COLE: As I said at the outset, I will be extraordinarily brief because the people that I am about to introduce really need no introduction. Our speaker who will reflect on the history of science policy in the United States will be Professor Harvey Brooks, the Benjamin Pierce Professor Emeritus of Technology and Public Policy, and Professor of Applied Physics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Simply put, Harvey Brooks has been, and continues to be, one of the most knowledgeable and influential scientists in this country, and a major figure in developing this nation's science policy.

Professor Harvey Sapolsky is Director of the Defense and Arms Control Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has published extensively on aspects of science and the military, health planning, the telecommunications revolution.

And we are joined – I'm very, very pleased to say this morning – by Mr. William Golden. All of these monitors that you see up here may, at the moment, have my image on it, but Bill Golden has now appeared, and Bill, we want to welcome you to our conference. We are delighted that you will be a participant.

As most of those here know, Bill Golden has been one of the most influential Americans in the development of post-war science policy. He designed the first presidential science-advisory organization for President Truman in 1950. He is currently Chairman of the American Museum of Natural History, and the past Chairman of the New York Academy of Sciences, and Co-chairman, with Joshua Lederberg, of the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology and Government. Bill is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and one of the most knowledgeable people that I know in the area of science policy. I'm delighted to have you with us, Bill.

BROOKS: The debate that was launched by the original Bush report and its rival report, the Kilgore Plan, has roots that go back to the debate between J. D. Bernal and Michael Polanyi in Britain from the 1930s until the late 1950s. This is perhaps a somewhat over-simplified analogy, but nevertheless worth mentioning.

Then as now, the debate concerned the degree to which it is feasible and desirable to plan the agenda for the national science and technology enterprise in terms of explicit societal or economic goals. Polanyi stressed the need for autonomy and self-governance of the scientific community if it were to contribute most efficiently to societal goals in the long run. His view may be most succinctly summarized in the following quotation from

the sociologist of science, Bernard Barber, in something he wrote in the 1960s.

In contrast, Bernal, who was strongly influenced by Marxist thought, was impressed with what he saw as the tremendous inefficiencies of autonomous

science. He believed that its enormous potential benefits for humanity could only be realized through a publicly discussed and debated flexible plan involving government and many representative elements of society. This same debate essentially has been reflected in all the subsequent debates about national science policy.

It is by now a truism that World War II was a watershed, particularly in the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, in Britain and Europe. For example, in 1935 the U.S. federal government contributed only 13 percent of total national expenditures for research and development, which constituted only 0.35 percent of the national income. By 1962, the federal contribution to this total had risen to nearly 70 percent, with the aggregate being more than 3.3 percent of the national income, an approximately 10 order-of-magnitude increase.

In the 1930s, federally-supported research and development was mostly conducted at in-house, civil-service laboratories, which accounted for about 0.25 percent of the federal budget. This figure rose to 11 percent by 1962, and represented probably more than 35 percent of the federal government’s discretionary expenditures.

The imminence of World War II mobilized leaders of American science in advance of American participation in the war. And whereas technical advances in World War I had been generated largely from existing military needs as defined by the military, many of the World War II advances were born in the laboratory, almost as solutions looking for problems. Their military application evolved as military strategy and technology were developed in tandem, with scientists and the military in equal partnership, but with the civilian agency Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) – headed by Vannevar Bush – able to make decisions independent of previously specified military needs. Scientists eventually were able to persuade soldiers to inform them of the general military problems involved, so that the scientists might reach their own conclusions about the kinds of weapons and devices the military would need to meet those problems.

Unlike the situation in World War I, science in World War II was mobilized under civilian tutelage, with the leaders of the scientific community having direct access to the President and to the Congressional Appropriations committees – if necessary, over the heads of the military, although in practice this privilege was seldom exercised.

The experience of World War II had a profound impact on both the political and scientific leadership, and crucially influenced the position of science relative to government after the war. The war-time experience convinced Bush of the importance of an independent role for scientists in an equal partnership with government. It was the fountainhead of his report, Science: the Endless Frontier (1945).

The essence of that report was contained in the following eight recommendations and five general principles.

The first recommendation: "Science, by itself, provides no panacea for individual, social, and economic ills. It can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team, whether the conditions be peace or war. But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world."

Second, "It is clear that if we are to maintain the progress in medicine which has marked the last 25 years, the Government should extend financial support to basic medical research" – that is, the 25 years before the report was written.

