CHICAGO--Could scientists stand to see their budgets slashed in the short run, if it means a deeper, more significant commitment to R&D over the long term?

At a symposium at the 2009 AAAS Annual Meeting, an international panel of science policy experts challenged their colleagues to see the current economic crisis as an opportunity to build 21st-century economies in their home countries.

It's a project that will require significant help from the science and technology communities, and could lead to an "unprecedented focus" on the potential of basic and applied research, according to the speakers from the European Union, Japan, and the United States.

In places like Japan and Europe, policymakers are already using the financial crisis to leave behind their industrial-based economies in favor of building "cleaner, greener, fairer" knowledge-based economies with a global reach.

Jose Manuel Silva Rodriguez, the European Commission's director general of research, called the crisis an "ill wind," and urged his colleagues to see the opportunity presented by changing times. "If you wait until the wind and weather are just right, you will never plant anything," he observed.

Although some policymakers question whether R&D investment can create jobs and alleviate other acute symptoms of an economic downturn, Silva said investment in environmentally-friendly products and services are already "showing that they can contribute to growth" in the European Union. Other public-private initiatives, such as the EU's project to retrofit buildings with energy-efficient features, will also create jobs, said Silva.

Japan has already endured a decade of recession, and the faltering economy there has convinced that country's leaders to move toward a knowledge-based economy as well, said Tateo Arimoto, the director general of Japan's Research Institute of Science and Technology for Society.

But Japan will have to "adjust its social and science systems" to rebuild in this fashion, said Arimoto. For instance, universities in Japan and around the world must move away from being "instruments of national competition" and reorganize themselves as global centers for learning, he recommended.

Experts agree that globalization is partly to blame for the scale of current economic woes, but they also agree that a return to protectionist policies would "reduce the speed and size of the economic recovery," said AAAS Chief International Officer Vaughan Turekian, who organized the symposium.

Although he believes scientists are "optimists by nature," the U.S. National Academies' Richard Bissell was less sanguine than his colleagues about the fallout from the failing economy.

"Budgets will be severely challenged in ways that we as scientists haven't seen in a decade," warned Bissell, the Academies' director of policy and global affairs.

Even if short-term stimulus money does come to science agencies, a sudden influx of funds can be disruptive, since the cash may come with unrealistic expectations, he noted.

"You don't want people asking, 'if I give you a billion dollars, how many jobs will you produce?'" explained Bissell. "Is that the criteria you want to be judged by?"

But even Bissell allowed a little of his optimism to show through by the end of the symposium, saying he was "encouraged that the public believes science is an avenue to a better future, even when things are going badly."