Georgia Institute of Technology
From the SelectedWorks of Diana Hicks

2016

Grand Challenges in US Science Policy Attempt
Policy Innovation
Diana Hicks, Georgia Institute of Technology - Main Campus

Available at: https://works.bepress.com/diana_hicks/38/

Grand Challenges in US Science Policy Attempt Policy Innovation
Diana Hicks
School of Public Policy
Georgia Institute of Technology
dhicks@gatech.edu

Abstract

This paper investigates the historical development of the Grand Challenges concept in
US science policy. The concept originated in advocacy for funding for high performancecomputing and was enshrined in the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. The Bill &Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health program marked a second
milestone in the application of the concept to US science funding. The National Academy ofEngineering’s Grand Challenges in Engineering followed in 2008. Most recently the WhiteHouse has pursued programs under the Grand Challenges rubric. The history of these varied
initiatives spanning 40 years is examined here to identify core elements and continuity as wellas to explore the relationship between innovation and tradition in U.S. science policy.
Keywords
Grand challenges; science policy; HPCC; global health; engineering; OSTP

1. Introduction
Talk of grand challenges has become commonplace in research policy in recent years.
This is especially true in Europe after the use of “grand challenge” in the title of a key document
describing the 8th Framework program and the renaming of that program’s thematic priorities
as societal challenges. Like a meme, the term appears in ever more places, applied to an evergreater number of projects without much critical thought in evidence. Analysts pondering thememe have arrived at varied interpretations. To some it is a buzzword and a passing fad (Rip,2014). Others have been commissioned to determine what, exactly, are grand challenges(Kellerud et al., 2013; Leijten et al., 2012). Some speculate that the concept might be aharbinger of a fundamental transformation (Kuhlmann & Rip, 2014).
In Europe we may see an emerging sense of challenge oriented policy, often associatedwith the term “societal challenges”. Such policy addresses the biggest issues of our time climate change/energy, aging society, security, etc. It is policy that goes beyond national
governments, requiring international cooperation, as well as policy that goes beyond researchand innovation though both will likely be involved in any solutions. It is policy that probably
entails transformation not only of research and society but also of policymaking itself(Kuhlmann & Rip, 2014). It may have a Europe-specific connotation of areas that are under
the control of national governments, not the EU, but in which national governments will takedirection from the EU or at least the Commission seeks influence (Leijten et al., 2012, p. 7).
European analyses of grand challenge policymaking are international in scope, andreference developments in the United States, often concluding that American use of theconcept is less open ended and more focused on technology development (Kellerud et al.,2013; Leijten et al., 2012). US analysts of research policy have interpreted grand challenges interms of their prior interests - mission oriented research, prizes, or the green revolution,(Mowery, 2012, Murray 2012; Wright 2012). In contrast, this paper seeks to examine grandchallenges in US science policy in their own terms. This is not a comparison or reconciliationof US and European use of the term. Nor does it limit discussion to that which makes sensewhen viewed from existing frameworks. Historical examples of important policy initiatives
framed as grand challenges are described. Common elements are sought in an effort todevelop a definition of the concept as used in the United States. After this, the relationshipbetween the grand challenge framing and the older framing of research as basic and applied is
discussed. The paper argues that grand challenges have signaled attempts at innovation in
research policy and examining them in this light illustrates the difficulty of changing existing
frameworks
The paper is organized as follows. Each historical and contemporary example isdiscussed in turn: advocacy for funding for high performance computing by Kenneth G. Wilson;
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health program; the National
Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenges in Engineering; the DARPA grand challenge
competition, and recent White House initiatives. The efforts seem to share a sense ofinnovativeness, use of aspirational pedigrees and a definition. More or less common
elements that might constitute a definition are found to be: combining the intellectual andpractical, a desire to energize a community, ambitious scale, requiring interdisciplinary2research, specification by a committee with a public call for suggestions, a request for resources
and feasibility. Finally, grand challenges are discussed in terms of applied research toillustrate the difficulty of innovating policy mechanisms.

2. Origins
The use of the term "Grand Challenges" in science policy originated with Kenneth G.
Wilson, a Nobel Laureate physicist who received his award for work on phase transitions inmaterials using supercomputer simulations. Described by Cornell as a "supercomputing
visionary" he established a supercomputing center in 1985 called the "Cornell Theory Center." iIn the early 1980s he was a prominent advocate for very large scale computers in theoreticalphysics. At the time, the idea of funding supercomputers as tools for theoretical physics faced
opposition from eminent scientists. They objected to this newfangled, and therefore
illegitimate, way of doing science and doubted it could add anything of value to the field.
Wilson's advocacy work included writing papers and giving speeches in which he articulated the
obstacles he faced in arguing for supercomputer funding.
Wilson's first documented contribution is found in an appendix to an early report to the
National Science Foundation (NSF) and Department of Defense (DOD) on the use of large scalecomputing in science and engineering in which he said:
None of the committees I have served on including this workshop, have
solved the problem of documenting the importance of computing support fortheorists. Members bring lists of needs within their fields, but these lists
seldom provide any overview of the importance of the needs. There must be
a more ongoing effort to collect data establishing the scientific importance oftheorists' computing needs, especially given the skepticism of many eminentscientists towards large scale computing. (Lax, 1982, Aii-20)
At this point Wilson believes the problem is a lack of data, that is given enoughexamples of how supercomputing can contribute, his skeptical colleagues will be convinced by
the evidence.
By 1984, Wilson was deep into long term advocacy for the US to adopt a coordinated,
multi-faceted approach to large scale computing (see for example his testimony before
Congress, Wilson, 1983). He described three years of visits, speeches and panels in a paper
entitled: Science, Industry and the New Japanese Challenge (Wilson, 1984, p. 7). At the time,
the success of Japanese companies had focused attention on their management practices.
There were several books published around 1980 with “Japanese Challenge” in the title. So
when the Japanese government announced a program to develop supercomputers for scientificand engineering use, it garnered publicity in the US, to which Wilson responded in this paperwith his vision of the future. He advocated for things that have come to pass such as NSF
support for the launch of the Internet; things that ended up in Grand Challenge lists – quantum
chromodynamics - and things that remain on the most recent Obama administration list ofGrand Challenges – computer aided instruction.
In this paper, Wilson also described six obstacles to his vision that he sought to3