Third, "Military preparedness requires a permanent independent, civilian-controlled organization, having close liaison with the Army and Navy, but with funds directly from Congress and with the clear power to initiate military research which will supplement and strengthen that carried on directly under the control of the Army and Navy." It is sometimes said that Bush envisioned that all military research would be conducted under a kind of a overarching Department of Science. That was never envisioned, as this recommendation makes clear.

Fourth: "Basic scientific research is scientific capital. Moreover, we cannot any longer depend upon Europe as a major source of this scientific capital. Clearly, more and better scientific research is one essential to the achievement of our goal of full employment."

That fourth principle most clearly embodies the idea of basic research as the prerequisite for technological innovation. There are two rather different views of this. One is that specific ideas emerging from basic research are the inspiration and source of technological innovation. The other is that the cumulative output of basic research is essentially a resource that can be mined by applied scientists and engineers for the purposes of innovation. It's my view that Bush held much more of the latter view than the direct-event connection.

The fifth recommendation in the Bush report was, "If the colleges, universities, and research institutes are to meet the rapidly increasing demands of industry and Government for new scientific knowledge, their basic research should be strengthened by use of public funds."

Sixth: "To provide coordination of the common scientific activities of these governmental agencies as to policies and budgets, a permanent Science Advisory Board should be created to advise the executive and legislative branches of Government on these matters." This function apparently was originally envisioned for the National Science Board. However, it became unrealistic so long as the National Science Foundation budget constituted such a tiny faction of the total federal support of scientific research, as it did through most of its early history.

The seventh recommendation: "The Government should provide a reasonable number of undergraduate scholarships and graduate fellowships in order to develop scientific talent in American youth. The plans should be designed to attract into science only that proportion of youthful talent appropriate to the needs of science in relation to the other needs of the nation for high abilities." This was a sort of foretaste of the G.I. Bill and was perhaps the most significant and practical initial outcome of the Bush report.

And the final recommendation: "A new agency should be established, therefore, by the Congress, devoted to the support of scientific research and advanced scientific education alone….The agency to administer such funds should be composed of citizens selected only on the basis of their interest in and capacity to promote the work of the agency. They should be persons of broad interest in and understanding of the peculiarities of scientific research and education." This last phrase recurs throughout both the Bush report and through many of the subsequent discussions.

Those were the eight recommendations of the Bush report. There were also five principles which must underlie the program of support for scientific research and education. Bush set these down in the following terms:

First, the new agency "should have a stability of funds so that long-range programs may be undertaken." Second: "The agency to administer such funds should be composed of citizens selected only on the basis of their interest in and capacity to promote the work of the agency. They should be persons of broad interest in and understanding of the peculiarities of scientific research and education."

Third: "The agency should promote research through contracts or grants to organizations outside the Federal Government. It should not operate any laboratories of its own." This was a pretty flat-footed recommendation, which was followed both in the implementation of the National Science Foundation, and also in the implementation of the Atomic Energy Commission. It was followed to a considerable extent also in the early days of the Defense Department, at least for the support of basic research.

Fourth: "Support of basic research in the public and private colleges, universities, and research institutes must leave the internal control of policy, personnel, and the method and scope of the research to the institutions themselves. This is of the utmost importance."

And fifth: "While assuring complete independence and freedom for the nature, scope, and methodology of research carried on in the institutions receiving public funds, and while retaining discretion in the allocation of funds among such institutions, the Foundation proposed herein must be responsible to the President and the Congress. Only through such responsibility can we maintain the proper relationship between science and other aspects of a democratic system. The usual controls of audits, reports, budgeting, and the like, should, of course, apply to the administrative and fiscal operations of the Foundation, subject, however, to such adjustments in procedure as are necessary to meet the special requirements of research."

I would like to also to add two other quotes from the Bush report, because I think they explain why he laid such emphasis on universities and independent research institutes.

