TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=94TT0089> <title> Jan. 24, 1994: Don't Tread On My Lab </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994 Jan. 24, 1994 Ice Follies </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> SCIENCE, Page 44 Don't Tread On My Lab </hdr> <body> Researchers brace themselves for a new era of tighter control and stingier funding from Washington By Philip Elmer-Dewitt--Reported by Dick Thompson/Washington Science is like a flashlight; what it illuminates depends on where it is pointed. Traditionally, U.S. scientists have been free to decide for themselves where to focus their research. From time to time, politicians and interest groups would lobby for specific agendas--space exploration, say, or AIDS or breast cancer. But by and large, science in America has been run by the scientists. That is about to change. In what could be the most significant redirection of U.S. science policy since World War II, the Clinton Administration this month is launching an ambitious Cabinet-level effort to set national priorities and push the country's vast federal research program toward those goals. In effect, the government has grabbed the flashlight. The immediate aims, as President Clinton never tires of saying, are to boost the economy, strengthen U.S. industry, protect the environment, improve education and create jobs. The scientific resources that could be applied to that campaign are immense: more than 700 federal laboratories, hundreds of university research facilities, 2 1/2 million scientists and engineers, and a national research budget of $76 billion. But the risks, say critics, are equally immense. By putting blinders on the pursuit of knowledge, they fear, the Administration could frustrate a research community that is the envy of the world. The policy that the Administration inherited dates back to the late 1940s, when the scientific resources that had been marshaled for World War II--including the top-secret Manhattan Project, which built the atom bomb--were reorganized to serve the period of economic growth (and the uneasy peace) that followed. Under a philosophy outlined by Vannevar Bush, science adviser to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, the huge flow of public dollars allocated to cure diseases and fight the cold war was distributed according to a chaotic system dubbed "scientific pluralism." Basically this meant that the money was funneled through review boards manned by scientists, who gave it to researchers proposing projects considered worthy. The system led to quite a bit of waste and overlap, but it also produced a series of unparalleled triumphs, from conquering polio to creating the transistor. Then, in the late 1980s, the cold war eased and the money ran low--in part because the economy sagged as budget and trade deficits soared. American scientific breakthroughs were still leading to dazzling new products--but too many of them were being manufactured in Japan. Pressure began to mount in Congress to cut defense funding and reshape America's amorphous research effort into a coherent program that would aid industry. But Presidents Reagan and Bush resisted the pressure because the strategy smacked of government meddling in the marketplace. Clinton, in contrast, has embraced the idea of a national industrial policy, making it a cornerstone of his plan to reinvigorate the economy. Last November he created the National Science Technology Council, a Cabinet-level body on a par with the National Security Council and the National Economic Council and composed of the secretaries and directors of all the research-oriented departments and agencies in the government. Preliminary meetings of the council's nine subcommittees have been under way for the past three weeks, and the President is scheduled to chair the first formal meeting next month. The science council should have a busy year. One of the first items on its agenda will be to decide the fate of the nation's federal research labs, including the three nuclear weapons-building facilities (Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore), which each spend about $1 billion a year. Military research makes a tempting target for budget cutters; the government spends more than 60 cents of every research dollar on defense applications, and the President has said he wants that cut to 50 cents. But research in the service of defense is not the only science under scrutiny. Over the next year the NSTC plans to review all federally funded projects--civilian and military--with an eye to weeding out redundancies and identifying technology that could be put to use by U.S. companies. Presidential science adviser John Gibbons, who heads the NSTC, makes no secret of the fact that some government-sponsored science will have to be axed. "We're going to do new things," he says. "But we can only do those by not doing some things we are doing now." What will those new things be? Gibbons points to the Clean Car Initiative launched last fall, a project designed to transfer technology developed in federal labs to the auto industry as a way of helping it meet tough new pollution standards. The science council plans to launch a dozen similar projects over the next 12 months, focusing on such areas of applied research as construction technology, manufacturing techniques, new materials and manpower retraining. Some projects are already getting money under a new $464 million program designed to encourage "dual-use" research projects, which have both military and industrial applications. Among the 160 proposals selected for funding: -- A virtual-reality-type head-mounted display developed for military aircraft that can also be used on assembly lines to project instructions and data without tying up assembly workers' hands. -- A computerized triage system that can track the diagnosis, status and location of patients in both civilian and battlefield trauma-care units. -- A cooperative undertaking by four Massachusetts universities to retrain displaced defense engineers and help them find employment in biotechnology and biomedicine. Not surprisingly, the Clinton plan has won the tentative approval of industry. "The whole research and development enterprise is being rethought," says Daniel Burton Jr., president of the Council on Competitiveness, which represents the chief executive officers of 140 U.S. firms. "What they're trying to do is make sure that there is a solid, results-oriented goal driving research, and not just research for research's sake." Not everybody shares Burton's enthusiasm. Some critics are worried that private companies will use the science council as a virtual R. and D. lab, allowing them to reap the benefits of millions of dollars of federal science money without having to contribute a dime. Others fear that the science bureaucracy will get bigger, not smaller, making it a tempting tool for pork-minded politicians. Paul Romer, an economist from the University of California, Berkeley, questions how effective the NSTC will be at dismantling wasteful or irrelevant programs. "It will make virtually no difference," he predicts. "That spending is there because somebody who is politically powerful wants it there." Scientists, of course, tend to bristle when they hear people speak dismissively of "research for research's sake." Leon Lederman, former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, points out that many of the century's most important scientific advances--from Einstein's theories of relativity to Watson and Crick's DNA double helix--came out of just this kind of "pure" research. Lederman supports the President's efforts to bring more coherence and high-level attention to science policy, but he warns the Administration not to put its eggs into too few baskets. "There is not enough wisdom in the world to say what projects are going to have big payoffs," Lederman observes. Still smarting from Congress's decision last fall to pull the plug on the $11 billion Superconducting Supercollider, many scientists fear that the new focus on results-oriented research will make funding for pure science scarce. There is already "heightened anxiety" within the scientific community about a tightening of research budgets, says Philip Griffiths, director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. "Scientists are having trouble finding support for their own work, and it's even gloomier for their students." American science at its best derived its greatness from the bottom up; the pluralistic approach freed the best minds of several generations to pursue the questions they found most interesting. The challenge facing the Clinton Administration is to focus the scientific flashlight without leaving whole pathways to knowledge in the dark. </body> </article> </text>