00:00:00 Another good morning to all of you who have joined us since our first speaker.

00:00:15 We're about ready to present the second paper in the award symposium of the chemical education division.

00:00:26 Considered as the ACS's highest award, the Priestley Medal is given annually to recognize distinguished services to chemistry.

00:00:35 This distinction and honor was given to Frank Whetherow.

00:00:40 Although he formally, increasingly, his attention is drawn to the problems in science education.

00:00:48 He is concerned with the phenomenon of scientists.

00:00:52 Professor Westheimer, a chemist, a scientist, an educator, a humanist, and a scholar, truly possess the qualities and attributes embodied in the ACS's Priestley Medal.

00:01:07 Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to present Professor Frank H. Westheimer.

00:01:15 Thank you.

00:01:39 Thank you very much, Dr. Moy for that extremely flattering introduction and for helping to lay the background for what I want to say here.

00:01:50 The Priestley Medal of the American Chemical Society is a great honor and I'm enormously proud to join the select society of eminent former recipients.

00:02:01 The medal is awarded quite simply to recognize distinguished service to chemistry.

00:02:07 I'm elated that the society has found that my past activities constitute distinguished service to chemistry at the level reserved for Priestley medalists.

00:02:18 Perhaps it will be possible for me to continue to benefit chemistry by analyzing the problems of education in science.

00:02:30 The American Chemical Society has always exerted a leadership role in the education of chemists, but has played a lesser role in the education of non-scientists.

00:02:41 A number of important new developments, such as the TV series being developed at the University of Maryland with the help of Roald Hoffman, are aimed at improving the level of chemical education in our schools.

00:02:55 Since the schools are perhaps the most important target for improvement, these activities deserve increased support.

00:03:04 But I hope to contribute to upgrading education in America by emphasizing the vertical nature of learning in science.

00:03:11 I shall return to and explain the concept of vertical education in just a moment.

00:03:17 The concept provides both an explanation for the abysmal level of education in science of non-scientists in the U.S., and a point of departure for correcting the problem.

00:03:29 Of course, in emphasizing education in science at this meeting, I am to a large extent preaching to the converted.

00:03:38 But perhaps some of you will become convinced that the vertical nature of learning in science is the critical point in the debate on education, and will carry the message to our non-scientific friends in and out of colleges and universities.

00:03:57 We all know that no one is truly educated who is ignorant of modern science, and we all know that technology is essential to our nation.

00:04:06 We know that our industries trail those of the Japanese and Germans. In a sense, they are the ones who won World War II.

00:04:15 We have too few engineers on the shop floors of our factories. The managers of our industries are, too often, lawyers or graduates of business schools, rather than engineers.

00:04:28 Robert Solow received his recent Nobel Prize in Economics for the work he did 20 years ago, in which he showed that technological innovation is the engine that drives our economy.

00:04:41 But still we, in the United States, shy away from distressing science and mathematics in our elementary schools, or teaching science and mathematics to all of our students in our colleges.

00:04:53 Other nations can manage it, and it shows in the quality and price of their industrial products. Why can't we?

00:05:02 I am proselytizing for more science for non-scientists. The thesis of this lecture is that, in American universities, we do not insist on balanced education for our students,

00:05:15 and that although most humanists and many social scientists are literate, they are not numerate. They graduate without a reasonable background in science,

00:05:26 a background that they will need to cope with and to help with the increasing technology of the modern world.

00:05:35 Furthermore, I claim that the fundamental reason for this difficulty is that the faculty and administrators of our universities have not internalized an important fact about education in science.

00:05:48 This critical fact, and it really is a fact and not just an opinion, is that education in science is highly vertical, where one subject is built upon knowledge of another,

00:06:00 whereas scholarship in the humanities, a scholarship no less real, it should be increasing.

00:06:08 Perhaps if administrators and non-scientists fully appreciated the vertical nature of education in science, we could begin to straighten out our educational system.

00:06:18 Some of the unpleasant consequences of our neglect of education in science are now appearing in the public press.

00:06:28 David Halberstam, in his book entitled The Reckoning, has commented on the success of Nissan Motors as contrasted with that of Ford in the production of automobiles.

00:06:39 A large part of the difference arose because Nissan had, and presumably has, many more engineers on the factory floor worrying about details of production.

00:06:51 The sum of the minor improvements they make in manufacturing processes integrates to important advantages in quality, speed, and cost.

00:07:03 Lester Thoreau, professor of economics at MIT, notes in Science Magazine that most of the managers of U.S. businesses are ignorant of science and technology

00:07:15 and regard most innovations as black boxes that they do not understand.