overcome in his advocacy:
1. the difficulty his theoretical colleagues at Cornell have in accepting his vision (p.
11),
2. leading senior scientists fighting hard for basic research funding who view
theoretical computing as unnecessary and a potentially disastrous drain on
research budgets (p. 13),
3. the need for a practical understanding by senior management of the results tobe expected from the scientific/engineering computing community (p. 16),
4. the need for much bolder planning on the part of universities (p. 17),
5. agencies and programs that prefer mission or discipline-oriented supercomputer
programs (p. 17), and6. "getting glared at by every other member of the committee" and so accepting an
unsatisfactory solution such as a one-time appropriation rather than apermanent budget designated for scientific computing (p. 18).
We get a sense even today of Wilson's persistence and determination in refusing toaccept as inevitable either existing institutional practices or perceptions. No doubt his recent
Nobel Prize, with its accompanying ascendance into the most elite category of scientist, helped
boost his confidence in his judgment and increased the persuasiveness of his arguments withothers. Perhaps the "Japanese challenge" term, which had currency at the time, suggested tohim "grand challenge." By 1987, Wilson was using "grand challenges" in the title of a talk inwhich he said:
The challenge is to move from the present situation, where there isplenty of research going on, to achieve the really spectacular discoveries
which have not been made yet: the kind of discoveries that would make you
run to the first colloquium on the subject, the way I used to run to thecolloquia on pulsars when they were first discovered. (Wilson, 1988, p. 162)
In this talk Wilson named two challenges - weather forecasting and electronic structure and described them in depth. Wilson recognized here that the task of persuasion involves anemotional component, that there is a need to generate a sense of excitement, in addition toproviding evidence and having authority.
Shortly afterwards, in 1989, he articulated the rationale for the use of the term "Grand
Challenges" explicitly. Wilson again mentions the need for excitement as a component ofefforts to win support and the difficulty of generating it in computing. He mentions pulsars
again, as well as established disciplines like astronomy, materials science and molecular biology
in which it is easier to generate that excitement. He goes on to write:
Unsupported promises of major breakthroughs have to be avoided
because past experience has been that supercomputers are more difficult toachieve success with than initial expectations. At the other extreme, however,reference only to past or current successfully completed supercomputer
projects provides too weak a case for the future. . . . .
4

I propose an alternative approach. The major future opportunities forbenefits of supercomputers to basic research should be identified without theexisting compromises, but presented as challenges to be overcome with themany obstacles to success clearly explained. . . . . Furthermore, a few key
areas with both extreme difficulties and extraordinary rewards for successshould be labeled as the "Grand Challenges of Computational Science".
(Wilson, 1989, p. 173)
By this point, Wilson has discarded the gathering of evidence because it has provenunequal to the task. Current achievements are so limited by current hardware that theycannot possibly justify the large amount of funding needed to overcome those very limits. A
standard alternative approach in such situations is to make big promises. He wants to avoid
that as well because disappointment will surely follow. He is presumably playing the longgame and would not want large funding, once achieved, to be jeopardized shortly thereafter
due to failure to deliver on initial promises.
One can imagine how the Grand Challenges formulation offered responses to each of
the obstacles Wilson faced in advocating for large scale funding for computing in research.
With the memory of the discovery of pulsars, Wilson recognized the need for an element of
excitement in his vision. An exciting vision would be a more persuasive vision, and perhaps
increase the chance that his fellow theoreticians would come to share the vision. The intent
to open vast new domains previously inaccessible might appeal to those fighting Wilson topreserve funding for basic research. The benefits to be had by solving the big challenges
Wilson proposed can be explained in terms understandable to non-specialists such as senior
management, whose backing was required. The invitation to be “grand” suggests thatboldness is required, a characteristic Wilson thought universities were singularly lacking.
Solving the challenges requires interdisciplinary work, Wilson’s principal recommendation was
the formation of an interdisciplinary community, providing a way out of the standard
disciplinary or mission focus holding the field back. And to those suggesting Wilson
compromise, presumably Wilson would dare anyone to suggest compromising on a Grand
Challenge.
Wilson’s advocacy was ultimately successful. The work of Wilson, and many others,
laid the foundation for the US entry into what was called at the time high performancecomputing.

3. Grand Challenges in high performance computing
Wilson's Grand Challenges formulation entered US Federal science policy discourse in
the High Performance Computing & Communications (HPCC) program developed over thecourse of the 1980s. The HPCC realized Wilson's vision. The policy documents that
established the HPCC strategy always included a list of high complexity problems in several
disciplines that required computational power not yet available as well as sharing of computing
resources across geographical areas due to the large collaborations that were envisioned toaddress these problems. The first such list of high complexity problems was included in the Lax
Report of 1982 in which the need for high performance computing for American academics was
5first articulated.
The phrase "Grand Challenges" was associated with these lists of problems in a policy
document around the time of Wilson's Cornell talk. In 1987 the Federal Coordinating Council
for Science, Engineering and Technology (FCCSET) published "A Research and Development
Strategy for High Performance Computing", which outlined what was to become the HPCC
program (OSTP, 1991). The strategy/program had four components ii "grand challenges" wereused to explain the software component and five fundamental problems were listed.iii
The HPCC program fully materialized with the passage of the High Performance
Computing act in 1991 (Senator Gore sponsored the bill) associated with the publication by theWhite House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) of an addendum to the President's
budget that elevated grand challenges from obscurity in the software section to the title.
Chapter 4 described a list of 10 grand challenges (explicitly not comprehensive): forecasting
severe weather, cancer genes, predicting new superconductors, air pollution, aerospace vehicle
design, energy conservation and turbulent combustion, microsystems design and packaging,
biosphere, high speed networks, and education using networks.
The High-Performance Computing Act incorporated a definition of Grand Challenges
into the US legal code:'Grand Challenge' means a fundamental problem in science orengineering, with broad economic and scientific impact, whose solution will
require the application of high-performance computing resources andmultidisciplinary teams of researchers (15 U.S. Code Chapter 81 - HighPerformance Computing § 5503)
In policy for high performance computing around 1990, grand challenges signaled lists
of very difficult intellectual problems in science or engineering which would benefit from amultidisciplinary approach involving computing at a large scale. From the perspective ofcomputing, this would be an application, and in Wilson’s phrasing these would be the “Grand
Challenges of Computational Science”. Wilson also linked his new policy term to a desire toexcite and energize a community.

4. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges in Global
Health (BMGF GCGH)
In 2000, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, recently founded though the merger of
two predecessor foundations, joined with others to work on the UN's Millennium Development
Goals which were announced that year. The Foundation provided grants for health careproviders, for example delivering vaccines or providing education about and treatment forschistosomiasis. There were non-profits supporting biomedical research, but the Gates
Foundation was not yet prominent among them.
This changed in 2003 when the Foundation announced their intent to identify researchareas with the greatest promise for saving and improving lives in the developing world; to fundnovel, interdisciplinary approaches among researchers seeking solutions; and to get the rich6

world scientific community to apply its experience to pivotal health questions of the developingworld. Bill Gates announced his plans at Davos in 2003 and followed up with an article in theWall Street Journal (Gates, 2003). The Gates Foundation then issued a request for ideas to thescientific community and convened a board of 20 scientists and public health experts from 13
countries, including several from the developing world and the director and ex-director of the
National Institutes of Health (NIH). The board published the results of their deliberations in anarticle in Science (Varmus et al., 2003). Gates had originally pledged $200 million, but interest
was so strong that the budget was increased. $458 million was awarded in what became thefirst round of a program that has exceeded 13 rounds of proposals and awards.
Gates named his initiative Grand Challenges in Global Health (GCGH). This was
unusual. The conventional name would have been Gates Overseas Infectious Disease Program
and the conventional mechanism would have been to announce the area of interest and solicit
proposals. The Wellcome Trust for example had been funding research on malaria inlaboratories in Southeast Asia since the 1970s under its Major Overseas Programmes. Grand
Challenges sounds more Davos-worthy and perhaps justified the attentions of the Wall Street
Journal in a way that an overseas infections disease program would not have, but the raised
expectations can have a downside.
After 10 years, one fifth of the original Gates projects were moving towards fruition, forexample a plan to make mosquitoes immune to the virus that causes dengue fever, a drink
containing bacteria that kill cholera-causing bacteria, and a much cheaper machine to stop thecollapse of lungs in premature babies (Economist, 2014). These would be solid successes for a
Gates Overseas Infectious Disease Program and may justify the original investment. For a
Grand Challenges in Global Health however, these successes invite disappointment, not being
blockbusters nor particularly grand (Economist, 2014).
“Global health” was an overly broad claim for an initiative addressing only the infectious
disease component of health in non-Western nations, thus two further groups on global healthwere convened outside the Gates umbrella. The most cited of these post-GCGH papers iv was
published in 2007 in Nature and entitled "Grand challenges in chronic non-communicablediseases" (Daar et al. 2007). Its two lead authors, Daar and Singer were on the GCGH board andwere coauthors on the 2003 GCGH Science article. A second initiative was published in Naturein 2011 and entitled “Grand challenges in global mental health” (Collins et al. 2011).
The unusual name may have had a direct connection to the earlier efforts. When his
foundation was considering entering research, Bill Gates likely discussed his plans with theperson who advised him when Microsoft entered research, Gordon Bell. As assistant directorof NSF’s computing directorate, Bell chaired one of the three subcommittees that wrote the1987 report which first used the term "Grand Challenges." During the early 1990s Bell advised
Microsoft on setting up a research unit and in 1995 Bell joined Microsoft Research.
The Gates effort is similar to the earlier high performance computing effort in morethan its name. Both aimed to identify intellectual problems with promise of solving practicalproblems. Gates’ combined intellectual/practical aspect mirrors the combined scientificresearch/computing character of the computing grand challenges. Like the earlier grand7

challenges, Gates explicitly called for interdisciplinary work, and wanted to energize acommunity and work on a large scale. The term was also introduced in rhetoric concerning
research funding. Finally, the board of 20 scientists published in Science a 14 point to do list,
mirroring the list approach begun by Wilson.
There were also innovations in the Gates approach. New was the systematic processused to devise the list in which a committee of 20 scientists consulted with the broader
community and with the public, though this mirrored the standard National Academies
approach, used in several grand challenges documents, see below. The Foundation had
worked on another to do list, the United Nation’s (UN) Millennium Development Goals, which
may have served to demonstrate the power of to do lists with big names. The UN goals are
expressed in active form, for example: "Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger." This
contrasts with the complex nouns that served as grand challenges within the computing
community, for example "calculations to understand the fundamental nature of matter."Mirroring the Millennium Goals, the GCGH differs from previous challenge lists in taking theactive form:•

