U.S. science in a changing context: A perspective

In 1989 Francis Fukuyama, a senior policy analyst at the U.S. Department of State, wrote a paper about the end of the Cold War entitled “The End of History?” It offered an intriguing thesis: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such; that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” [ Fukuyama , 1989 p 4]. What Fukuyama calls “the end of history” is an important change in the context of science for two overlapping reasons. First, because the challenge of the communist Soviet Union drove United States science policy for much of the twentieth century. Second, because the atomic bomb and a subsequent series of events and circumstances—including SDI, the Green Revolution, AIDS, and now global change—have connected science to global geopolitics, irreversibly enlarging its relevant context.