00:07:21 He believes that these managers fail to institute innovations promptly because they cannot understand them,

00:07:29 and that this, in many cases, is a source of the advantage of foreign industry over ours.

00:07:35 Thoreau maintains that workers in U.S. factories are today the least educated of those in any developed country,

00:07:43 in sharp contrast to the situation at the turn of the century.

00:07:47 Their failures complement those of management.

00:07:51 Professor Louis Branscombe, formerly chief scientist for IBM,

00:07:56 comments on the difficulties that arise when chief executives are trained in law and business schools and lack a technical background.

00:08:06 A recent article in the New York Times points out the need that judges have for technical knowledge in deciding cases involving modern industry.

00:08:17 The lawyers debating these cases presumably have similar needs.

00:08:23 Our educational system predicts, rather than reflects, our industrial shortcomings.

00:08:31 First, in international tests of mathematics, students in U.S. schools place at or near the bottom of the heap,

00:08:40 with scores far below those of the Japanese and Taiwanese,

00:08:45 and, in an earlier test, considerably below those of Europeans as well.

00:08:54 The population explosion is one of the most important, possibly the most important, problem facing the world today.

00:09:03 How are we going to explain the exponential increase in population to students who do not know about and understand the exponential function,

00:09:18 and who may even have difficulty doing problems in compound interest?

00:09:24 A recent article in Science magazine reports science tests where our 8th and 9th grade students tied for 14th place out of those in 17 countries tested.

00:09:38 As I will show later, the emphasis on science in colleges in the U.S. has declined.

00:09:46 Perhaps this decline in national achievement in science and mathematics arises in part because the public assessment of science and scientists is not, at the moment, entirely favorable.

00:10:00 It was summarized a few years ago in the following sequence, shown in my first three slides,

00:10:08 from major literature in the United States, one of the comic strips, The Wizard of Id.

00:10:39 The problem with science in the universities is quite real.

00:10:45 In May of 1978, the Harvard faculty voted by a margin of greater than 3 to 1 to introduce a core curriculum,

00:10:58 a core of knowledge that all students in the college should have before they can graduate and join, quote, the Society of Educated Men and Women.

00:11:10 I believe that the core curriculum is ill-conceived because it minimizes science,

00:11:16 and that the vast majority of students graduate from Harvard and are, in a real sense, uneducated because they know almost no science.

00:11:29 This statement would be trivial and essentially irrelevant if it were not true also of students in many, if not most, American colleges and universities.

00:11:41 Yale University now demands three semesters rather than only two in science.

00:11:48 This is a small step in the correct direction.

00:11:52 The University of Chicago requires two full courses in science.

00:11:58 But in general, education in science occupies only a tiny place in the education of non-scientists.

00:12:07 It is 6% at Harvard, for example, of the total curriculum.

00:12:14 The emphasis is much smaller than it was in the last century.

00:12:18 The education that is available to those students who want it, the education, sorry, in science,

00:12:26 that is available to those students who want it at Harvard and at many, many other American universities is superb.

00:12:34 But very little of it is required of those who do not elect to concentrate in the sciences.

00:12:40 Perhaps a major problem arises because we pretend that this is not the case and that we are really providing a liberal education for all our students.

00:12:53 We pretend our graduates have a common core of knowledge that embraces both of C.P. Snow's two cultures.

00:13:00 It doesn't.

00:13:02 Scientists are exposed to a modest amount of the humanities and the social sciences.

00:13:09 Humanists are not exposed to much in the way of science.

00:13:13 As long as we pretend we are doing otherwise, we cannot hope to graduate educated students.

00:13:21 The faculties of almost all the great American universities have produced similar curricula.

00:13:28 I believe that these curricula are inadequate, but that improvements will arise naturally when the vertical nature of learning in science is recognized.

00:13:37 The next slide shows the requirements in science of a few selected colleges and universities.

00:13:47 I don't know if that can be read.

00:13:49 Berkeley requires two half courses in science.

00:13:55 So does Columbia.

00:13:57 Essentially, so does Haverford, although you can get around a little of it.

00:14:02 Harvard requires a course in the physical sciences or mathematics and a half course in either biological or behavioral science.

00:14:14 Similarly, other great universities have minimal science requirements.

00:14:21 Contrast these requirements with those in science and mathematics at Harvard in 1850.

00:14:30 One would scarcely maintain that science occupied the important place in the world in 1850 that it does in the world of 1988.

00:14:41 Yet in 1850, all Harvard students were required to take a course in science or mathematics or both in every semester of every year.