Goal 1: Improve childhood vaccineso Grand Challenge 1: Create effective single-dose vaccineso Grand Challenge 2: Prepare vaccines that do not require refrigerationo Grand Challenge 3: Develop needle-free vaccine delivery systems
Curiously, in announcing the GCGH, Gates did not mention Wilson as originator of the
grand challenge concept nor high performance computing as a precedent. Instead, the WallStreet Journal article began by invoking what was framed as “another worldwide call to action,”David Hilbert's 1900 list of 23 unsolved mathematical problems (Gates, 2003; Hilbert, 1902).
In that Hilbert made a list - of problems - there is a similarity. But the similarity ends there.
Hilbert’s context was millennial, he mentions the turn of the century as an appropriate time toreflect on the future. Hilbert’s list is disciplinary, not interdisciplinary; in fact he wasconcerned with the unity of mathematics. The problems are purely intellectual, v researchfunding was irrelevant, there was no scale -individual investigators were the focus – and Hilbert
was reassuring rather than energizing, noting that because mathematics had many unsolved
problems, it had a future. Hilbert’s list is closer in kind to the academic papers with grandchallenges in their titles that proliferated in the computer science literature after the HPCC andmore broadly across all fields post GCGH. Closer to the mark was Gates’ mention of thehuman genome mapping as “a model of a successful international, interdisciplinary” effort(Gates, 2003). Though as a big science effort, that too really was different. Perhaps theclosest precedent was the UN’s Millennium Development Goals which were not mentioned.
The Gates Foundation entered research funding in response to its perception that
postwar government institutions (i.e. NIH) had failed to address serious gaps in knowledge
relevant to the diseases of the poor in developing countries. The Gates Foundation was a newactor in research policy, addressing a perceived failure of established research funders. Gates
wrote: "Every year $70 billion is spent on medical research and development, yet only 10% isdevoted to the diseases that cause 90% of the global health burden" (Gates, 2003). Gates
framed the problem in a way that transcends national boundaries. National governments
8allocate that $70 billion in medical R&D funding in accordance with national priorities. But
viewed from a global perspective, the disease burden is in a different place than are theconstituents of national governments with substantial research funding. Gates introduced
this global perspective into an area of policy that had hitherto had clear geographic scope. To
Maarten Hajer this would exemplify the increasingly common situation in which “solutions forpressing problems transgress the sovereignty of specific polities.” (Hajer, 2003, p. 175).
This intervention in science policy was successful. The agenda of the NIH altered in
response to the GCGH, with the NIH subsequently allocating more resources to research on
developing country infectious diseases (Kirstin & Matthews, 2008). In addition, the Canadian,Brazilian and Indian governments have each launched their own grand challenge grants
programs in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Thus "grand challenges"(accompanied by large amounts of money) functioned here to help a nontraditional actor, anon-profit, enter science policy and shift the priorities of traditional actors and institutions.

5. Grand Challenges for Engineering
The National Academies Press has published more than 100 reports that mention grandchallenges. In the early 1990s computer science reports extensively referenced the thenrecent grand challenges in the HPCC initiative. This pattern was broken in 1998 with theappearance of a report entitled: Visionary Manufacturing Challenges for 2020 with a chapter
entitled “Grand Challenges for Manufacturing”. 2001 saw the appearance of Grand
Challenges in Environmental Sciences, a report much referenced in succeeding reports. The
NSF was a sponsor of all of these reports, and sole sponsor of some.
One of the NSF sponsored reports was the 2008 National Academy of Engineering (NAE)
Grand Challenges for Engineering. This report was produced by a “blue-ribbon” committee of“leading thinkers from such areas as technology, science, business, politics, and entertainment”(NSF, 2006). “Key, and unique, to this project [was] a focus on public outreach” (NSF, 2006).
The effort aimed to improve public understanding of engineering; to excite young people about
an engineering career; and to uncover examples of engineering research opportunities.
Despite the high powered group and the directive to collaborate with “one or more major
media outlets” (NSF, 2006), the report landed with “a dull thud” in the words of the NAE
president Charles Vest (Kaplan-Leiserson, 2011). There was essentially no press coverage.
The engineering report’s main line of development may have gone nowhere, however,there have been spinoffs. Ray Kurzweil, then CEO of Kurzweil Technologies, was a member ofthe engineering committee. In 2009, he founded Singularity University whose mission
statement and indeed website is liberally sprinkled with the term “grand challenges.” vi
Also in 2009 Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering commissioned a public surveyof attitudes towards engineering and engineering challenges. The survey asked whether
engineering issues and problems were more interesting and important than those of medicine,business and law. 40% thought they were. After hearing descriptions of five of theengineering grand challenges, that proportion increased to 54%. “Demographic groups
exhibiting the greatest increases include women without a four-year college degree (+249

points), African Americans (+22 points), and 18- to 34-year-olds (+21 points)” (Hart, 2009, p.3).
These are key demographic groups for engineering degree programs. Over a series ofworkshops endorsed by the NAE support was gathered, and in 2015, deans of 122 U.S.
engineering programs delivered to President Obama commitments to enhance theirundergraduate degrees with grand challenge programs offering five co-curricular components:
GC related research or design projects; client projects; entrepreneurship and innovation
experience; global and cross-cultural perspectives; and problem-based community projects, i.e.
service-learning. The press release explicitly linked this effort with the Engineering Grand
Challenges and with the White House 21st Century Grand Challenges, see below (NAE, 2015).
The engineering effort was similar to Gates’ in proposing a list of 14 grand challenges
devised by a committee of eminent worthies consulting more broadly, including with the
public. Another point of similarity was the explicit motivation of exciting people to engage
with engineering. However, the engineers are silent on much else: the intellectual-practicalnature of the problems, scale and interdiscipliarity. “Unprecedented levels of public funding”
will be required to meet the challenges, yet funding advocacy has not been a feature of thereport follow-on.

6. Competitions
There is another line of grand challenge development concerned with competitions.
The original grand challenge is a rowing competition for men’s eights in Oxford. Dating from1839, the Grand Challenge Cup is the oldest and best-known even at the annual Henley RoyalRegatta on the River Thames. Kenneth G Wilson spent a year in Oxford as a teenager (Nobel
Foundation, 1991) and so likely knew about this race.
At about the same time as the GCGH started, DARPA became the first government
agency to apply the term grand challenge to a competition – a long distance trial for driverlesscars. The first DARPA Grand Challenge was announced in 2002 and took place in 2004.
Nobody finished. There was a winner in 2005 and the competition was held three times
before its name was changed to the robotics challenge in 2012 and then the FANG challenge in2013. The DARPA Grand Challenge followed the first big innovation competition of themodern era, the private Ansari X PRIZE announced in 1996 and won in 2004 by Spaceship One.
Wikipedia notes that the DARPA Grand Challenge was the first effort in autonomous cars notusing traditional mechanisms of corporate development or academic research grants.
The mechanism of challenge competitions as an alternative tool to encourage
innovation has developed greatly under the Obama administration. On his first day in office,President Obama issued a memorandum for Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies
entitled Transparency and Open Government. In the memo, the President committed his
administration to innovation in government seeking, among other things, to offer Americans
increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to use innovative tools tocollaborate with those outside government (Obama, 2009). Implementation followed with
OMB issuing guidance to agencies on using challenges and prizes (as well as citizen science) as
innovative policy tools in addition to the traditional tools of taxes, regulations, contracts,
research grants etc. (Zients, 2010; Weinstein, 2010; NEC & OSTP, 2015). The COMPETES act
10reauthorization of 2010 granted agencies legal authority to conduct prize competitions, andmuch work has gone into developing agency capacity as well as building the challenge.gov
platform. As of 2015, 440 Federal challenges have been conducted by more than 80 agencies
with over $150 million in prizes through challenge.gov (NEC & OSTP, 2015).

