A science advisor for US Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, said Monday that one of the most important engineering challenges in the 21st century will be cyber security. And an advisor for Senator John McCain, the Republican contender, said the most important challenge is improving urban infrastructure. Say what?

They were unlikely priorities to be mentioned, given that Republicans tend to own security issues, while Democrats have been more vocal on infrastructure issues, especially those that affect their core constituencies in crumbling urban centers.

The two advisors were Paul Kaminski, a former undersecretary of defense for acquisition and technology, who supports Obama, and Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO who supports McCain. They were at a panel discussion Monday at the National Academies in Washington DC. In between them in the picture was Lord Alec Broers, a member of the UK House of Lords and former vice chancellor of Cambridge University. He grimaced a lot and kept his lips pursed while Kaminski and Fiorina went back and forth. It was a fairly civil discussion, considering the tone this campaign has otherwise taken.

The National Academy of Engineering was holding its annual meeting, and wanted some big names for its scheduled talks and panel discussions. It also wanted to drum up more interest in a report released earlier this year, called Grand Challenges for Engineering, which lists the 14 most important engineering challenges of the 21st century, as decided upon by a wide range of engineers, entrepreneurs and futurists. And so it hosted two panel discussions to explore how the report could get more attention from policy makers or the media, in a culture that devotes, at best, a couple of minutes to science and technology within 22 minute TV news programs, and in a political system that requires re-election every two, four or six years: time periods too short for long-term technology projects.

One thing that occurred to me: the academies could do better pushing their grand challenges if the challenges were a little less copious. Fourteen items are a lot for anyone’s agenda; they should have done a better job winnowing them down and prioritizing them. Why was “reverse-engineer the brain” (which bore the clear imprint of report committee member Ray Kurzweil) on the same list as “advance health informatics”, when the former won’t happen for generations, while the latter already is? Why was “provide energy from fusion”, which is still 50 years away, mentioned in the same breath as “make solar energy economical”, which might only be a decade or so away? (My editor reminds me that all solar energy is really just 8 minutes away.)

I posed this question to the chair of the report, former US secretary of defense William Perry. He agreed that some challenges were more immediate than others, but said that the committee looked at the “entire 21st century.” If forced to choose one, Perry said that New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who was on one of the panels, may have summed it up best: the most important challenge is to develop an “abundant, cheap, clean, reliable source of electrons.” That coinage seems to refer to two of the grand challenges: making solar energy economical, and developing carbon sequestration methods. But I agree: Friedman said it better.

The debate between the candidates’ representatives at times reflected the clear political differences of the parties they represented. Kaminski seemed to have a faith that government could lead the way on these grand challenges, while Fiorina said that government sometimes got in the way of innovation. Kaminski cited the importance of government-led goals like putting a man on the moon, while Fiorina said that most of the innovation in aerospace today is coming from private investment, not NASA. Kaminski talked about a hypothetical, step-by-step program that would lead to a US energy supply that was 20% solar powered – with intermediate checkpoints along the way. But Fiorina, who stressed the importance of allowing entrepreneurs to innovate, said that Kaminski’s approach sounded like a “top-down” government program. “Venture capitalists are much better at walking away from government programs that don’t work than government bureaucrats,” she said.

But when asked which of the grand challenges they thought most important, the advisers’ answers were a bit more surprising. Kaminski said that for him, the most important were securing cyberspace and making renewable energies affordable – the latter of which I took as a close cousin to the “making solar energy economical” item on the NAE list. Biofuels and other renewables like wind never made the NAE list.

Fiorina said that it was difficult to select just one challenge because they were all “inextricably tied” together. Renewable energy, she said, was tied to “preventing nuclear terror.” While preventing nuclear terror was indeed one of the 14 admirable goals on the list, I don’t understand the asserted relationship. Do we now have to worry about terrorists blowing up our solar farms?

But if Fiorina had to narrow the list down to one, she said she would select “restore and improve urban infrastructure.” Strangely, that would make Fiorina’s priorities inextricably tied to Obama’s, who announced a policy on this in February.

Image: Risdon Photography