00:15:00 Although some of the subjects covered in 1850 are now covered in good high school courses today,

00:15:08 much of what is now taught hadn't yet been discovered and couldn't be taught in 1850.

00:15:17 Two points stand out.

00:15:19 First, in 1850, more than a quarter of every student's curriculum was devoted to science.

00:15:28 Second, most of the body of science, both fact and theory, has been discovered since that date.

00:15:39 Perhaps it serves a purpose to recite some of the intellectual advances in science that have occurred just in the last half century.

00:15:47 In particular, in 1938, the discovery of atomic energy was still in the future.

00:15:55 The critical discovery of Hahn and Strassman was published in 1939.

00:16:01 In 1938, the chain reaction of atomic piles and bombs had hardly been imagined, much less achieved.

00:16:09 Neither nuclear fission nor fusion had been worked out.

00:16:14 Only a few years before that, no one knew how the sun produced its light and heat.

00:16:20 Neither the destruction caused by atomic weapons nor the potential and hazards of atomic power were known.

00:16:28 If one were to inquire today as to the most important issues about which a citizen must be informed,

00:16:36 certainly the broad implications of nuclear physics would rank near the top of the list.

00:16:42 One cannot look for guidance from the men and women educated in the humanities at elite American institutions.

00:16:50 They will probably have been exposed to only a half-course in the physical sciences and know virtually nothing about nuclear physics.

00:16:59 This may not prevent them from having opinions. It will only prevent them from having informed opinions.

00:17:08 But the advances in science in the last half century have scarcely been confined to nuclear physics.

00:17:15 The first practical digital computer was invented during the Second World War, and the subsequent developments have been remarkable.

00:17:23 The one aspect of science in the United States that has been firmly introduced into education involves the use of computers.

00:17:32 Primarily, we use them as word processors and bookkeepers and to play games.

00:17:38 But a good many Americans can also carry out some programming.

00:17:42 Discoveries in solid-state physics have introduced the transistor that has revolutionized computers and phonographs and TV sets and cameras and much else.

00:17:54 Television is less than 50 years old, yet few Americans understand anything about tuning.

00:18:01 Their knowledge is limited, by and large, to how to turn the selector switch for various channels.

00:18:08 In the practical world, lasers are used for eye surgery and for much else.

00:18:14 Astronomy has advanced the idea of black holes and is engaged with the question as to whether the universe will expand forever or collapse, or will cycle forever between expansion and collapse.

00:18:29 But the greatest intellectual revolution that has taken place in the last 50 years, in fact, in the last 35 years, has been in biology.

00:18:38 Can anyone be considered educated today who does not understand a little molecular biology?

00:18:45 Recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that 15% of the biology teachers in Ohio, presumably graduates of U.S. colleges and universities, teach creationism along with evolution.

00:19:01 And over half of the teachers regard evolution as a theory that cannot be tested.

00:19:08 Obviously, they do not know that the theory has been tested rigorously and triumphantly through biochemistry.

00:19:18 The phylogenetic trees, that is to say the relationships among animals and plants and unicellular organisms, established by taxonomy, have largely been duplicated and clarified by considering the sequences of amino acids in the proteins of various species and by considering the sequences of nucleotides in their nucleic acids.

00:19:43 Roughly the same relationships were established by biochemistry and by taxonomy.

00:19:49 No one in Darwin's day could possibly have imagined this test.

00:19:54 The appropriate molecular concepts didn't even exist, much less the experiments.

00:20:00 But when the possibility of testing evolutionary theory from the viewpoint of molecular biology arose, the theory passed the tests magnificently.

00:20:11 The close relationship, for example, between chimpanzees and man can be shown by the great similarity between the structures of their proteins just as well as by their similarity in morphology.

00:20:27 Largely because of the vertical nature of science, the biochemical test cannot readily be explained to those who don't know some biochemistry.

00:20:38 And biochemistry cannot be understood by anyone who doesn't have a minimal knowledge of organic chemistry.

00:20:43 And organic chemistry is hard to explain to someone who doesn't know some general chemistry.

00:20:49 Here is an example, and there are many more, of the vertical nature of learning in science.

00:20:54 To understand the modern corroboration of Darwin, one must start with general chemistry and build a considerable superstructure.

00:21:04 Apparently half the biology teachers in Ohio don't know about this verification, and perhaps do not even have the background to understand it.

00:21:14 Isn't it important to educate the citizens of our nation about evolution?

00:21:19 Shouldn't we teach enough background of science to make it possible for teachers of biology in Ohio, and elsewhere, to show their students how the theory of evolution has been tested?

00:21:32 Should not college students learn something about these various scientific advances, even at the price, and it is a real price, of knowing less.