7. The White House manifesto
The association of the Obama White House Office of Science and Technology policy withGrand Challenges has evolved. At first the OSTP was somewhat hesitant to engage with theconcept. In its first A Strategy for American Innovation, published in 2009, the phrase grandchallenges occurs three times in scare quotes and once without. The final section andsubsections are entitled:
Catalyze Breakthroughs for National Priorities
o Unleash a clean energy revolution
o Support advanced vehicle technologies
o Drive innovations in health care technology
o Harness Science and Technology to Address the "Grand Challenges" of the 21stCentury. (NEC & OSTP, pp. 19-22)
Under the grand challenges heading, eight important, though somewhat miscellaneous,
fairly specific and so not obviously grand, challenges were articulated in the noun form, forexample “a light-weight vest for soldiers and police officers that can stop an armor-piercing
bullet.” This is especially odd since this list follows three much grander challenges phrased
much more forcefully. The Strategy for American Innovation was updated in 2011 in adocument that uses grand challenges once in passing, without scare quotes.
The OSTP’s hesitancy towards "grand challenges" shifted to full engagement in 2012
with the hiring of an Assistant Director for Grand Challenges, Christin Dorgelo, formerly the
XPRIZE Foundation manager of active competitions. White House and OSTP announcementsof research programs, incentive prizes and agency initiatives thereafter elaborated an argument
for the importance of grand challenges. Tom Kalil’s name is associated with much of thisactivity. Kalil came to OSTP from Berkeley where he initiated multi-disciplinary initiatives
defined both in the traditional manner by the research areas being brought together and in theinnovative framing of societal challenges in energy, water and poverty. He also worked in
global health at the Clinton Foundation and so must have encountered the Gates GCGH.
In April 2012 in a speech at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Kalil
explained grand challenges. This speech is the only document devoted solely to describing
the theory of grand challenges. Almost every other document substantively engaging grandchallenges contains a to-do list. Kalil defined Grand Challenges as "ambitious yet achievablegoals that capture the public's imagination and that require innovation and breakthroughs inscience and technology to achieve" (Kalil, 2012, p. 1). Grand Challenges are a central
mechanism in the President's Innovation Strategy. The precursors mentioned are President
Kennedy's initiative to land a man on the moon, the Human Genome Project and, somewhat
unconventionally, Wikipedia. vii Five attributes were listed:11

1. potential for major impact in domains such as health, energy, sustainability,
education, economic opportunity, national security, or human exploration
2. ambitious but achievable,
3. compelling enough to capture the public imagination,
4. measurable targets for success and completion
5. can help drive and harness innovation and advances in science and technology.
President Obama calls for an "all hands on deck" approach to the identification andpursuit of Grand Challenges involving government agencies, philanthropists, foundations,research universities, companies, investors, and "America's storytellers" including media
companies. The administration encourages us "to imagine a world in which more individuals
and institutions are involved in pursuing or supporting a Grand Challenge and a world in whichthese challenges play a more prominent role in our culture and in our public discourse" (Kalil,
2012, p.5)
In comparison with previous initiatives, there is more emphasis on the excitement
aspect. Wilson explicitly recognized the need for the emotional engagement of excitement toenhance the persuasiveness of his effort. The charge to the NAE from NSF listed excitement
as goal number 2 in aid of recruiting young people to the engineering career (NSF, 2006).
Gates too mentioned recruiting new scientific talent as well as increasing public attention inorder to increase public investment (Gates, 2003). The White House defining grandchallenges as that which "captures the public's imagination," as "compelling and intrinsicallymotivating," and calling for "all hands on deck" efforts, is clearly intended to realize the visionof participatory and collaborative government laid out in the Transparency and Open
Government memo (Obama, 2009). The broad group of collaborators sought includes media
companies perhaps the only time in US science policy that media companies are positioned as
integral to the effort.
On April 2, 2013, President Obama announced his 21st Century Grand Challenges
initiative with which several agency programs are associated. viii NASA’s Asteroid Grand
Challenge aims to find all asteroid threats to human populations and decide what to do about
them. The initial framing aligns well with the manifesto. It was announced at an asteroid
initiative industry and partner event, is a large-scale effort that will use multi-disciplinary
collaborations and a variety of partnerships with other government agencies, international
partners, industry, academia, and citizen scientists. "This Grand Challenge is focused on
detecting and characterizing asteroids and learning how to deal with potential threats. We will
also harness public engagement, open innovation and citizen science to help solve this global
problem." (NASA, 2013). The influence of the grand challenge manifesto may have been toencourage the agency to address a big problem and see its work as setting up the question,
recruiting partners and using the latest methods (citizen science, public input through the RFI)
to address the problem. This differs from the traditional policy mechanism, an RFP requesting
proposals from university and government scientists to perform research on the problem.
The agency juxtaposed the grand challenge against its traditional effort in this area, which is a
mission to redirect an asteroid and send humans to study it. The grand challenge agenda has
produced several other programs: the cross agency BRAIN initiative to map the human brain,
the Sunshot solar energy program of the Department of Energy (echoing the “moonshot”
12historical touchstone) and several grand challenges at the State Department.
and State Department programs have used prize competitions.

