TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/082691/0826300.000

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                                                                                SCIENCE, Page 44

COVER STORIES

Crisis in The Labs


Beset by a budget squeeze, cases of fraud, relentless activists
and a skeptical public, American researchers are under siege

By LEON JAROFF -- Reported by J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago and Dick
Thompson/Washington


    Without scientific progress the national health would
deteriorate; without scientific progress we could not hope for
improvement in our standard of living or for an increased number
of jobs for our citizens; and without scientific progress we
could not have maintained our liberties against tyranny.

    -- Vannevar Bush, presidential science adviser in Science:
The Endless Frontier, 1945



    It was the glory of America. In the decades following
World War II, U.S. science reigned supreme, earning the envy of
the world with one stunning triumph after another. Fostered by
the largesse of a government swayed by Vannevar Bush's paean to
science, it harnessed the power of the atom, conquered polio and
discovered the earth's radiation belt. It created the laser, the
transistor, the microchip and the electronic computer, broke the
genetic code and conjured up the miracle of recombinant DNA
technology. It described the fundamental nature of matter,
solved the mystery of the quasars and designed the robot craft
that explored distant planets with spectacular success. And, as
promised, it landed a man on the moon.

    Now a sea change is occurring, and it does not bode well
for researchers -- or for the U.S. While American science
remains productive and still excels in many areas, its exalted
and almost pristine image is beginning to tarnish.

    European and, to a lesser extent, Japanese scientists have
begun to surpass their American counterparts. In the U.S. the
scientific community is beset by a budget squeeze and
bureaucratic demands, internal squabbling, harassment by
activists, embarrassing cases of fraud and failure, and the
growing alienation of Congress and the public. In the last
decade of the 20th century, U.S. science, once unassailable,
finds itself in a virtual state of siege.

    "The science community is demoralized, and its moans are
frightening off the young," says Dr. Bernadine Healy, director
of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). "You have never seen
such a depressed collection of people," says Stephen Berry, a
University of Chicago chemist. "It's the worst atmosphere in the
scientific community since I began my career more than 30 years
ago."

    In public perception, at least, that atmosphere has been
fouled by a multitude of headline-grabbing incidents:

    -- The federal researcher at whose urging Times Beach,
Mo., was permanently evacuated in 1982 because of a dioxin
scare has conceded that the draconian action was a mistake and
that newer data suggest dioxin is far less toxic than
previously believed. While some environmental scientists dispute
the conclusion, the Environmental Protection Agency has launched
a review of its strict dioxin standards, leaving the public
confused about what to believe.

    -- In space, the inexcusable myopia of the $1.5 billion
Hubble telescope, the balky antenna that endangers the $1.3
billion Galileo mission to Jupiter, and even the Challenger
disaster and the shuttle's subsequent troubles gave space
science a bad name -- notwithstanding the fact that the failures
resulted not from scientific errors but largely from managerial
blunders and budgetary constraints.

    -- The circus atmosphere that accompanied last year's
announcement that cold fusion had been achieved, the subsequent
debate among scientists and the eventual widespread rejection
of the claim evoked public exasperation and ridicule in the
press.

    -- Nobel laureate David Baltimore's stubborn refusal to
concede that data reported by a former M.I.T. colleague in an
immunology paper Baltimore had co-signed was fraudulent, and the
shoddy treatment of the whistle blower who spotted the fraud
aroused public suspicion about scientific integrity. Worse, from
the viewpoint of scientists, it brought about an investigation
by Michigan Democrat John Dingell's House subcommittee and
fears of more federal supervision of science. By the time
Baltimore finally apologized for his role in the affair, the
damage to science's image had been done.

    -- Another Dingell probe, which revealed that Stanford
University had charged some strange items to overhead expenses
funded by federal science grants, mortified university president
Donald Kennedy, led to his resignation and raised questions
about misuse of funds at other universities. "I challenge you
to tell me," said Dingell, "how fruitwood commodes, chauffeurs
for the university president's wife, housing for dead university
officials, retreats in Lake Tahoe and flowers for the
president's house are supportive of science."