First, from page 19:

Vannevar Bush wrote another report, which is not anywhere near as well-known as Science: the Endless Frontier, but is at least as enlightening with respect to Bush’s personal view of the relationship between engineering and science, and between pure and applied science. It is called "The Report of the Panel on the McKay Bequest to the President Fellows of Harvard College" (Harvard College 1950). The following two quotes are taken from Section 4, entitled "Present Day Engineering and Applied Science." They clearly express that Bush's views were not quite as purist as has often been implied in recent interpretations:

There was an interesting phenomenon in the World War II scientific effort. It occurred in the radiation lab and the proximity-fuse lab, and was particularly obvious in the Manhattan Project: the leaders of those civilian efforts came, by and large, from backgrounds in nuclear physics. Nuclear physics at that particular time was a subject which involved very much of a cross between science and engineering, since the engineering and apparatus of nuclear physics was a very important part of the whole enterprise. Contrary to the popular wisdom about theoretical scientists, many of the people who led the effort in the radiation lab, the radio-research lab at Harvard, and the Manhattan Project were people who, in their practice of basic science, had experience in many ways quite typical of engineers. That was particularly true at that time in the history of the development of physics.

The second quote provides quite a contrast to some of the statements that have been made about Science: the Endless Frontier:

The limitation of the opportunity-oriented approach is that the potential applications of the resulting knowledge are usually spread over a very wide spectrum of societal problems, and highly dispersed in time. Many applications and their timing are unforeseeable when the research is first undertaken. On the other hand, the limitation of focusing too narrowly on the presently formulated or foreseen societal problems lies in the fact that the very definition of these problems may often depend on knowledge not yet discovered.

Also, the knowledge produced by the opportunity-oriented approach tends to be cumulative and can only be created if pursued in the right logical sequence, making it impossible to produce needed knowledge on demand just at the time the need for it first becomes apparent in connection with the solution of the societal problem.

Because of these issues of timing and problem-specificity, the two types of knowledge are most sufficiently pursued in parallel, in an appropriate mix and with continual but deep interchange between the two knowledge streams, each of which is cumulative in its own terms. And, of course, the technological branch is cumulative to just as large an extent as the science branch.

I suspect that the tighter and more frequent the interaction between the two streams of knowledge, the greater the importance of the opportunity-oriented agenda relative to the society-oriented one, even while the latter absorbs and will continue to absorb the far largest fraction of resources.

Not only does the opportunity-oriented agenda more frequently enrich and make more cost-effective the pursuit of the need-oriented agenda, but also the societal agenda will more frequently spin off new intellectual challenges worth pursuing in the opportunity-oriented mode, beyond the needs of the immediate problem, for the sake of their contribution to the conceptual structure of knowledge.

Each of the parallel agendas will increasingly serve as triggering sources for the other in a more symmetrical fashion than has often been appreciated by the inhabitants of either branch of the scientific agenda.

And I might add, the inhabitants of the two branches of the technical agenda are not necessarily distinct classes of people, although they often may be. You find some people, like Edwin Land, who shift back and forth between one agenda and the other.

It is important to make note of the fact that the Bush report did not really recognize the extent to which the scientific agenda – that is to say, the opportunity-oriented research agenda – was often initially triggered by an applied problem, sometimes one that was very narrow initially. This is a legitimate criticism of the Bush report.

It is still important to look at the way such an applied problem is pursued. That is to say, it should be pursued, and ought to be pursued in much greater depth, with much larger ramifications than just the solution of the immediate problem.

An examination of the R&D budget in the U.S. since World War II shows the evolution of science policy during that time. Essentially, it can be divided into three eras. The first era is the Cold War era, which extends and rather abruptly ends around 1966 or '67 so far as R&D is concerned, even though this was the period of the build-up of the Vietnam War. In fact, there was a big de-emphasis on strategic weapon systems during that time.

From the period from 1966 to about 1975, there was an actual fall-off in federal R&D which amounted to about 17 percent in real terms. At the same time, there was a fall-off in university research in the physical sciences, which declined by about 14 percent. And even in the biomedical sciences there was no fall-off, but there was a level-off during that period.

For reasons which are not entirely self-evident, in about 1975 or 1976, there was a resumption of growth in the federal R&D budget, and it was spread over a considerably larger domain. There was also a dramatic increase in energy-oriented R&D from about 1974 to the early 1980s. But the most striking aspect is the rapid rise and continuous rise of privately supported industrial R&D, which continued right through the deep recession of the 1980s.

So, there were really three periods here. The first period was the Cold War period. The second, the period of the dip, might be termed the social-priorities period. During this time, there was an almost doubling of the amount of support for research in the social and behavioral sciences, although it never reached the extent it did in other fields. This was the period of the Great Society program.