The NASA, DoE

In October 2015 A Strategy for American Innovation was updated for a third time(hereafter Strategy 2015). In this version, grand challenges appears 15 times. The section
entitled Catalyzing Breakthroughs for National Priorities lists 11 action items, the first of which
is: Tackling Grand Challenges. The grand challenges section offers a vision:
As President Kennedy once observed, “By defining our goal moreclearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all
peoples to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly towards it.”Grand Challenges are ambitious but achievable goals that harness
science, technology, and innovation to solve important national or global
problems and that have the potential to capture the public’s imagination.
These can have a major impact in domains such as health, energy,
sustainability, education, economic opportunity, national security, and human
exploration. Also, as various technologies such as biotechnology, information
technology, and nanotechnology become more and more powerful—thequestion “what should we do” is arguably as or more important than “whatcan we do.” This is not just a technical question, it is a question that relies on
imagination, creativity, values, as well as individual and shared views on how
we define progress. (NEC & OSTP, 2015, p. 85)
Substantially the same wording can be found in Kalil’s 2012 speech. The next section isabout the path forward and describes the agency initiatives introduced above, as well as thecommitment the Deans of Engineering have made, also introduced above. Finally, companies
pursuing ambitious goals are mentioned: SpaceX, Google (self-driving cars), Qualcomm(“tricorder” like device), IBM (Watson). In this way the document makes the case that an allhands-on-deck approach has been implemented because government agencies, universities
and companies are engaged in the effort. ix
The White House approach to grand challenges clearly evolved between the first
Strategy for American Innovation, published 9 months after President Obama was inaugurated,
and the 2015 version. The first Strategy was similar to Engineering, Gates and Wilson inoffering an 8 point to do list, though being in the noun form was somewhat of a throwback toearlier efforts. The list was also strangely un-grand (Goldston, 2009) and as if to remediate
this, was followed by an RFI requesting suggestions for challenges from the public. The 2015
Strategy in contrast departs from previous models, reading less as a to do list and more as
examples of a new policy tool at work. Indeed, the Administration seeks to improvegovernment processes in part through pioneering new approaches to getting things done,
itemized in the Innovation Toolkit (NEC & OSTP, 2015, pp. 109-110). One item in the toolkit is:“Identifying and pursuing the “Grand Challenges” of the 21st century.”
Like Wilson, Gates and the Engineers, the White House is explicit about using grandchallenges to energize a community and recruit new people into the effort. The White House13

is also explicit about working at scale. Ambition and potential for major impact are defining
characteristics of the White House vision. The judgement that a solution is feasible, which
was articulated by the Gates committee, was also articulated by Kalil. The White House madea public call for suggestions, like Gates and the Engineers. However, there is no eminentcommittee specifying a to-do list in the current White House vision, nor is explicit mention
made of interdisciplinarity.

8. Similarities
The four most influential uses of grand challenges in US science policy have been
introduced, as well as, briefly, a high profile competition x. Though they span 40 years, theefforts share a great deal. All are science policy in that they articulate an agenda in order toinfluence budget allocations. (This contrasts with the plethora of grand challenge academic
papers and conference sessions proposing problem lists for a specialist research community.)
They have in common elite sponsors – a Nobel prizewinner, the richest man in the world, theNational Academy of Engineering, the White House.
At a fundamental level, the efforts share the dictionary definition. Grand means large
or ambitious in scale or scope and also magnificent and imposing in appearance, size or style.
In denoting the most important of its kind, it has connotations of nobility. A challenge is a callto take part in a contest or competition, originally a duel. The Grand Challenge usage isshifting this meaning. Rather than being offered by one man to another, the challenge isoffered to society by a variety of forces beyond the control of any single person or institution.
The intent is that we join together to overcome these predicaments. Grand Challenges have an
air of saving humanity about them. Though this strand was not present in Wilson's
formulation or the initial use by the computing community, it is notable in the Gates GCGH,
Engineering and the White House efforts.xi
The efforts also hold in common a sense of what defines grand challenges in researchpolicy. Grand challenges take the form of to do lists involving:
●
●
●
●
●
●
●
●

Problems combining intellectual and practical obstacles (Wilson, Gates, Kalil)
A desire to energize a community (Wilson, Gates, Engineers, Kalil/White House)
At a large scale (Wilson, Gates, Kalil/White House)
Requiring interdisciplinary research (Wilson, Gates)
Specification by a committee (Gates, Engineers)
A public call for suggestions (Gates, Engineers, White House)
A request for resources (Wilson, Gates, Engineers)
Judgment that solution is feasible (Gates, Kalil/White House)

This list represents the most elaborated definition in decreasing order of necessity.
That is, all grand challenges are problem lists, fewer require feasibility. Gates Foundation
Grand Challenges in Global Health articulates all these elements. The Engineers mention the
fewest, not because they object to any of the defining elements but because their text is silent
on so much, lacking even a definition of grand challenges. Strategy 2015 departs the most14

