Yale physicist D. Allan Bromley--for the people

D. Allan Bromley
1926-2005

Unknown for the most part but a significant contributor to the popularization of science--D. Allan Bromley.

The biography of Professor D. Allan Bromley, Sterling Professor of the Sciences,
as presented by Paul A. Fleury, Dean of Engineering,
on the occasion of the presentation of the Sheffield Medal to Professor Bromley

D. Allan Bromley is the first Sterling Professor of the Sciences and was Dean of Engineering from 1994-2000 at Yale University; during 1989-1993 he was The Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the Executive Office of the President of the United States.

One of the world’s leading nuclear physicists, he was founder and Director of the A. W. Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory at Yale from 1963-1989. He has carried out pioneering studies on both the structure and dynamics of nuclei and is considered the father of modern heavy ion science, one of the major areas of nuclear science. From 1972 until 1993 he held the Henry Ford II Professorship in Physics at Yale and from 1970 to 1977 served as chairman of the Yale Physics Department. An outstanding teacher, over the 1965-1989 period his Laboratory at Yale graduated more Ph.D.s in experimental nuclear physics than any other institution, worldwide. He has published over 500 papers in science and technology as well as edited or authored twenty books and has received numerous honors and awards, including, in 1988, the National Medal of Science, the highest U.S. scientific award.

For more than two decades, Dr. Bromley has been a leader in the national and international science and science policy communities. As chairman of the National Academy’s Physics Survey in the early 1970s, he contributed in a central way to charting the future of that science in the subsequent decade. As president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest scientific society, and of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, the world coordinating body for that science, he has been one of the leading spokesmen for U.S. science and for international scientific cooperation.

The first person to hold the Cabinet level rank of The Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Dr. Bromley increased both the staff and budget of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy by factors of more than five between 1989 and 1993. He revitalized and chaired the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering and Technology and achieved an unprecedented level of cooperation and communication among the more than twenty federal agencies that support U.S. science and technology. For the first time, he published a formal statement of U.S. Technology Policy and played a central role in greatly expanding cooperation between the federal government and the private sector toward more effective utilization of technology throughout U.S. society.

He also served as chairman of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and the Intergovernmental Council on Science, Engineering and Technology. During the Bush Administration he testified 42 times before Congressional Committees and delivered more than 400 addresses to major audiences across this country and around the world as the senior representative of American science and technology.

Prior to his appointment to the Bush Administration, Dr. Bromley served as a member of the White House Science Council throughout the Reagan Administration and as a member of the National Science Board in 1988-89.

Born in Westmeath, Ontario, Canada, he received the B.Sc. degree with highest honors in 1948 in the Faculty of Engineering at Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada. He received the M.Sc. degree from Queen’s University in 1950 and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Rochester in 1952, both degrees in nuclear physics. He subsequently has been awarded thirty-two honorary doctorates from universities in Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, South Africa and the United States.

He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, of the Royal South African Academy of Sciences, Academician of the International Higher Education Academy of Sciences, Moscow, and a Benjamin Franklin Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London.

He was President of the American Physical Society in 1997 and a member of the Governing Board of the American Institute of Physics from 1995 to 1998.

During his APS Presidency he has played a leadership role in coordinating the activities of 110 American scientific and technological professional societies representing more than 3.5 million scientists, mathematicians and engineers in support of continuing federal investment in academic science and technology. He also hosted and organized a meeting of the presidents of the major physical societies and regional societies worldwide for discussion of common problems and opportunities.

He serves on a number of Presidential commissions and on the Boards of Directors of several private sector corporations; he is a founding partner of the Washington Advisory Group LLC.