It was followed, in the mid-1970s, by considerable disillusionment with the power of the social sciences to attack social problems, and by the gradual resumption of the Cold War military build-up, which began in the second half of the Carter Administration and accelerated during the subsequent Republican administrations.

It is interesting to note that the combined expenditures on defense, space, and nuclear energy never reached the peak, in terms of percentage of GNP, that they had reached in the 1960s. In fact, the build-up was much less rapid than the build-up that had taken place in the early part of the 1960s.

The other characteristic of the period after 1975, although it began considerably earlier and there were even signs of it in the late 1960s, was the increase in interest in economic performance. This was a change from the 1966 to 1975 period, where the priorities were public-sector needs, as formulated in the Great Society program.

After 1975, there was a rapid build-up of public concern about the declining international economic competitiveness of the U.S. especially vis a vis Japan, which became pronounced in the Carter Administration. That period ended in about 1986, and there has been a gradual shift whose exact nature I think we still cannot foresee, but is clearly a part of what is being debated now.

With the surge of the relative private investment in R&D accompanying the unprecedented prosperity of the late-1990's, combined with the growing public and political skepticism about the relative cost-effectiveness of "big government" and tight limits on government spending, a dominant issue of science policy has become the criteria that justify public investment in R&D as opposed to relying on the private sector, if necessary by restructuring incentives so as to induce more private R&D investment. It is generally agreed that there must be some pubic or common good arising out of federal R&D, which cannot be captured by individual firms or even by voluntary associations of individual firms, but just how this public good can be measured, and what is the relative efficiency of private and public spending is a matter of increasingly intense debate. That the economic returns to R&D are large, especially in the longer term, is less and less called into question by the public and politicians, but there is a paradox here. Aggregate returns alone are insufficient to justify public investment in the absence of any showing of a common good that can be quantified sufficiently well to show that it exceeds the sum of the private returns to individual firms. The more tangible and measurable the returns, the more they are likely to be labeled as "corporate welfare" and left to the private sector to support. The more elusive and diffuse they are, the more likely they are to be questioned by skeptics. Closely related to this issue is the optimal allocation of federal R&D spending among universities, non-profit research institutions, and industry.

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COLE: We do have one question we'll take before we move to Dr. Sapolsky. This is a comment and a question received from Lilli Hornig, and it says–

If it had not been for those fellowship programs, one may wonder whether, in fact, there would have been a much more precipitous drop in the physical sciences than there actually

was. I think if you look at the more dramatic example of the G.I. Bill in the 1950s, it's somewhat harder to make the case that there was not growth in the physical sciences and engineering. And, of course, that was a much more broadly distributed program, and was big enough to have a real impact on numbers, not only in the universities, but even outside the university.

So you may have to separate the period of the G.I. Bill in the late '40s and most of the '50s from the period of the build-up of fellowships in the 1960s, which were more motivated by a feeling that with the combined military and space-program build-up, a real shortage of scientists and engineers was developing.

And, in fact, that's the only period in the whole post-war history when there was good evidence of shortage, an actual shortage, of scientists and engineers needed for the combination of federal and private programs, indicated by the salaries of scientists and engineers relative to the labor force.

Furthermore, during the space-program build-up particularly, there were about 100,000 non-degree people in the aerospace industry who were converted into the equivalent of graduate engineers within the industry – another piece of evidence of the shortage.

But the broader question – the broader point raised by your question – I don't really know the answer to, except that you have to look at it in a "compared to what" business. And I think there would have been no reason, really, to expect necessarily an absolute increased response in this particular case.

COLE: Thank you, Harvey. We will connect now with Bill Golden and reverse the order because I know that Bill is constrained by a meeting that he's attending out in California. So, Bill, can you hear me?

GOLDEN: Yes, I hear you very well, Jonathan.

COLE: Well, it's good to have you again.

GOLDEN: Well, I'm glad to be able to connect, and I've been edified, as the audience directly there in the rotunda has been, to hear Harvey's comprehensive history of science and technology in our country, with emphasis on the practicalities.

Van Bush – or Vannevar Bush, none of us called him "Van" to his face [laughter] – was a very practical man. He had a somewhat formal exterior, but he had a very warm inside.

I remember him very well as being very helpful and kind to me, in spite of being rather very formal and not entirely in agreement with my boss when I was at the Atomic Energy Commission as assistant to Louis Straws. Louis Straws and Van Bush were both very talented men. They were formal and cool, at best, to each other. But he was very good to me. I'm just impelled to reminisce about that.

