Encouragement from a 'lapsed scientist'

World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz admitted today that he could be considered as a "lapsed scientist" – and that this had given him "a better appreciation" of why science, technology and innovation (STI) were so important in development strategies.

Making an unscheduled appearance at the banks' Global Forum on building STI capacity for sustainable growth and poverty reduction, Wolfowitz described how, having completed an undergraduate degree in mathematics, he had faced two options for his PhD: research in chemistry at Cornell, or in economics at Cornell.

Against the advice of his father – an eminent stastician – he chose the former. "If I had gone the way my father wanted me to go, I could have been sitting with you today," he told the audience.

Wolfowitz's message to the forum was the need for a balance in development strategies that kept science in the frame. It was important to address poverty directly, in particular through the priorities identified as the Millennium Development goals, he said. But at the same time he emphasised the need for sustained investment in scientific and technological capacity if these goals were to be achieved.

"There seems to be an attitude, more often in the back of people's minds than on their lips, that questions why we should be worried about science and technology when so many kids are not even going into first grade, or why we should support medical research when many people cannot afford medicines that are already available," he said. "That is a very unbalanced view".

What he didn't say was that the bank had been one of the institutions promulgating this 'unbalanced' view in the 1980s and much of the 90s.

[A report on Wolfowitz's presentation will appear shortly on the SciDev.Net website]