funds in order to produce, first, practically all of the world's research output in the form of research papers, technical reports, discoveries, patents and prototypes of new products and processes, and second, most of the new generation of trained research workers in science and technology. Furthermore, these countries reaped in the past and are now reaping most of the direct economic, political, social and general cultural benefits of scientific research. Finally, during the past twenty years it is mainly these countries which have made the almost simultaneous invention of national research policy as a new institutional mechanism for the development and the use of science to achieve their national objectives. The other countries approximately 100 in number with about twothirds of the world's population, share in various degrees the remaining one-twentieth of the world's science. They are countries which, either in an absolute or in a relative but very significant sense, have no science. It has become difficult for these countries to ignore the fact that research is no more than a negligible category in their national division of labour. They cannot avoid being aware that they are essentially pre-research cultures. All kinds of forces, domestic and foreign, political and economic, moral and historical, are acting on the governments of these countries with the inexorability of a law of nature to take some sort of action to promote the development of science in their own countries.