Now we're here concerned, surely all of us, with the future. And Harvey has brought us up to date, and has enunciated principles from Van Bush and others that certainly are, in many respects, equally applicable now.

There are some different emphases, certainly. Going back to World War II and post-World War II, during which scientific and technological research and support grew so dramatically in our country, indeed, throughout the world, the stimulus was – and always has been in history – concerns with military matters. That goes back at least to, well, at least to, let's say, David and Goliath [laughter], when David threw the best of modern technology at the time, a super slingshot, which won the battle for him.

But things have changed very greatly, as we all know, the Cold War being over, fortunately. The emphasis is on global-economic competition – the key word through the world is "jobs" – and modern communications, of which my being able to talk with you in this way is a very minor example.

The United States has to be concerned with its economic standing in relation to global economic competition – a kind of competition which heavily relies on matters of technology, and before that, of science; or perhaps I should say, the interaction between science and technology.

In fact, technology greatly influences science, and there is certainly a circular effect there; one instance would be where instrumentation, made possible by technology, enables advances in science.

I do want to touch on certain points that Harvey brought up, one of them being the need that Vannevar Bush pointed to – the need for dependable, or rather, the need for a "stability" of funding for science and research, research and technology I should say, projects over a period of years.

Our country suffers from the short-term approach of funding, although funding has grown greatly and been very generous. I think the taxpayers generally do not object to what has been done and is being done. The Congress has a very short-term view of committing funds. This is less of a problem in many other countries.

I don't have a prescription to alleviate the situation, but I think it's important to mention that, as many of you know, the United States increasingly is regarded in other parts of the world as not a reliable partner in megascience projects that require many years of funding. Or in projects which are not megascience in the sense of major instrumentation, such as the superconducting supercollider or others of that major ilk, but rather studies going on over a period of years and over areas of geography in other countries, where cooperative efforts among different countries enables a much better result. These would be, for example, in areas of environmental issues – in recording data and experimental tests, such as underwater sound tests – and cosmological issues involving telescopes in many parts of the world. These require stability in funding.

This opens up the question of a role for the Department of State in science and technology policy formulation, where science and technology have never, except for a brief period after World War II, had the attention that I believe, and many others believe, they should have. There is not a real career opportunity in the State Department for scientists and engineers. And I mention it here, in part, because I hope to stimulate interest among all of you in encouraging State Department action to create a more favorable climate for the consideration of science and technological issues in the formulation of policies on issues that are not directly science and technology issues but in which science and technology are woven into the fabric. This, of course, increasingly includes many economic issues. I would hope that all of us will be thinking of how to encourage the State Department to improve the status of science and technology in the organization chart.

The Carnegie Commission, which some of you know about, and which has issued many publications, copies of which will be available to any of you who want them, has been very much concerned with the United States' science and technology in world affairs. Among the practical outcomes of the Carnegie Commission's studies over a five-year period, has been the creation of something that calls itself the Carnegie Group. The Carnegie Group is an informal organization – the most general term – an informal organization of the ministers of science or their equivalents in the G7 countries. Of course, for the United States, we have our Science Advisor to the President as our approximate equivalent of the ministers of science in the other countries.

This group invited these ministers to a meeting some years ago, to discuss whether they would like to have an informal get-together in which they would get to know each other without any staff being present, without any minutes being kept. Getting into a position where they, having common concerns on matters related to science and technology that cross all country borders, would be able to discuss them with their neckties off.

This first meeting was so successful that they asked us invite them a second time over a weekend. And from that time on, every six months they meet, they discuss common issues of science and technology and their relation to world affairs and to economic affairs and indeed to the affairs that concern all of us as homo sapiens. They just recently held their eighth semi-annual meeting. Now this group is much concerned with the attitudes of the equivalents of our State Department in these countries. I think it worth mentioning for that reason, because international affairs are increasingly matters that concern science and technology and the welfare of all of us.

The welfare issue brings me to the last point I want to make in this response, and that is to call attention to the so-called underclass in the United States. It may not seem directly a matter of science and technology, but it is very much a matter that concerns all of us, in which science and technology may be able to be helpful.

A substantial fraction of our population is classed as underclass, and no one in this room is in that class. And we are fortunate. But the underclass in the United States is I would say –should be – a concern of all of us who are not in the underclass. Not just for reasons for compassion, not for reasons of gratitude that we're not in such a state, but as a matter of enlightened self-interest.