    -- A long-running and unseemly dispute between Dr. Luc
Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris and Dr. Robert
Gallo of the NIH over who had first identified the AIDS virus
raised public doubts about the motives and credibility of
scientists. Those concerns remained when Gallo conceded that
through inadvertent contamination, the virus he identified had
been isolated from a sample sent him by the Frenchman. Last week
the journal Science revealed that a draft of a forthcoming NIH
report about the affair criticizes Gallo and accuses one of his
colleagues of scientific misconduct.

    -- Bowing to the demands of pro-lifers, the Bush
Administration continued a ban on federal funding for fetal-cell
transplants, despite the fact that the use of such tissue has
shown promising results in treating Parkinson's disease and
other disorders. Frustrated U.S. researchers watched helplessly
as their European counterparts moved ahead on medical
applications of fetal tissue.

    -- In several raids on research laboratories,
animal-rights activists destroyed equipment and "liberated" test
animals, setting back experiments designed to improve medical
treatment for humans. Activists using legal means, such as
picketing and newspaper ads, successfully brought pressure on
some laboratories to improve treatment of test animals. But
others campaigned to halt virtually all animal experimentation,
a ban that would cripple medical research. All told, the
animals-rights movement has led to a false public perception
that medical researchers are generally callous in their
treatment of test animals or at least indifferent to their
welfare.

    -- Although gadfly activist Jeremy Rifkin failed in a
legal attempt to delay the first human-gene-therapy experiment
last year, he skillfully used the courts to set back by months,
and even years, other scientific trials involving genetically
engineered organisms or substances. His success in obstructing
genetic experiments came despite the fact that in every case,
his warnings of dire consequences proved to be unfounded.
Favorable coverage of his views in some newspapers and on TV
heightened public misgivings about genetic research.



    To many researchers, however, the single greatest threat
to U.S. science, and a source of many of its troubles, is money
-- or a lack of it. That view came into sharp focus in January
when Nobel laureate physicist Leon Lederman, the newly elected
president of the prestigious American Association for the
Advancement of Science, issued what he called his "cry of
alarm."

    Lederman, former head of Fermilab, the high-energy physics
center in Illinois, had conducted a survey of research
scientists in 50 universities. Most of the nearly 250 responses,
he reported, came from demoralized and underfunded researchers
who foresaw only a bleak future for their disciplines and their
jobs. "I haven't seen anything like this in my 40 years in
science," Lederman said. "Research, at least the research
carried out in universities, is in very serious trouble." And
that, he warned, "raises serious questions about the very future
of science in the U.S."

    By Lederman's calculations, if inflation is taken into
account, federal funding in 1990 for both basic and applied
scientific research in universities was only 20% higher than in
1968, while the number of Ph.D.-level scientists working at the
schools doubled during the same time period. In other words,
twice as many researchers are scrambling for smaller pieces of
a slightly bigger pie. The competition for financing has forced
scientists into fundraising efforts at the expense of research
and has led to angry exchanges over what kind of work should
have priority. It has also forced researchers to propose "safe"
projects with an obvious end product.

    Those restraints are clearly detrimental to the bold and
innovative research that has made American science great. Leder
man's solution: "We should be spending twice as much as we did
in 1968."

    For his alarm, and especially for his proposed cure,
Lederman was not immediately overwhelmed by acclaim -- either
from fellow scientists or from Congress. The Bush Administration
had already requested a generous increase in the science budget,
critics noted. Lederman's call for a doubling of financial
support at a time of severe budgetary restraint, they charged,
made scientists seem petty and self-serving and suggested that
they are out of touch with the country's political realities.
In fact, only last year congressional budgeteers agreed to limit
spending growth for domestic discretionary funding, in effect
making science a "zero-sum" category. This meant that increases
for one scientific project, for example, might have to come out
of the hide of another.

    "I don't think that ((Lederman's)) argument was very
good," says Harvey Brooks, a Harvard science-policy expert.
"Scientists are having a hard time, and so are the homeless. You
have to justify science because it is doing something good for
society." Even Frank Press, president of the National Academy
of Sciences (NAS), agrees on the need for restraint. "No nation
can write a blank check for science," he says. "In a very tight
deficit year, we may have to make some choices."

