The InterAcademy Council: Inventing a New Global Organization - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences

Last month, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan presided over the launch of a report by the InterAcademy Council, Inventing a Better Future: A Strategy for Building Worldwide Capacities in Science and Technology.[1] The report is a call for action to strengthen national scientific capabilities throughout the world and to foster new opportunities for cooperation among the world's scientific and technological communities. This is the first report issued by the InterAcademy Council,[2] an organization created in 2000 by the world's academies of sciences to provide expert knowledge and advice to the World Bank and other international Inventing a Better Future recommends that every nation develop a science and technology (S&T) strategy – one that reflects local priorities and specifies available funding – in consultation with that country's science, engineering, medical, and industrial communities. Each nation's strategy should include support for basic science, education, and training, which will allow it to achieve local competence in selected areas of national priority. The panel suggests that developing nations commit a minimum of 1–1.5% of their gross domestic product to science and technology, and it stresses the critical importance of using competitive merit reviews to allocate those resources (see Snapshot, p. 12). Enhancing local S&T capacity is essential because trends in the development and use of new technologies have left a growing gap between the "have" and "have not" nations. The world has entered a vicious cycle in which developing countries that lag in S&T capacity are falling further behind, as industrialized nations with financial...