Global Innovation

Leigh Riordon
August 22, 2006


By: David Alan Grier

Many people as or question how science and technology can be international. David Alan Grier had some of these same questions when he became involved with George Washington’s Center for International Science and Technology Affairs four years ago. In this center he learned that the researchers in the center are dealing with “the most fundamental problem of modern life.” This problem consists of how best to use the knowledge that researchers and scientists have about our physical and or materialistic world and the newest technologies to provide support for our economies, countries, and for our people.
The GW’s center for International Science and Technology began running in 1968. The center contains eight faculty members, thirty-five graduate students, many graduate research assistants, and one pair of staff members. In 1968, their first attempt was to place a man on the moon, while their second goal was to have a future in space flight. John Logsdon, who within two years of his arrival at GW, had become the space expert. In that second year of being there in 1972, he made his first television appearance. People can easily remember this date, because this was the year of the Apollo flights. The Space Policy Institute was created in 1987 by Logsdon as well.
The center hosts post-doctoral scholars every year, who come from all over the world from government institutes and universities in Europe, Asia, and North America. The center also works with Korea, who has research agreements with GW containing information about a journal devoted to the history of computing and digital communication that he edits. His assistant editor is in Norwich, England, production manager in Long Beach, California, and a main department editor in Osaka, Japan.
Once a month, every month, on the second Wednesday, the center sponsors a technology and innovation seminar, in which 600 people are invited. In the most recent seminar, the newest research professor, Carolyn Wagner spoke. She traveled to be there from the Netherlands.
With all of these seminars and through complicated research, the faculty of the center is trying to grasp the answer on how best to guide science and technology through the 21st century. I would have never of thought that “international science and technology” would be a course that was offered at different universities, although now many. I do though understand that today’s advances in science and technology cannot be handled by one country. I believe that in the 21st century you need to work together to accomplish anything!

http://www.gwu.edu/~magazine/2005_research_fall/features/feat_global.htm