    In June the House of Representatives made a choice, and it
did not sit well with scientists. The House voted to designate
$1.9 billion of NASA's fiscal 1992 budget to continued work on
the proposed space station, which could eventually cost as much
as $40 billion. Because of the budgetary restraints, that money
may be cut from other projects supported by NASA and the
National Science Foundation (NSF). And two huge science ventures
are already siphoning off significant chunks of the federal
budget: the Human Genome Project, a 15-year, $3 billion program
to identify and map all 50,000 to 100,000 genes and determine
the sequence of the 3 billion code letters in human DNA; and the
superconducting supercollider, a high-energy particle
accelerator to be built in Texas at an estimated cost of $8.2
billion.

    Several planned NASA science projects could immediately
suffer or even be eliminated because of the space-station vote.
They include the Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby mission, in
which an unmanned spacecraft would make close approaches to
Comet Kopff and an unnamed asteroid; the Advanced X-Ray
Astrophysics Facility, which will investigate X-ray sources in
space; and the Earth Observing System for weather and pollution
studies.

    Scientists were dismayed. Daniel Kleppner, an M.I.T.
physicist, pointed out that the money spent on the space station
this year will be almost as much as the total fiscal 1990 NSF
budget, a major source of federal funding for all the sciences
except biomedicine. Writing in The Sciences, the publication of
the New York Academy of Sciences, he expressed his indignation:
"It seems incredible that the government can spend billions on
such flawed projects while allowing the world's greatest
scientific institutions to decline for lack of relatively
modest funds."

    By one standard, at least, the troubles of American
science are not that obvious at first glance: the Nobel science
awards for the past few decades have been dominated by
Americans. For example, 14 of the 25 Nobel Prizes for Physics
between 1980 and 1990 went to Americans. But 13 of those 14
awards were for work done many years ago. Most of the Nobels for
more recent research have gone to Europeans. "It appears that
American science is coasting on its reputation," says Kleppner.
"Today Europe is beginning to run away with the honors."

    Physics is not the only discipline that is hurting.
Harvard's pioneering biologist E.O. Wilson, the father of
sociobiology, is concerned that the dwindling supply of federal
grant money to individual scientists is changing the very nature
of research. A quarter-century ago, he says, grants were far
more generous, and a higher percentage of proposals got funded.
"In those days," he recalls, "a young scientist could still get
a grant based on a promising but partly formulated idea or
fragmentary result." Today, Wilson laments, there is far less
interest in funding such marginal and daring proposals.

    Physicist Nicholas Samios, director of Brookhaven National
Laboratory on New York's Long Island, has also witnessed a
negative effect among people on his staff. "When funding gets
tight," he says, "people get more conservative and bureaucratic.
You don't want to make mistakes. You want to make certain you
do the right thing. But to have science flourish, you want
people who take chances."

    These days scientists often pick their fields of research
with an eye to the whims of funding agencies. That was
precisely what Jim Koh, a University of Michigan graduate
student in human genetics, had in mind when he chose to
specialize in cystic fibrosis. Research on the disorder, funded
in part by the private Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, is less
affected by federal budget problems than many other fields.
"Fundability is a real factor in my thinking," Koh admits.

    Other young scientists are not so fortunate. University
jobs are hard to find, and because of tight budgets will not
become more plentiful until the older professors, the majority
of them hired in the bountiful, go-go 1960s, retire. When a
university slot does open, hundreds of graduate students may
apply for it. Industry too has little to offer newly graduated
scientists. Saddled with debt and under pressure to turn out
favorable quarterly reports, it has cut back on money spent for
research and development.

    All this is disillusioning to promising young scientists.
At 34, Norman Carlin, an evolutionary biologist who has been a
postdoctoral fellow at Harvard since 1986, is giving up. "Last
year I decided I would go through one more year of this
fruitless and humiliating attempt to get work," he says. "Well,
I didn't get a single job offer from 20 universities -- and I
got into every law school I applied to. So I decided to go where
I was wanted for a change." When he earns a law degree, Carlin
hopes to specialize in environmental law. "I had tremendous fun
doing science," he says, "and I'm bitterly sorry I won't be able
to do it anymore."

    All too aware of the dearth of job opportunities at
research universities, senior faculty members are faced with a
dilemma. "When undergraduates come to me looking for career
advice," says Dr. James Wilson, a gene-therapy expert at the
University of Michigan, "I have to think long and hard about
advising them to be scientists." Justified as it is, that kind
of thinking alarms M.I.T.'s Kleppner. "If America's senior
scientists cannot, in good conscience, persuade the next
generation to follow in their own footsteps," he warns, "the
nation is finished scientifically."