from this definition. Using grand challenges as an umbrella for innovative policy tools such ascompetitions and citizen science the Administration is moving the term into a new spacetenuously connected to research.
Curiously, though the efforts should share a pedigree, they instead share the invocationof (various) aspirational pedigrees. Wilson doesn’t mention the boat race or the Japanese
Challenge, both of which likely influenced his phrasing. Rather he harkens back to thediscovery of pulsars, an example anchoring his readers on an image of the excitement of big
discovery. Gates doesn’t mention Wilson or the HPCC, though he likely learned of grandchallenges from Gordon Bell who was involved in the HPCC effort. Instead he anchors hisreaders’ minds on an image of venerable abstract research with reference to the mostinfluential mathematician of the 19th century. The engineers are silent on pedigree, as onmuch else. Kalil’s speech does not mention Gates or Wilson or the boat race, pulsars or even
Hilbert. He plants several anchors, harkening back to the moonshot, genome sequencing andWikipedia (Kalil, 2012) offering glowing memories of a large, expensive and successful effort led
by President Kennedy, a successful innovative big science effort, and a model of citizen
engagement creating a broadly used knowledge resource. Each pedigree is offered withpurpose, explaining grand challenges as something familiar in a particular way – exciting
discovery, very, very scholarly science; or inspiring collaborative, citizen-involved efforts withpresidential leadership. Each pedigree is aspirational and meant to suggest to readers thatthe author’s plans will produce more success of the same type.
The four efforts share another characteristic - policy innovation. Wilson and the Gates
Foundation pushed an outsider agenda and saw substantial success. Both initiatives can beinterpreted as challenges to the post-war institutions governing US science. Both sought toplace on the agenda of Federal agencies and scientists what they perceived as important
problems that were being ignored: Wilson the development of high performance computing toadvance science and Gates reducing the toll of infectious diseases in non-Western countries.
Both succeeded in getting these items on the agenda. The US High Performance Computing
act and subsequent programs, including one long running NSF grand challenge grant program,
were helped into being by Wilson’s advocacy. The Gates Foundation enlisted scientists towork on the problems of infectious disease in poor countries and saw NIH start to spend somemoney in this area. Several countries have partnered with the Gates Foundation to devotetheir resources to the effort. Others sought to expand the remit and rally resources behind
efforts in non-communicable diseases and mental health in developing countries.
The other two initiatives came from institutional pillars of US science policy: the
National Academy of Engineering and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Far from being outsiders, these are consummate insiders and agenda setters. The engineering
effort seemed to miss the mark, though two weakly linked efforts gained some traction,
Singularity University and university programs to augment undergraduate engineering
education. This is strange because one function of the report’s genre, NSF funded National
Academy studies, is to set priorities for research funding and the report’s Grand Challenge list
could be used for this purpose. The Administration’s grand challenge efforts are associatedwith the President’s initiatives to modernize the operations of the Federal government, in part15

by bringing in new policy tools such as prize competitions. The 2015 Strategy lists grandchallenges as one item in an “Innovation Toolkit for Public-Sector Problem Solving” (NEC &OSTP, 2015, p. 109). The agencies’ grand challenges use competitions and seek participation
beyond university scientists, both new elements in US science policy.
The four science policy grand challenge initiatives examined here share origins among the elite,a definition of grand challenges, persuasive use of aspirational pedigrees and innovative intent.
The next section takes a closer look at the innovative aspect by considering the relationshipbetween grand challenges and the older, dominant framing of research efforts as basic or
applied.

9. Grand Challenges versus applied research
These four initiatives were motivated by different dissatisfactions with current policy:
lack of funding for supercomputers in physics, lack of scientific attention to infectious diseases
in developing countries, lack of public enthusiasm for engineering, little public engagementwith Federal government and a feeling that more advantage could be taken of innovative
processes used in the private sector. Yet as different as these motivations were, elites
pursued their programs under the rubric of grand challenges, as if beyond the dictionary
definition of the individual words, the phrase somehow signals innovation in research policy.
In US research policy, basic and applied research, the linear model, and the scientificfrontier have been invoked almost ad nauseam by those garnering broad political support forlarge scale funding commitments to research in the decades since World War II. After 60
years, this discourse seems to have lost some of its force. For example arguments have been
made that society can no longer condone basic research that causes suffering to animals(Bateson et al. 2011; Greek and Greek, 2010), suggesting the domain of basic research could
contract. Pielke charts the declining usage of “basic research” in Science, Nature, the New
York Times and Congressional Hearings during the 2000s (Pielke, 2012). In books scanned by
Google, use of “basic research”, originating about 1940, peaked about 1986 and declined
thereafter. If one discourse loses some of its persuasive power, does research therefore
command less attention and lower political priority? Or might new schema emerge to fill adeveloping void?
The grand challenge concept does not overturn the modernist institutions of science
policy established after World War II. Rather it represents a new discourse, a new way ofseeing things that persuasively framed initiatives outside the normal schemas. I use schemas
in Sewell’s sense as cultural resources, less the hard and fast rules such as those that govern the
NSF and NIH and their grant programs, but instead the binary oppositions providing
fundamental tools of thought, informal metaphors, assumptions, conventions, scenarios andhabits of speech (Sewell, 2005, p. 131). Sewell argued that the unavoidable metaphor ofstructure in the social sciences, is constituted by mutually sustaining cultural schemas andresources that empower and constrain social action and tend to be reproduced by that action.
To Sewell structure is dynamic, evolving through actors’ resourceful agency and interaction(Sewell, 2005, p. 151).
16

Maarten Hajer has traced the evolution of schemas in the domain of environmental
policy, pointing to widespread to dissatisfaction with modernist policy institutions (Hajer,
2003). His work demonstrates how a new environmental discourse:. . . brings to life a new way of seeing, with new constraints and newopportunities, that is then recognized and interpreted by various actors within
the environmental domain, which subsequently leads to all sorts ofadjustments in institutional practice. (Hajer, 1995, p. 262)
Grand challenges may have the same potential to be a new way of seeing research. It
has been used by those seeking innovation in research policy perhaps for that reason. In
research policy the dominant modernist schema, the one the audience for grand challenges
uses to interpret what is being said, would be basic and applied research, the linear model andthe frontier of science. The category of basic research emerged after WWII and is associatedwith Vannevar Bush’s report: Science the Endless Frontier which changed forever the languageof science policy with an explanation of how basic research enabled societal progress,
associating it with the excitement of the American exploration of the frontier (Bush, 1945).
Basic research connotes not only research done with no consideration of application, but also
autonomy of the individual exploring the frontier, superiority over applied research (Stokes,
1997) and the linear model encapsulating the relationship to societal need. The inadequacy ofthis framework has been noted before (for example, Ceccarelli , 2013; Pielke 2012) andattempts have been made to develop a new language with which to describe research (Stokes,
1997; Nowotny et al., 2003). I have suggested above that grand challenge initiatives agree on
proposing lists of problems that combine intellectual and practical aspects. This combination
defined Pasteur’s Quadrant (1997), Stokes’ proposed new language, and it echoes Mode 2’scontext of application (Nowotny et al., 2001).
Speaking in terms of grand challenges, one can avoid the basic/applied categories. Even
better, grand’s connotations of nobility perhaps evades any hints of inferiority that might be
expected to accompany mention of solving practical problems (Stokes, 1997). Engineers havealways had a status problem in the basic/applied world. Connotations of nobility andgrandeur in problem solving would have obvious attractions to those tasked with making
engineering seem desirable. Transcending basic/applied would have been useful to Wilson
whose project risked being seen as applied and therefore of lower status. The type of
advocacy he rejected, pointing to problems solved, is used when arguing for money for appliedresearch. His use of grand challenges conveys excitement associated with big discovery(pulsars) and working with purpose while avoiding the low status associated with applied.
Wilson’s definition of grand challenges does not use the word “applied”, preferring instead:benefits, basic, extreme difficulties, extraordinary rewards.
That the modernist schema always lurks in the background is suggested by Gates’
invocation of abstract mathematics to introduce his problem solving grant program. The
otherwise anomalous introduction of Hilbert into Gates’ Wall Street Journal piece makes sense
if viewed as an attempt to signal appreciation of scientists’ valued basic research and, despite
the large amount of money on offer, a concern to be seen as credible in the world of science by17