Dr. Bromley's Sheffield Lecture:

"SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND POLITICS"

by

D. Allan Bromley

Sterling Professor of the Sciences

Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

March 22, 2001

INTRODUCTION:

The great majority of Americans believe that science and technology are relatively recent players on the world’s scene; not really understanding either in any depth, the public still — by more than 80% — supports fundamental scientific research as something worthy of federal support even if no immediate application is in view. At the same time technology is viewed with significant suspicion and hostility. In part, this, of course, reflects the nuclear mushroom cloud that many see as the symbol of technology while others view technology as fundamentally destructive of the world environment without really understanding quite how this is supposed to come about but being substantially influenced by the general media. Indeed, the indoctrination in this area all too frequently begins in elementary schools where science courses too often focus on endangered species and the fate of the rain forests to the exclusion of almost all else. As Arthur Clarke has noted, "To most of the planet’s inhabitants, advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic!"

It would be well at the outset for us to define our terms. Let me begin with a quote from Theodore von Karman, "Science studies what is; technology creates what never was." Science is simply the English translation of scientia or knowledge, technology is the application of that knowledge to the needs of society and politics — at least as defined in the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary — is, "the science and art of government; the science dealing with the form, organization, and administration of a state, or a part of one, and with the regulation of its relations with other states; that branch of natural philosophy dealing with the state or social organism as a whole." I shall return to this question of natural philosophy in a moment but my remarks today will focus on the connections and interactions between these three vital human activities: science, technology and politics.

THE IMPACT OF WORLD WAR II:

For most Americans and, indeed, for the world, World War II marked a major watershed in the relationships among science, technology, and politics. Prior to that time science and technology were very separate activities. Science was known broadly as natural philosophy, was considered to be at best a suitable pursuit for retired clerics, and was considered to be of essentially no use in any practical sense. Technology, on the other hand, was represented by invention which was considered to be eminently useful, eminently practical, and a vitally important part of society. Whereas, natural philosophy was devoted to the understanding of nature, invention was devoted to its mastery for the betterment of the human condition — at least, in most cases. Looking back from our era the degree to which the two activities — natural philosophy and invention — were separate is startling. When Edison — an inventor, par excellence — was attempting to develop the electric light bulb he simply tried everything he could get his hands on as a potential filament until he finally landing upon a carbonized cotton thread; having found that it worked he stopped without any consideration of why it worked, or whether its working could possibly suggest something that would work better. Such was the nature of invention — not at all what we would today consider as research.

THE EARLY DAYS OF US SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY:

Prior to World War II there was essentially no relationship between scientific research and politics and relatively little between technology and politics. What scientific research and education there was gained its support almost entirely from private philanthropy — and in particular from the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations.

In the case of technology, the first real contact with government came in the 1830s when the Navy’s chief – and only – scientist, John Ericson, approached seven universities with the proposal that each design a 12 inch gun for the Navy’s new battleship — the Princeton — which was the first screw-driven warship. The universities responded and on a spring morning in 1845, the Princeton steamed out into Chesapeake Bay to begin tests of the weapons that the Navy had constructed to the university designs. Fortunately, the first test involved the weapon designed by Captain Parsons of the Navy itself. When it exploded — as it did — it killed the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Navy, the Governor of Maryland, the Captain of the Princeton and, as press reports of the day put it, "---sundry other dignitaries." It was the sort of thing that gave technology a bad name!

Less well known is the fact that President Tyler would have been among the "other dignitaries" had he not been detained momentarily below deck so that he could complete a more than slightly obscene Navy song!

It was not until World War II, about a century after the Princeton incident, when the pressures of national survival threw both natural philosophers and inventors together in three major technological activities that their separation ended permanently. These activities were: the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, devoted to the development of the British invention of radar; the Manhattan project, devoted to the development of nuclear weapons based on the European discovery of nuclear fission; and thirdly, and all too often forgotten, the need to develop high-quality medical care that could be delivered on the battlefield. In all three of these activities it very rapidly became clear that the work of the inventors or, as we would say, the technologists, was vastly assisted and accelerated by the understanding of the scientists or natural philosophers. Their understanding of natural phenomena made it clear that there were many things that could not possibly work and others that would probably work — thus, avoiding the random trials characteristics of earlier invention. The war years irretrievably merged natural philosophy and invention — or science and technology. It is equally clear that they irreversibly merged science and technology with politics as the politicians realized what major contributions science and technology could make to the war effort, and by inference, to other major societal problems in the postwar period and the scientists and technologists recognized that their work could be immeasurably strengthened and accelerated by a continuation of the flow of tax dollars that grateful politicians had provided freely to them during the war years.

