Necessity’s Child

With his latest, Invention and Innovation, Vaclav Smil sets out to achieve what he describes as “modest goals.” He wants to remind us “that success is only one of the outcomes of our ceaseless quest for invention; that failure can follow initial acceptance; that the bold dreams of market dominance may remain unrealized; and that even after generations of (sometimes intensifying) efforts, we may not be any closer to the commercial applications first envisaged decades ago.”

Smil is famously reclusive, prolific, and influential. It is said that at the University of Manitoba, where the scientist and policy analyst spent his entire career, he attended a single faculty meeting, the agreed quid pro quo being that he remain intellectually productive. He has lived up to his part of the bargain by publishing over forty books, moving Bill Gates to write, “I wait for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie.”

In an era of endless excitement over technological progress that is routinely described as rapid, game changing, and disruptive — we are said to be living through no less than a fourth industrial revolution — Smil’s modest goals are a necessary palliative. The trick is to recognize the importance of technology in our lives while not becoming complacent about its effects. This Smil achieves in a short volume, built around nine case studies, that’s accessible to the layperson.

Beyond an introduction and a thoughtful conclusion, the main body of the text is divided into three long chapters, each with three sections. “Inventions That Turned from Welcome to Undesirable” considers leaded gasoline, the insecticide DDT, and chlorofluorocarbons. “Inventions That Were to Dominate — And Do Not” covers dirigibles and other airships, nuclear fission, and supersonic flight. “Inventions That We Keep Waiting For” looks at hyperloops, nitrogen-fixing cereals, and controlled nuclear fusion. Each case study could stand alone as an essay that highlights the interplay between human curiosity, societal need, and the economic environment within which invention (the act of scientific inquiry leading to a result) and innovation (its adoption and use) occur. Collectively, they buttress Smil’s stated goals.

Assuming Elon Musk plays a major role in shaping economic and technology policy in the second Trump administration, it is appropriate to remember, as Smil does, one of the billionaire’s mendacious tweets, from July 2017: “Just received verbal government approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 20 mins.” Leaving aside the fact that the brevity of the message belies the complexity of multi-jurisdictional approvals for large infrastructure projects, the underlying science just wasn’t — and still isn’t — in place. Five years later, a worldwide survey of transportation experts concluded that the hyperloop concept is fundamentally impractical on account of daunting operational, safety, and cost barriers. Or, as Smil puts it in admirably non-technical terms: “All in all, not even a half‑baked idea.”

Imagine an army of Musks in every country that has a meaningful science and technology sector. They might not all be quite as flamboyant, but they are likely to be smart, agile, driven, and totally convinced of the value of their work. They are also likely to be well-organized, with the public mood as a wind at their back. In the popular imagination, the application of technological advances to solve common problems is appealing. Yet the public is largely unfamiliar with the cost-benefit analysis involved in innovation and its rollout. And although Smil doesn’t use the phrase “regulatory capture”— when government authority is co-opted to serve private or commercial goals — that is the pre-eminent risk in the management of technology for the public good.

The high stakes are most evident when Smil examines innovations that went from good to bad, among them the key component in leaded gasoline: tetraethyl lead, or TEL. Early car engines were prone to violent and potentially dangerous knocking, and there were three ways to address the issue: keeping compression ratios low, using smaller engines, or using additives to prevent the chemical process that led to the problem. As we know, the first half of the twentieth century was an era of rapid expansion of the automobile; any solution that limited the speed, size, or growth of a car was seen as undesirable. So the additive route prevailed, using lead, understood to be toxic since Greek antiquity but cheap and plentiful.

Language matters. The patent for TEL had the banal title “Method and means for using motor fuels.” The fuel containing the additive became known in common parlance as “ethyl gas”— unpardonable because actual ethyl was one of the cleaner alternatives that had been rejected on account of its scarcity. The public health community, which had firm evidence of the harmful effects of lead, particularly on children’s health, was sidelined in favour of the commercial arguments made by DuPont, Standard Oil, GM, and the Ethyl Corporation. Ironically, when the United States started removing lead from liquid fuel, it wasn’t because of its health effects but because of the photochemical smog that was enveloping many cities.

Once the authorities chose to limit the additive’s use and awareness of the problem became widespread, sales of unleaded gasoline went from 3 percent of the U.S. market in 1970 to 95 percent in 1991. It is difficult to separate the effects of government action from public education, but surely the moral of the story is that we need both to reinforce each other. Smil doesn’t delve into this explicitly (I wish he had), but an underlying theme is the value of an informed public. An uninformed one buys into hype and scams or, as with some digital technologies, immediately sees an innovation’s benefit but not its costs, which can be subtle and unfold over longer periods of time. Just consider the erosion of our privacy through the ubiquitous use of electronic devices or their impact on our (and especially our teenagers’) attention span and ability to process information rationally.

Coverage of science and technology in the popular media is inadequate and shrinking. In the last two years, Wired laid off twenty staff members, National Geographic fired the last of its full-time reporters, and Popular Science ended a 150-year publication run. Only a handful of newspapers and television networks have science desks — and “desks” might be overstating it. A Pew Research Center survey released in 2023 found declines in positive views of science among American adults. It is not unreasonable to causally connect a loss of faith in science to the level and quality of coverage of it.

A second area Smil might have treated explicitly is how the nature of our innovation system leads to successes or non-successes. Although discoveries and patents are mentioned throughout Invention and Innovation, the term “intellectual property” is not. Without a clear-eyed understanding of this essentially commercial and exclusionary concept, a history of hype and failure is not complete. This matters because many technologies have positive or negative spillover effects that are not reflected in their market price.

Take COVID‑19 vaccines, which were produced in record time. Scientifically, that was a brilliant and unrivalled feat. But as a purported exemplar of public policy, a “vast debacle of global vaccine inequity,” as the New York Times put it, is a more apt description. Through a series of interventions to fund general mRNA and COVID-specific research, accelerated trials, and guaranteed orders, the development and production of the vaccines was entirely de‑risked for big pharma. Yet when it came time to promote and distribute the shots, these same firms invoked free markets. As the layers of confidentiality around the deals were peeled back, we discovered that prices varied according to bargaining power: South Africa paid more than double the price the European Union paid for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, for instance, even though its per capita income is a fifth of the EU’s. Vaccination rates were — and remain — low in countries (mostly in sub-Saharan Africa) where mutants might form and return to bite us all. A proposal by India and South Africa early in the pandemic to revise TRIPS — the global agreement on intellectual property — was watered down at the World Trade Organization to the point of being meaningless. In 2022, an analysis by Richard Gold of McGill University, published in Nature Biotechnology, dispelled two relevant myths: first, that patents were essential to the development of drugs and vaccines, and second, that intellectual property regimes are not a barrier to the global distribution of vaccines and antivirals.

There are other ways of doing innovation. The open science movement, in which knowledge is developed and reported via collaborative networks, is one. CGIAR, the global network of agricultural research institutes founded by public and private philanthropy over fifty years ago to eliminate famine and improve nutrition, is another. CERN — where twenty-four countries partner in particle physics research — funds, develops, and shares core insights among its members collegially. Earlier this year, a high-level United Nations panel on artificial intelligence suggested a similar model to finance the technology’s expensive infrastructure.

Such initiatives do not mean that science should go socialist, with no room for the profit motive. Rather, they underline an implicit theme of Smil’s excellent book: that the power of curiosity, human ingenuity, and indeed greed must be accompanied by thoughtful public engagement.