Unless we can improve the status of the underclass, which is growing more rapidly than the rest of the population, it is going to impair our economic status by giving us a burden to support and by giving us a growing fraction of the population that will find it difficult or impossible to obtain jobs in an increasingly technological society.

I bring this matter up now because technology, which is so helpful to most of us, is impairing the opportunity of jobs for those who are not adequately educated. It's easy to say that all they need is education and that would be so, but there is a need for the motivation in order to seek the education, to feel that jobs are available, and indeed to find them available.

To go further, the question of what creates the motivation gets into issues concerning early childhood, into family issues, into nutrition, and this is not the place to go into them. I hope to bring these issues to your attention and to put the pebbles in your shoe regarding this problem, which I think is a major one. I believe it would have concerned Vannevar Bush greatly, if it prevailed when he was there, and would if he were here now.

I want to bring up, in closing, the name of Leonardo – Leonardo DaVinci. Leonardo was a very practical quasi-engineer, technician, scientist of sort in his time. He was very much concerned with primarily advancing his own economic status through military devices that he would prepare to sell to any ruler who would seek his services. He was driven very largely by economic issues, and I think we might keep in mind that many of our scientists and engineers today are also encouraged by the opportunities for personal financial advancement as well as the glory of advancing learning and the prestige that comes from seeking Nobels and similar prizes.

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COLE: Thank you, Bill. Let me pose one question to you – that is posed, in fact, by Ann Griffin – and it is as follows: "You mentioned the demise of the SSC, what lessons do you derive from this experience? Do you foresee a shift to international cooperation in big science projects? What are the implications for American scientific autonomy then?"

GOLDEN: Well, I would comment that the Carnegie Group to which I referred, at its recent meeting – which was held in Brussels, the center of European union, the European community – paid much attention to just such matters as to how cooperative ventures in megascience could be most effective. I have no answer to the question, but I think the fact that there is increasing awareness of the need to find practical solutions – practical palliatives at least to what has been the unreliability of the United States for making long-term financial commitments – gives me some feeling of encouragement that ways will be worked out to bring about effective practical arrangements between the governments involved in megascience and cross-boundary projects.

COLE: Thank you very much, Bill. We're going to move on at this point to hear from the comments and responses of Professor Harvey Sapolsky.

SAPOLSKY: Science policy is the scientist's struggle for a public patron, the scientist's search for a winning rationale for financial support. There are three main rationales for public patronage, two of which have just been derailed by events that I never expected to see in my lifetime.

The first is national security as a rationale. Under this banner, science in the service of defense – a banner that Vannevar Bush strongly believed in – flourished over the last 40 years.

It's my estimate that we spent approximately $13 trillion on the Cold War. The R&D portion of that was perhaps $2 trillion. That means hundreds of billions of dollars were given to basic research, largely in the name of national security. I include under the national security banner the Department of Defense, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and what was the Atomic Energy Commission and is now the Department of Energy. Those three agencies have dominated science in the last 40 years. Even the National Science Foundation, to some extent, because its initial resources came largely under the Sputnik era, was created under a defense rationale.

Defense has been quite good to science over the last 40 years. There was no better, more protective patron of science than national security. National security kept the democratic wolves away from the door.

Just as Bush wanted, science had autonomy under the defense rationale. Scientists were largely free from management oversight, they were given resources to acquire the fanciest equipment, and they were free from geographic and other constraints on distribution that affect so much else of what the federal government does.

Defense, in a real sense, protected science from politics, just as some said Bush might have wanted. Congressmen left military appropriations, or what they thought were military appropriations, largely alone.

I could elaborate on the reasons why the defense agencies were so generous to science, but suffice it to say that I'm not a believer in the argument that the military were converts to science after World War II, that they became believers in the beauty of science and the utility of basic research. For me, the success of this rationale was a combination of bureaucratic accident, bureaucratic politics, and bureaucratic inertia. But it's been very helpful.

In any event, that has all come to an end with the end of the Cold War. It marks the end of a very long gravy train. I believe that the military, much-hated on some campuses, will be sorely missed.

Industrial competitiveness is the second rationale. It has sparked great interest in recent years as a potential replacement rationale. And it even has generated a fair amount of funding for science, though not a tremendous amount.

