Democratizing Science

Science News, Nov 7, 1998 by Janet Raloff

Science shops are research for and with communities

In the early 1970s, the Center for Urban Affairs at Northwestern University was contacted by the Christian Action Ministry. This coalition of 13 Chicago churches, which ran medical clinics in its low-income neighborhood, wanted to prevent disease and injuries. Instead, it seemed stuck doing little more than dispensing treatment.

So, the university center recruited Scott Bernstein and 19 other students on its Evanston, Ill., campus to scout for root causes of the neighborhood's medical problems. They began by sifting through a year's worth of medical records--some 22,000 files--from the west-side community's two hospitals.

The students eventually identified the top 10 reasons for hospital visits, a list that allowed the community to focus on projects that held the prospect of quick payoffs for relatively small investments.

Such as the number-two health problem: traffic accidents.

The ministry's neighborhood, home to 80,000 people, averaged almost 55,000 traffic accidents per year. The Northwestern students pored over police records to identify the hot spots and then monitored those intersections.

"We witnessed a system out of control," Bernstein says. "Nobody was keeping up the stop signs, traffic lights were mistimed or not working, curbs were crumbling, and potholes were everywhere." Armed with site-specific data, community leaders met with the city's traffic-safety commission not only to address specific problems but also to change how the city channels traffic through the neighborhood. Local traffic-accident rates fell.

More importantly, Bernstein argues, the community learned it could take charge of local problems.

A quarter-century later, Bernstein has become famous in Chicago for attacking many of the same types of problems on a metropolitan scale through his Center for Neighborhood Technology. He's still mapping problems and analyzing their underlying causes--though now with a paid staff of 20 and an annual budget of about $2 million. Working with government and industry power brokers, the center is also helping devise low-cost incentives for reinvestments in inner cities beyond Chicago.

It's but one of dozens of small centers that have sprung up around the country using community-based research to address local problems. The Netherlands, home to several dozen such research centers, is widely credited with pioneering this type of institution and its generic moniker: the science shop. Its model has spawned centers in France, Northern Ireland, and Austria, but most of the centers in the United States developed independently.

Until recently, most of these groups have toiled in relative obscurity, notes Richard E. Sclove, president of the Loka Institute in Amherst, Mass. His organization hopes to change that by knitting them all into a worldwide network and "increasing their public profile so that people who could benefit from them can also find them."

The first Dutch science shop opened in 1974 at the University of Utrecht. Others quickly followed, evolving into politically popular centers through which federally funded institutions of higher learning could fulfill a social-service mission.

Collectively, the Dutch centers now perform about 2,000 research projects annually for community groups, unions, schools, and individuals. Some have developed into the equivalent of consulting companies, undertaking contract work, even for industrial customers. While public projects are conducted free of charge, commercial commissions must be financed by the client.

The larger shops, often staffed by 4 to 10 people, serve as centralized doorways to a university's research community. They work with neighborhood groups to hone public inquiries into something students can address, then find faculty members who will supervise the student investigators. The more numerous smaller shops tend to be thematically focused and more likely to oversee directly any research project that they accept.

The University of Groningen has nine such decentralized science shops. In even its biggest, the Chemistry Shop, a typical project lasts only about 4 weeks and usually amounts to little more than an intensive state-of-the-art literature search, explains its director, Henk A.J. Mulder. Yet, these projects can prove practical and substantive, he says.

Among the "green chemistry" projects undertaken by Dutch chemistry shops are research that identified vegetable oil-based substitutes for harmful organic solvents and a literature search that uncovered methods to produce polycarbonate window plastics without chlorinated chemicals.

Danish universities have embraced many aspects of the Dutch model for their federally funded science shops--such as relying on students to perform research. At the Technical University of Denmark, outside Copenhagen, research needs are publicized in an annual catalog mailed to all students and faculty members, notes Michael S. Jorgensen, who runs the university's science shop. Though student participation is voluntary, he says, perhaps 25 of about 35 projects described in the catalog are completed each year. In addition to receiving university credit for their work, "students receive real-life experience in problem solving," he observes.