THE BEGINNING OF THE POSTWAR ERA:

In his remarkable report, Science: The Endless Frontier prepared at the request of President Roosevelt, Roosevelt’s science advisor, Vannevar Bush, the first of the American Science Advisors to the President, promised the members of the American public that if they would support research and development in peace as they had in war then the benefits to them, to the quality of life of our citizens, and to our society as a whole would exceed our fondest imagination. I hope that you will agree that this promise has, in fact, been more than kept. Some would argue that science and technology made a Faustian bargain with the politicians; I would not.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND:

As we think about this relationship between science and technology on the one hand and politics on the other it is important that we understand some of the historical background because it goes back much farther in our history than most of us recognize. In the middle ages the Roman Catholic Church was the strongest political organization that the world had ever seen — and it remains strong. Most people, if and when they happen to think about it, would probably mark the division between the medieval and the modern worlds as occurring in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses — his fundamental statements of his beliefs, many at major variance with the official positions of the Church — onto the door of his Wittenberg Chapel. He was directly challenging the dominant political power of his time and in so doing he marked the beginning of the Reformation and the end of Roman Catholic hegemony in Europe and in the world. It is important to remember, however, that Luther was a Roman Catholic priest; he was in no sense attempting to destroy the church, but rather only to eliminate some of the corruption that had grown within it, including the selling of indulgences, and the arrogance of the clergy but most of all he was challenging the belief that the church necessarily mediated between man and God.

What few today recognize is that there was essentially very little new in Luther’s theses. They had been advanced more than a century before by John Hus, a Bohemian priest, born in 1372, and I mention this because it will illustrate one of the first critical interactions between technology and politics. Hus, too, was objecting vigorously to the abuses that were even then rampant in the church and was strongly supported by King Wenceslas IV, of Czechoslovakia (of which Bohemia was a province) and in 1410, Hus was made Rector of the University of Prague, a position that he used as a bully pulpit to present his views. He also wrote a book presenting these same views. How is it then that everyone has heard of Martin Luther and almost no one has ever heard of John Hus? The answer, in short, is technology.

In Hus’ time it took roughly one man-year to copy a book and so even the most popular of books probably existed in less than twenty-five copies — including that written by Hus. When King Wenceslas turned against Hus, it was relatively easy for the King’s agents to collect those twenty-five or less books and burn them — as they did, essentially putting an end to anything except oral dissemination of Hus’ ideas. Book burning actually worked in those days! It was also, unfortunate for Hus that the Czech language was not widely used in Europe and this further restricted the spread of his ideas.

It was fortunate, for Luther, on the other hand, that Gutenberg, in the 1430s, had developed moveable type and by Luther’s time in the early 1500’s printing had become relatively common. Luther’s Latin theses would have received little more circulation than did those of Hus had they not immediately been translated into German, printed, and distributed in many more languages throughout Europe. The art of printing had been available to the Chinese centuries earlier but had not migrated to Europe prior to Gutenberg. Even if someone had wished to — and the church authorities certainly did — there was no possibility of collecting and destroying all of the printed copies of Luther’s theses — copies printed in the vernacular — and, they spread rapidly throughout Europe and the world. Printing — the first technological revolution of our modern civilization — had made it impossible to confine ideas to any local region.

THE FATE OF JOHN HUS:

Before leaving this period it is worth recording what happened to John Hus. In 1414, the church had recognized that it could no longer tolerate his teachings and so he was ordered to appear before the Council of Constance to answer for his heretic beliefs. This Council of Constance was the most powerful political organization in the world, at the time, having been established to try to resolve the so-called Great Schism. This schism dated from 1378, when — as a result of a disputed Papal election — there had been two independent Popes in Europe. The earlier Council of Pisa, in 1409, had attempted to resolve this situation but had only succeeded in establishing yet a third Pope and quite apart from these very serious problems of fragmentation, the church fathers were enormously concerned about the resulting dwindling respect for the universal church.