Industrial competitiveness is a more difficult rationale for the scientist, though, than defense, in the sense that some politicians actually believe in it. Because of this, they find it hard to resist distributional instincts.

Under a national security rationale, politicians may be less prescriptive. If they think a bomb is being made, they want the best bomb, and they are willing to allow the bomb to be made wherever the military might think it can best be done.

But with industrial competitiveness as the rationale, then they will start to think that maybe this belongs in their district, because if it is good for the industrial competitors of the United States, it can not be bad for their districts, can it? So, what is good for the United States could be good for Florida, and that's what's going to happen with that kind of rationale.

Moreover, the contribution that science makes to industrial competitiveness can be better measured than it can be for defense. Wars that you do not fight are hard to link together with the equipment or science that you invested in.

I think this competitiveness rationale would force the allocation to be subject to much more managerial direction, and you see that in the expressions of the committees of the Congress, where they start to say what they think about how this money should be funded.

This rationale was subject to a life-change with the demise of the Democratically-controlled Congress. Industrial policy under the Republican-controlled Congress is also being revised. I think it is an endangered species. The Republicans believe in supporting R&D as much as needed for things that the government buys – often largely military equipment. They have no problem with supporting whatever is deemed to be relevant to that kind of activity, because the government is the purchaser. They also believe in supporting basic research, because they believe that business firms, for their own self-interest, will under-invest in research.

But they do not support what they identify as applied research. They think that this is entirely the province of industry, and not at all part of a seamless web. They may see anything under the industrial competitiveness banner as applied research and say goodbye to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Technology Reinvestment Project, and all the other programs using that rationale.

Now, let me turn to the third rationale, one which I have not mentioned previously, and that is health. This one, I think, is a winner. It simultaneously serves both democratic and elite instincts that are mixed in with support of science. The geographic distribution of health dollars under the healthcare banner is assured by the population distribution, because the medical schools in the United States are distributed to be near what they call euphemistically "clinical material."

Boston, of course, has great medical schools and New York City has great medical schools, and San Francisco has great medical schools, just like they have great physics departments and whatnot. But so does Atlanta, and so does Salt Lake City, and so do St. Louis and Houston. These are all great medical centers in the United States.

There are 150 medical schools, they are all wealthy under this regime, and they can concentrate resources in the academic medical setting quite easily. They do it in 150 settings, not just five or 10, but it is easy to serve both democratic and elite instincts here.

Better yet, health as a rationale is pretty well protected from downturns: despite protestations by Americans that they have deep religious convictions, I don't see Americans eager to meet their maker. I see them quite willing to spend the entire GNP on healthcare of one kind or another.

Right now we're at the 14 percent mark, a trillion dollars a year that is being invested in health, and it goes up 10 percent per year. In fact, they have parties when it's under double-digit inflation in the healthcare industry. They think they had a successful year in controlling costs when inflation is only 9 percent. So this is on its way.

I think the rationale of science's contribution to health care of one form or another will generate great support and autonomy for scientists. It is the very combination that Bush wanted for science – and it is the permanent quest for health. That is truly the endless frontier.

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COLE: Thank you Harvey. Let me now convey to you a number of comments that have come forward, and then speak to a couple of questions.

The first comment is from Fred Seitz of the Rockefeller University, and he says–

You can make a table that classifies the major industrial countries of the world, not in terms of their total R&D expenditures but in terms of the total R&D expenditures of the private sector. And there's an almost perfect correlation, at least until recently, between economic performance and the percentage of total R&D expenditures, as a percentage of GNP by the private sector.

One country that's a little off the curve on this – which I don't entirely understand, because in terms of productivity, its performance hasn't been so good – the country which is

strongest on this scale is Switzerland. Switzerland has by far the largest percentage of its R&D expenditures supported by the private sector. On the other hand, it hasn't shown a very good productivity performance, but I think most people would still argue that the Swiss economy is in pretty good shape.

COLE: Thanks, Harvey. This is directed to Bill Golden. This is from Professor Mischa Shwartz from Columbia. And he asks you–

There are students of the complex sociological issues involved, which go back to single-parent families, to families who have not been brought up in an environment in which education is recognized as desirable, and parents, who may themselves be underfed, want to feed the infants.