    Money is so tight that many scientific institutions are
finding it difficult to maintain the equipment they have, much
less buy new instruments. At Kitt Peak in Arizona, the
structure of the National Optical Astronomy Observatories' solar
telescope was beginning to corrode because astronomers, strapped
for funds, had put off painting it. This year they could wait
no longer, and instead of buying a new, badly needed $100,000
infrared detector, they put the available money into a paint
job. The choice, while necessary, depresses Sidney Wolff,
director of NOAO. Although the infrared detector was developed
in the U.S., she says, "European observatories can afford to
purchase it, while we cannot. This is really a revolution in
technology; if you're using five-year-old technology, you're out
of the game."

    The budget constraints are part of an even deeper problem
afflicting American research: Congress is reflecting an erosion
of public confidence in a scientific establishment that not many
years ago could seemingly do no wrong. The message from
Washington is clear: science will receive no more blank checks
and will be held increasingly accountable for both its
performance and its behavior.

    Today, despite continuing brilliant work by U.S.
scientists, attention seems focused on their failings and
excesses, both real and perceived. Why, critics ask, after a
decade of effort, have researchers not found a cure for AIDS,
or why can't they figure out, after nearly a half-century, how
to store nuclear wastes safely or build spacecraft that work?
Why do they concoct compounds that end up as toxic waste or
court danger by tinkering with genes?

    Some of this burgeoning antiscience sentiment springs from
the well-meaning but naive "back to nature" wing of the
environmental movement, some from skillful manipulation by
demagogues and modern-day Luddites. And some is misdirected;
science is often blamed for the misdeeds of industry and
government.

    But scientists too must shoulder their share of the blame.
Cases of outright fraud and waste, sloppy research, dubious
claims and public bickering have made science an easy target for
its critics. Says Marcel LaFollette, a professor of
international science policy at George Washington University:
"One of the threads that run through all this is a refusal by
the science community to acknowledge that there is a problem.
They continue with the attitude that scientists are part of the
elite and they deserve special political treatment and
handling."

    In Washington the new sock-it-to-science stance is
personified by Congressman Dingell, who has taken the lead in
investigating the wrongdoings of researchers. Many scientists
consider his intrusion into their domain dangerous because it
threatens their long-held notion that science should be
self-governed, self-regulated and self-policed. When Dingell
asked the Secret Service to examine the notebooks in the
Baltimore case for authenticity, some researchers accused him
of launching a witch hunt and trying to establish "science
police." Because of his badgering of scientists at congressional
hearings, he has been charged with practicing McCarthyism. Says
Maxine Singer, a molecular biologist and president of the
Carnegie Institution of Washington: "With Dingell, the issues
get swallowed as he makes personal attacks on people."

    Despite Dingell's abrasive manner, however, he has rooted
out some serious abuses in science. The Congressman makes a
legitimate argument that science is a social tool and should be
directed and regulated in the same manner as other social tools,
such as defense and education. A newly contrite Baltimore now
says Dingell's investigation was "an altogether proper exercise
of his mandate to oversee the expenditure of federal funds."

    This month Dingell was at it again. He hauled NIH director
Healy before his subcommittee to charge that by abruptly
transferring a chief investigator of the NIH's internal office
of scientific integrity, she had "derailed" investigations and
"demoralized and emasculated" that office, which had been
involved in the Baltimore case. Healy indignantly called the
charges "preposterous," adding that Dingell "is a prosecutor.
He's there to root out evil, whether it's there or not."

    Underlying the current furor over funding, and fueling
Dingell's investigations, are the implicit assumptions that
science can no longer be fully trusted to manage its affairs and
that society should have a larger voice in its workings. "We
can't just say Give us the money and don't bother us anymore,"
acknowledges Chris Quigg, a physicist at Fermilab.

    Congressional pressure on science has been countered by a
growing pressure on Congress -- by institutions and researchers
lobbying for science funds. Influencing the lawmakers has become
so critical that science is recruiting the professionals of
persuasion. Many universities pay $20,000 a month each for the
services of Cassidy & Associates, a science-lobbying firm that
has been successful in getting federal money earmarked for its
clients. Some of Cassidy's trophies: $15 million for Tufts
University's Human Nutrition Research Center and $19.8 million
for the Proton Beam Demonstration Center at California's Loma
Linda University. Four biochemistry societies have joined to pay
former Maine Congressman Peter Kyros $100,000 a year to lobby
for increased funding for biomedical research. Unfortunately,
money appropriated for these projects bypasses the peer-review
process used by such scientific bodies as the NSF and the NIH.