Not being an idiot, Hus had requested — and had received in writing — a guarantee of safe passage to and from Constance not only from the Council but also from the Holy Roman Emperor himself. Thus girded with what he took to be ironclad protection Hus traveled to Constance where despite all promises — written or otherwise — he was immediately arrested, thrown into a filthy jail cell for eight months, and then subjected to a show trial immediately following which, in 1415, he was stripped of his priesthood — and everything else — and burned at the stake. The church had taken care of a subversive element. Many observers of the time learned that politicians of whatever stripe were not always to be trusted. Because of the printing press, however, the church was quite unable to take care of Luther in equivalent fashion to Hus. Free flow of information and of ideas has always changed the nature of societies and it is technology that has made that flow possible. It is important to add that about a year ago the current Pope traveled to Bohemia to officially apologize for the church’s treatment of Hus.

COMMUNICATION AND FREEDOM:

When the histories of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the breakout of democracy in the People’s Republic of China, and in other nations around the world in recent decades, is finally written, technology in the form of the cellular phone and the fax machine will be shown to have been crucial to keeping such political movements alive until they reached a critical mass that was beyond suppression by the political powers of the time.

Of course, the introduction of technology has not always been greeted with the enthusiasm accorded the fax and the cellular phone. When the Jacquard loom was introduced to the silk weavers in Lyon, France, for example, they promptly smashed it to pieces on the correct assumption that it would eliminate their jobs. The Luddites in the English midlands had exactly the same reaction to the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

THE SEVEN TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTIONS:

It is important to recognize that there have been at least seven technological revolutions in the past five centuries that have had profound impacts on the entire nature of societies and on the quality of life of all humans. Several are still in their infancy. I have already mentioned the first of these, the Printing Revolution, that occurred in Europe in the 1430s. The second was the Industrial Revolution in the British midlands in the mid 1700s. Here we learned to use energy, primarily in the form of the steam engine, to amplify the power and repetitive potential of human and animal muscles. This revolution was all over in less than one hundred years; it changed the entire face of society; and yet very few people — with the exception of the few Luddites — recognized that it was underway until it was essentially over.

The third revolution was the Nuclear one usually considered as one marked by Enrico Fermi’s release of controlled nuclear energy in Chicago in 1942 — for the first time making available what is essentially an infinite supply of energy, although, we have not yet in this country found the political constituency to make it widely available. It is interesting to now know that Werner Heisenberg, the author of the quantum mechanical uncertainty principle and the head of the German nuclear research in World War II had a crude operating reactor a few months before Fermi, but for whatever reason the Germans did not undertake to develop nuclear weapons. In Japan, Nishina, one of the nation’s best scientists and his colleagues had made much more progress toward nuclear weapons than anyone knew at the time – and certainly more than the Germans.

The fourth revolution was the so-called Green Revolution of the 1960’s for which Norman Borlaug received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize simply because there was no Nobel Prize in Agriculture. Certainly his work has saved tens, if not, hundreds, of millions of people around the world from starvation. His work, however, has been much misunderstood because most people believe that he introduced new cereal plants to bolster the food supply. In fact, he spent some twenty years, largely on his knees, in the Mexican sun searching for mutant plants among the cereal grains — mutants that had abnormally heavy stalks so that it was possible to pour energy in the form of chemical fertilizers and energy intensive irrigation water onto the plants without having them fall over so that they would rot and could not be harvested. What he was doing was making it possible to pour energy into agriculture.

It is worth noting, that a century ago over 80% of Americans were engaged in agriculture and barely managed to produce enough food to feed themselves. Today, because of improved technology, substantially less than 2% of our population feeds us as well as much of the rest of the world.