So, I wish I had a prescription. But I think we need to increase the public awareness of this issue, which is moving toward us inexorably, and is increasingly burdensome to all, as the population percentage of the underclass grows. I think that, in a way, the beginning of wisdom is an increasing awareness of the existence of a problem and a recognition that even though we don't see a difference from one day to another, if we look ahead 10 years, we're going to find that this tsunami of the burden of the underclass is approaching us very closely.

So I hope that all will be thinking about it more acutely than they, I should say we, have been doing so far.

BROOKS: If I may comment, this is something that I've been thinking about a great deal lately, trying to get a project started at the American Academy. I think the problem is much broader than the underclass. It's the problem of income distribution overall in the whole society. Since roughly 1979, inequality of income in American society has been steadily growing after roughly 20 years of decline, with a very abrupt decline in equality during World War II. There is no agreement as far as I can make out among economists or anybody else, as to what the source of this decline is.

This is a universal phenomenon in industrialized countries. It's largely concealed in most of the other countries because of the much more generous welfare programs.

Canada, for example, if you look at it in terms of earned income, actually has a more rapid rise in inequality in income than the United States. But nevertheless, that is almost completely offset – or has been in the past almost completely offset – by much more generous welfare programs.

I notice now that the Canadian budget deficit, as a percentage of GNP, is one of the largest in the world, and this is increasingly a problem that's going to face the other countries that have been able to suppress the problem, essentially by means of redistribution programs. But I think the cost of these redistribution programs is now getting so high that the problem is going to be more and more a universal problem of the industrialized world.

The U.S. has very low unemployment, particularly long-term unemployment, whereas the European countries and Canada have much higher and much longer-term unemployment. But we have much greater unequal distribution of income. So there seems to be a trade-off between the two.

COLE: Thank you. The next question goes to Harvey Sapolsky and it's from Michael A. Dennis, Cornell University. And Dr. Dennis asks–

They didn't bring it up particularly in this last go-round, but they opposed, in the past, passage of universal insurance schemes by saying, why don't we invest in the best insurance scheme of them all, basic research in health care? And part of the rapid experience of the increases in NIH during the 1950s was largely on that rationale.

I think they'll support health-care research. I think the public is so much unanimous on this interest that they can't oppose it.

GOLDEN: I agree with Harvey Sapolsky and with Harvey Brooks, both Harveys, that funds will be effectively used. But I think it's important to point to a very real problem that relates to this. While research is being well-fed, the teaching hospitals are facing a leaner and leaner diet. And while it is very desirable to have universal coverage for health and medical needs, the pressure so far has been and is growing to reduce the payments that are made to teaching hospitals as distinguished from primary care hospitals and the like. And I think it very important that the teaching hospitals be nourished sufficiently so that they can utilize the advances in science.

Now, at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York, we have both a medical school and a teaching hospital, and while the medical school increasingly is faring well in obtaining grants for research, grants which I'm satisfied are very well expended, the hospital is being confronted with reduced payments – and this applies to all the teaching hospitals.

I referred to Mt. Sinai, but in New York there's Cornell and NYU – all the teaching hospitals in New York have the same problem. I think it worth mentioning. It's very important.

COLE: Thank you. It might be appropriate to take questions or comments from the floor at this time, if anyone has them. Please identify yourself.

LICHTER: My name is Bob Lichter. I'm from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation. The discussion has focused on drivers of science, science's role in defense and industrial competitiveness, national competitiveness, international competitiveness, health. The emphasis has been on scientific knowledge as the product.

I suggest that this emphasis is misapplied. Well, I don't know figures, but I would suggest that most scientific results will remain buried in the scientific literature in one or another of the leading or less-leading journals, perhaps available to be mined appropriately. But most

unlikely to be so, most of it.

But for me this is not a reason to diminish support of science and for academic research, if you accept the premise that the product is not the knowledge, but the people who are producing that knowledge, and particularly the students, undergraduate, graduate students, post-doctorals, and others who are involved in that whole effort, who become the scientists who make the change and, equally importantly, become the advocates and the cheerleaders for science. That the process of doing science is the best way to learn about science.

And that brings one then to the question, the observation, that the people who are likely to be doing science in the future, most definitely, will not look like the people who are sitting here in this room.

And I would like to see some discussion directed toward, in fact, who are going to be the next generation of scientists and the implications of that question for developing science policy.

JONATHAN COLE: Thank you. I believe some of that may be touched on this afternoon, and some of it will probably be the subject of some extended discussion in the conferences that will follow later in 1995.

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