Towards a national policy of science and technology at the service of development

Abstract

The author deals with the issue defined in the title of this article taking two key ideas as a starting point. The first is the insertion the scientific and technological system in a larger context interrelated with other features of the national activity within the economic, social and political domains. As a matter of fact, science and technology do not exist in and by themselves and are not any data or parameters external as to the social organization. Science and technology - or better the uses one makes of them - are not neuter regarding the main problems of the social distribution of wealth, information, political and economic power. On the contrary, in the contemporary world, the social relations established inside the nation-State and, and above the nation-State, at the planetary scale find, in science and technology, a support the real range of which will understood only in the context of a systematization wide enough. The second key idea is that it is possible, necessary and urgent to act in order to reinforce the national capacity, the internal capacity, of thinking and solving, in an autonomous way, those problems raised by the satisfaction of the necessities of the Portuguese population either under the material point of view or concerning the development of the social and cultural aims that make specific the national collective living.