It bears emphasis, too, that there is hope of a second Green Revolution – not a moment too soon – as genetic engineering evolves plants that can flourish in desert environments and in brackish water.

The fifth technological revolution is that in Information. It is the child of the transistor, the integrated circuit, the computer, and the optical fiber, where we have learned to use energy to amplify the power, scope and speed of man’s mind. It is a revolution that had its roots in April, 1746 when the French scientist Jean Antoine Nollet with the help of the Abbot of the Carthusian monastery in Paris arranged some 200 monks in a long line – each separated from the next by a twenty five foot iron wire that each held in each hand. The line was roughly a mile long. Without warning, Nollet applied a few hundred volts from a primitive electrical battery. When the most remote monk yelled simultaneously – just as loudly as the first – and jumped just as high Nollet had confirmed his hypothesis that the electrical signal was transmitted instantaneously as far as he could tell and did not weaken perceptibly at least in a mile. He had established the basis for the telegraph – the internet of its time. The Information Revolution blossomed in the 1980’s but is one still in its infancy; like the Industrial Revolution it would be impossible to stop it, even if one wished to, and it will continue to change the entire nature of our society, as it already has. But it is important to emphasize that it is still in its infancy.

Dramatic developments are occurring on a rapid pace; we no longer claim to have to worry, or even think about bandwidth, speed, and memory capacity as was the case even a few years ago. On the horizon – but not yet available – are molecular level, self-assembling computers and quantum computers that in thirty seconds – it has been calculated – could solve problems that would take today’s most powerful supercomputer more than 10 billion years. There are major surprises ahead!

Next, the Biotechnology Revolution of the 1990’s — the sixth on my list — is also still in its infancy. So far it has been focused almost entirely on health, and health-related issues but its real power and its real impact will occur not there, but rather in agriculture, in manufacturing, in marine biology, and in fields as remote as solution mining. Here, again, particularly in the use of biotechnology in manufacturing, the focus will be on energy. Instead of using the high temperatures and high pressures that typically drive today’s chemical and other industrial production reactions we will have learned to use nature’s enzymes to carry out these reactions at atmospheric temperature and pressure and with enormous savings in energy.

Biotechnology, from the outset, has been a uniquely American technology reflecting the more than 40 years of generous federal support of fundamental biology research – primarily in the nation’s research universities – that is now beginning to pay off. We came close to losing our unique position through neglect, but I believe that we have – in the past few years – regained it. The very recent announcement of the completion of the mapping of the human genome with its major surprise that we have less than a third of the 100,000 genes long expected in the genome has consequences beyond even our present imagination. The fact that several plants are known to have more than 25,000 genes implies that the old idea that each gene produces one protein is no longer tenable. The greater complexity of the human must reflect differences in the way, and the number of, proteins for which each gene is responsible and this leads to the new scientific and technological field of protenomics.

The seventh of the technological revolutions is – I suppose to be consistent – embryonic but growing very fast. The ability to make devices measured in billionths rather than millionths of a meter opens up a whole new world of nanometrics where quantum mechanics rules. Thus far the emphasis has been on sensing and imaging devices but increasingly the sensor is accompanied on a tiny chip by an automatic data processing unit and a transmitter that communicates with the outside world. It is only a matter of time before such chips are implanted in humans for remote medical diagnosis and care. Laboratories on a chip are becoming commonplace. The question of how to power such chips is a daunting one. In many cases it appears that the electrical voltages already present in the human body are more than adequate for the electrical needs. Mechanical power is even more challenging, but already nanomotors are being fabricated. One interesting one resembles a pinwheel and uses tiny droplets of burning hydrocarbon fuel on its arms to spin the wheel and attached gear trains. The exhaust from such nanomotors is being developed for ultra-precise control of the orientation of spacecraft. What is important to remember here is that hydrocarbon fuels have an energy density more than a factor of ten greater than does any electrical battery yet developed.