a new entrant whose reputation was built in technology and whose Foundation at that pointdelivered healthcare services.
The modernist schema is never very far away in people’s minds and so frames their
reception of the grand challenges concept. The most common framing is to see the new
language as another way of talking about applied research. Mode 2 suffered this fate
(Nowotny et al., 2003). The wording in the US Code associated with the HPCC defines grandchallenges as application of computing to science. The same approach was taken in a special
issue of Research Policy on Grand Challenges devoted to gleaning lessons learned from thehistory of mission oriented research, the idea being that grand challenges are another name formission oriented research. However, within that issue, the differences between Grand
Challenges and mission oriented research were noted: greater breadth, longer time scale, nosingle agency being the intended “user”, intersectoral research collaboration required,competitive environment of application, and many sources of R&D funding (Foray et al., 2012,
p. 1698). xii Thus the article itself admits that equating grand challenges with classicalmodernist mission oriented research doesn’t work, if grand challenges are framed according to
the definition given above.
The White House, being the center of the establishment, can be expected to haveparticular problems transcending the categories that govern establishment thinking. In the
manifesto, Kalil proposed a definition encompassing both breakthroughs in science andtechnology and goals, thus framing a concept melding both intellectual and practical problems.
Strategy 2015 dutifully begins with a short section on fundamental research reviewing thePresident’s commitment to funding for NSF and NIH. In this context, where use of the basic
category is mandatory, grand challenges did not maintain the character of research combining
intellectual with practical challenges. “Harnessing science, technology and innovation” toaddress goals seems much more like a call to do applied research, and grand challenges has
been implemented in agency mission specific programs. Though as noted above, these
programs still do not look like mission oriented research because although they are agency
mission oriented, they are not exactly research programs. The reduction to applied researchalso appears in the common rewording of grand challenges to societal challenges. Societal
challenges can be juxtaposed with scientific challenges (Neal et al. 2008), and very little needchange.
The history of grand challenges in US science policy demonstrates that changing schemais extremely difficult. The grip of the existing ways of thinking remains very strong. Only
powerful elites are able to have a lasting impact with new discourse, and even then, the pull of
the old categories cannot always be overcome.

10.

Conclusion

In contrast to the tired categories of basic and applied, grand challenges offers a
research agenda more appropriate to our times, one that combines intellectual and practicalmotives, generating excitement to address problems so big that they exceed the capacity of
specialist communities. All the more so when articulated as a list, lists being “the signatureform of our time” (O’Connell, 2013). The grand challenge concept appeals today as an18

invitation to join a larger effort and connect with public concerns and thus stands opposed tothe bygone era of lone scientists in ivory towers. Grand Challenges evoke excitement; in thecontext of research that would be intellectual excitement. In every example examined here,
although the grip of the older categories remained strong, grand challenges demonstrated
potential as a new language.
If the potential of grand challenges were to be deployed consistently, basic research
could come to seem anachronistic. “Investigator initiated” sounds individual which could
become a liability in an age of team science, networks and collaboration. Working welltogether might be the new ideal in scientific life, insistence on individual pursuits might soon
sound somewhat selfish. Basic research would also be tainted when described as research“without a goal.” Formerly, research was tainted when performed with a goal in mind, but inan era guided by conceptions of grand challenges as the right and proper framing for science
policy, the taint could well transfer to research that cannot show a connection to a grandchallenge. Grand challenges encapsulate the promise of intellectual excitement and alignwith the group effort that characterizes research today, transcending limits imposed by anaging vocabulary of basic, applied and mission.

11.

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i

http://www.cac.cornell.edu/about/history.aspx accessed June 5, 2013
One of which was basic research.
iii
Grand Challenge lists mentioned in this paper can be found at www.dhgc.weebly.com
iv
Cited 1.6 times as often as the GCGH launch paper: Varmus et al., 2003, Science.
v
Though Gates’ readers are reassured that research into these problems “led to significant
breakthroughs in technology and medicine.”vi
In June 2016 Google returned over 600 hits on a search of singularityu.org for “grand challenges”.
vii
Hilbert, the Gates GCGH and the Academy of Engineering list were mentioned in an earlier document, a2009 RFI calling for public input on grand challenges.
viii
https://youtu.be/i6v5EFYnPjEix
The all-hands-on-deck wording is used elsewhere in the document to refer to initiatives in K-12 STEM
education and entrepreneurship efforts that also involve working collaboratively with institutions outside thegovernment to accomplish policy goals.
x
The next most influential use would be the National Academies report on Grand Challenges inEnvironmental Science, and following that, other National Academies reports. The environmental report was
influential within the environmental science community. It's characteristics mirror those described here.
ii

22

xi

If one isn't ultimately working to save humanity, can the challenge truly be grand?
The reduced control of a single agency over the activity in question goes to the heart of the difference
between the modernist and deliberative policy environment described by Hajer (Hajer, 2003).
xii

23