It's such a dream come true that I have this opportunity to create this blog-- even if it's only now since I've been wanting to do it as far back as maybe one or two years ago. It follows a dream of communicating a dream of One Global Philippines after I and my family opened a technology-oriented socio-economic magazine in July last year. That's right--that's one we dream of-- a united Philippines even if all of us are scattered all over the world. We dream of poverty reduction through science and technology as a vehicle. And I just wanted to share to everybody a hope while we have been working on our publication, the Growth Revolution Magazine. That went with the paper that we just filed with the Bureau of AGricultural Research-- that is for a grant. Here it is.
Creation of a Rich Information Exchange Venue Toward Science and Technology-based Poverty Reduction
Maybe for lack of a science orientation, the Philippines never really had a science magazine that targeted an audience of general circulation.
If one is to observe, those countries that have been in the forefront of technology and innovation had science magazines not only for the scientific community-- or those peer-reviewed journals. They also had publications meant for the general audience whose support is pivotal in the success of commercializing scientific innovations.
Discover magazine is one of such popular science magazines founded in 1980 in the United States, a country known to be the world’s center of innovations for many decades.
It was through Discover magazine that I first learned about the development of the computed tomography (CT) scanning diagnostic equipment which was just being launched in the 1980s. Discover magazine was regularly available at our school library at the Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila where I spent college studying Mass Communication. It was through Discover that I got an inspiration for a thesis called “Unearthing: A TV Program on Science and Technology.”
Without a general interest science magazine, it can be conclusive that support from an important general audience—like financiers and policymakers—will be difficult to harness.
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), more popularly known as Star Wars based on the 1977 George Lucas film, was a military-based plan of the US government to protect the US from ballistic missile attacks.
SDI was widely covered by Discover. While the SDI may not have been used in its complete essence as a ground and space-based anti-ballistic missile system, research and development (R&D) associated in it is said to be the basis of current anti-ballistic missile systems today.
The more than $100 billion investments that the US government, then led by its former president Ronald Reagan, poured into it through university and the National Laboratory R&D did not go to waste. The SDI Organization, put up in 1984, has generated, through its funding of many scientists’ works, advancements in computer systems, component miniaturization, sensors and missile systems that are a foundation of these technologies today.
But there are many other scientific publications even prior to Discover that were vehicles of scientific progress and economic change. The Royal Society journal documented much of the supremacy in scientific development of England in the nineteenth century during which time that the country went through immense industrial revolution. The monumental works of Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, and the early works of Charles Darwin were published by the Royal Society.
Many other scientific publications came out during these times in Britain, and their producers believed that these publications were instruments to making the general public become aware of scientific advancements that everyone, not just the scientific community, should support or at least be know of.
Aside from Discover and the Royal Society, a longer-existing magazine, a highly-prestigious one at that, Nature, was founded in 1869. Nature is really a scientific journal. But its mission, delivered through its choice of plain language, makes it understandable and attractive for the general audience.
Nature published global breakthroughs such as as Watson and Crick’s discovery of the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) structure in 1953 and the Dolly the (cloned) Sheep in 1997.
Publishing in Nature became so important that many of scientific works that got published here got funding too.
Nature’s editor John Maddox said Nature’s journalism “is a way of creating a sense of community among people who would otherwise be isolated from each other.”
The first owner and publisher of Nature, Alexander Macmillan, said Nature wanted to “provide cultivated readers with an accessible forum for reading about advances in scientific knowledge.”
Nature’s original 1869 mission statement was “first, to place before the general public the grand results of scientific work and scientific discovery; and to urge the claims of Science to a more general recognition in education and in daily life; and, secondly to aid scientific men themselves, by giving early information of all advances made in any branch of natural knowledge throughout the world, and by affording them an opportunity of discussing the various scientific questions which arise from time to time.”
But more than just copy the objectives and mission statements of other scientific journals and magazines, Growth Revolution, is putting the mission of its publication at the background of what is an obvious need in the Philippines.
The need in the Philippines is for each one specially for people “in the know” to contribute to poverty reduction and sustainable development.
Its vision is to create a rich information exchange environment for accelerated economic growth and poverty reduction. Its mission is to become the premiere venue for information exchange on poverty reduction through dissemination of information primarily on science and technology and peripherally on related topics such as education, infrastructure, business, and social welfare. It focuses on featuring best practices and successes in these sectors as an inspiration for many to communicate and also hopefully to replicate these successes. It also wants to become a truth-teller in certain situationer stories in these sectors.
Journalism professionals in other countries may have found the need for a more science-focused publication, without necessarily relating this to the economy.
However, in the Philippines, there is an apparent need to stress the importance of science and technology to daily life which somehow was Nature’s mission too.
Growth Revolution magazine aims to make the general audience see how science and technology and other sectors relate closely to each other and actually fall under one important mission of helping the poor become part of the larger society. This is what makes the magazine unique from other science magazines from abroad as it tries to fill a gap that is currently not filled in the country.
Despite its many limitations, Growth Revolution is, in fact, after its third issue, now the first and the only science-oriented socio-economic magazine in the Philippines targeting a general audience.
Its emerging concept also anchors on the fact that people are behind every development, recognizing that it is people that make and implement change.
The thrust on advancing economic development through science and technology should start from the top leadership of the state.
That is particularly true in the case of newly industrialized countries in Asia like in South Korea whose industrialization started with the leadership of Park Chung-hee, who directed from the 1960s to the 1970s Korea toward export-oriented heavy and light industry, chemical industry, and electronics.
In Taiwan, this was Minister of Economic Affairs Sun Yun-suan who founded in 1973 the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), the non-profit research-based state agency that spearheaded spin-offs of technology businesses from ITRI in Taiwan. ITRI led to the progressive technology industries in Hsinchu Park.
People’s leadership is also paving the way to India’s present technological revolution as former Indian President Abdul Kalam, himself a scientist, adopted in early 2000 a policy toward making India a technology superpower. India just launched last year its first mission to the moon through the Sriharikota space center and is now a biotechnology leader and a global software outsourcing hub.
Growth Revolution’s founders have always believed that science writing contributes a lot to national development as developed countries are built in the foundation of scientific discoveries.
The first automobile was invented in Germany , a G-8 rich nation. South Korea has its brands Samsung, Hyundai, and Daihatsu. And Taiwan has Acer and Asus.
And if others have leadership in technologies on cars, electronics, and Information Technology, authorities say the Philippines could have leadership in biotechnology considering its vast natural resources including a tremendous volume of marine species because of its archipelagic nature and skilled and very important nation-loving people.
It may have leadership in the use of more democratized Information Technology inroads like Software as a Service (Saas) or telemedicine precisely due to telemedicine’s application in the Philippines’ many fragmented islands.
In its own limited way at present, Growth Revolution has been born to see this vision come true. Its people are committed in their finances, time, talent, effort, modeling, and a call to sacrifice for this vision.
They are prepared to enter into needed collaborative works and are given to patience, persistence, and passion to pursue a goal of a science and technology-based poverty reduction and national development through this information vehicle.
