What happens when you put the life of the mind and the problems of a global civilization in a jar and shake it? The powerful and sometimes uneasy alliance between science and the society it serves is the theme of this year's special report on the “State of the World's Science.”
We start with the phenomenon of Big Science, which occurs when society deems an area of research important enough to throw money and resources at it. But the goals and methods of research scientists and politicians can be difficult to sync up. In “,” journalist Stefan Theil looks at the travails of the Human Brain Project, a vast research program that the European Commission established in 2013 to advance the field of neuroscience and boost European research. Theil shows what can go wrong when a top-down funding bureaucracy tries to orchestrate the unpredictable progress of scientific discovery.
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