A major development is likely to be the continuing rise of international scientific collaborations. They are already bigger and more international than ever. From the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to the mapping of the human genome, from the International Space Station to the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider, it seems nothing can stand in the way of such glittering scientific juggernauts. Indeed, many of these projects have become so grand and costly that no one nation can shoulder the entire burden of running them.
Are such scientific research projects destined to get ever bigger and more costly? And are they likely to become ever more remote and beyond the control of the average taxpayer and voter?
Well, it depends on how you define a single "scientific research project". Take for instance, the cancer sequencing efforts of The Cancer Genome Atlas or the International Cancer Genomics Consortium, which are really huge projects along the lines of attention grabbing physics experiments like those at CERN, just not all in one place. The ICGC, for example, has 66 projects amongst 15 member countries, so despite being a single project, it's really a coordination of research (and expenses) from many contributors.
Al-Khalili adds this:
It is vital that the scientific community work more closely with the politicians and policy makers who can provide oversight and publicly clarify and promote the rationale behind each endeavor.
It is also vital that scientists communicate their work to people that support it, be they politicians, policy makers, donors to a university or foundation, or the general public.
Public outreach is probably the most important work, since it's the public that can decide to donate or tell funders (like politicians) that science is important. But outreach is work, and it's work often overlooked when more pressing issues (research, grants, publications) get in the way. Nevertheless, some scientists like Michael Eisen and Steven Salzburg still manage to do it, and do it well.