    Too often, science lobbyists find easy pickings on Capitol
Hill, where Congressmen, courting votes, can win generous sums
for research projects in their home districts by simply
slipping riders onto appropriation bills. Federal legislators
in fiscal 1991 approved at least $270 million for pork-barrel
science projects. In many cases, this kind of financing supports
projects of dubious value, while more worthy endeavors go
begging. An example: a rider, attached by Alaska Senator Ted
Stevens, provided $9 million for a facility in his state to
study how to tap the energy of the aurora borealis. That
project, now funded, is characterized by one University of
Maryland physicist as "wacky."

    The NAS's Press is worried that too many scientists and
research institutions are rushing to engage lobbyists. "They see
that's the way the country runs, through lobbying and pressure,"
he says. "It's possible that public confidence in scientists
will be diminished." That may have already happened. In the
view of some members of Congress, scientists have become simply
another special-interest group pleading for its selfish ends.

    For all the lobbying, the scientific community has reached
no consensus about the worthiness of various projects.
Molecular biologists and particle physicists find it impossible
to agree on the relative merits of the Human Genome Project and
the superconducting supercollider. "Scientists are scared to
death about having to make such choices," says Francis Collins,
the University of Michigan geneticist who led the teams
responsible for identifying the cystic fibrosis and
neurofibromatosis genes. "It's such a contentious area that I'm
afraid people won't be able to agree."

    What is the alternative? Researchers blanch at the thought
of a scientifically illiterate public allotting the available
funds through the political process. Yet if the science
community cannot establish its own priorities, it is inviting
Congress and the White House to make all the choices, for better
or worse.

    While striving for a consensus, scientists would do well
to put their house back in order. They should avoid cutting
corners or misusing funds in a desperate effort to make
financial ends meet. They must come down hard on transgressors,
give whistle blowers a fair hearing and not stonewall in defense
of erring colleagues. And they should discourage the
ill-conceived practice of hastily calling press conferences to
announce dubious results that have not been verified by peer
review.

    Equally important, scientists should redouble efforts to
help educate Congress, the press and the public about the
importance and benefits of some of their more esoteric work. An
example: in little publicized reports in science journals last
month, three teams of researchers revealed that they had used
genetic engineering to create, for the first time, mice whose
brains develop the same kind of deposits as those found in
humans with Alzheimer's disease. Using these mice as models, the
scientists should now be able to learn more about the
debilitating disease that afflicts 4 million Americans and to
develop drugs to alleviate the disorder.

    In short, the use of genetic engineering and test animals,
practices decried by the more fanatic critics of science, has
provided a means by which Alzheimer's disease could be
controlled or even cured. More aggressive promotion of this kind
of news would certainly enhance the image of researchers, help
restore waning public trust in science and lessen the clout of
anti science activists.

    While scientists remain divided about the solution to
their dilemma, they do agree, almost universally, on the need
for ample support for basic research -- research that is not
launched with a well-defined end product in mind. Such work has
not only been the foundation for America's brilliant scientific
achievements but has also paid handsome financial dividends. For
example, basic studies of bacterial resistance to viruses led
to the discovery of restriction enzymes, the biological scissors
that can snip DNA segments at precisely defined locations. That
discovery in turn made possible recombinant-DNA technology,
which spawned the multibillion-dollar biotechnology industry.
And the laser, now the vital component of devices ranging from
printers to compact disc players to surgical instruments, was
a serendipitous by-product of research on molecular structure.

    Nearly a half-century ago, Vannevar Bush's clarion call
launched America into its Golden Age of science and helped
transform society. His words still ring true today, despite the
social and economic woes besetting the U.S. In fact, a vigorous
science program, properly exploited by government and industry,
might generate the wealth needed to solve these problems. To
create that wealth, the U.S. must increase its investment in
science, both by allocating more dollars and making certain that
the dollars already appropriated are spent more wisely. "We
cannot stop investing in our future for all the problems today,"
warns Frank Press, "or we will be mortgaging our future."