2018-12-04

I was ten years old in 1966, when the original  Start Trek television series first ran . This was the time of the moon race ,when everyone predicted  that we were at the start of a new space age ,My  family lived in Florida and  an uncle worked at Cape Canaveral,so ,of  course , Idreamed of growing up to be an astronaut ,Almost none of those dreams -personal or societal -have come true .After all ,I'm not writing this from my office on the moon .

Unlike the current , rain-dead ,shoot- em-up movies ,the original Start Trek series  was  deeply  philosophical ,It pictured alternative societies - both utopias and dystopias ,But,the thing that really attracted me as a teenager was the Star Fleet Academy - a university for future Star Fleet officers,Maybe ,it would be up and running by  the time I turned 18.

I had no luck getting into either Star Fleet or the VSA,but I've recently had the pleasure of visiting a number of impressive research academies in China . These are specialized  research centers, funded by both the central government  and provincial governments ,They are mostly separate from universities -although  they do have doctoral students ,In the Us Most of this type of research is done at universities ,so we don't have such organizations that are designed to provide  research  on social and economic issues directly to government  officials at all  levels.

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