ENERGY — THE ULTIMATE RESOURCE:

You will have noted that in all of these revolutions but the first — that of printing — a dominant factor has been the use of energy. Energy is the ultimate resource; with abundant energy we can recycle indefinitely the elements of the earth’s crust for our repeated use; we can fix nitrogen from the atmosphere; we can liberate phosphorus from the rocks and we can have unlimited pure water through desalinization of sea water or pumping from deep aquifers; with all this we can then maintain agricultural economies beyond anything of which we have even dreamed as yet.

This, and a second Green Revolution mentioned earlier may indeed come not a moment too soon. The world population, now 5.7 billion persons, has doubled since the late 1950s. Many demographic experts believe that it will grow to 12.5 billion by 2050 and predict consequent famine, wars and unspeakable suffering.

At the Third U.N. International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo, in 1994, a goal of 7.27 billion was agreed upon for 2015 with eventual stabilization to 7.8 billion by 2050. Unfortunately, there is little confidence – or evidence – that this goal is achievable although what is required is quite generally known: universal education for women and a long-term contraceptive that can be used by women while it remains not detectable by men! Otherwise men will simply prevent its use since the number of children fathered is, in far too much of our world, taken as the measure of manhood.

The creative use of energy is intimately related to our quality of life which is particularly closely coupled to our use of electricity. Here in the United States, for example, our use of total energy has been relatively constant since the oil shortages of 1974 taught us a much needed lesson about conservation. On the other hand, our use of electricity has grown in lockstep with our Gross Domestic Product and worldwide is now considered the best index of quality of life. We, in the United States, represent about 6% of the world’s population and yet we use something over 30% of the world’s total energy. This is not as bad as it may sound. First of all, we are a very large country and more than 40% of our total energy use is in transportation. It is also, true, that over the decades since World War II we have accepted the responsibility for the national security of much of Europe, Japan, Korea, and all of the Americas and a very significant fraction of our energy utilization is tied up in these national security activities.

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS:

Here, again, our science and technology have been intimately involved in aspects of our foreign policy and in our politics. To some degree this, of course, has been true since the founding of our nation. It was Pierre DuPont who, shortly after the founding of the United States, pointed out that, "The only way we can continue to beat the British is through superior manufactures" and in the decades prior to World War II we depended almost entirely on the Europeans for new scientific knowledge and new technologies which we subsequently developed, improved, and used as the basis for our rapidly growing manufacturing output. The resulting burgeoning economy stabilized and protected the new political entity. Effective use of technology gave this nation a jump-start in the global economy.

Of course, until very recently, the Japanese in like fashion since World War II, have turned to us for new scientific and technological developments which they subsequently improved and developed making them, in a few decades, a world-class technological power. The Japanese added a new political twist to the old process of importing science, in the form of a powerful governmental agency, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) that could, and did, set national technological priorities and then coordinated the national efforts, industrial, governmental and academic, to achieve these priorities. They selected the steel industry, the consumer electronics industry and the automobile industry early on as ones where they were determined to become world leaders and they have been remarkably successful. It is interesting to note that in recent years, the Koreans and the other Pacific Tiger nations are using similar approaches to science and technology importation from Japan.

POSTWAR US SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY:

How did we in the United States follow-up on the enormous progress made in both science and technology during the 1940 war years and develop what is universally recognized as the strongest science and technology enterprise that the world has ever seen? Two remarkable men, Emmanuel Piori and Robert Conrad in 1946 in the Office of Naval Research, were given the task of deciding how the federal government could support research in universities without impacting academic freedom, and without destroying the creativity that they hoped to foster. Piori and Conrad came up with three fundamental rules which bear remembering. They were the following:

1) Find the best people in the nation on the basis of peer review.

This was a revolutionary idea and one that President Truman found impossible to accept. He and many others referred to peer review as creating a situation, "where the pigs decided who gets into the trough." Indeed, it was President Truman’s reluctance to accept this idea that held up the formation of the National Science Foundation for over three years. Subsequent experience, however, has fully borne out Piori and Conrad’s wisdom and their faith in peer review.

2) Within the total funds available, support these brightest individuals to do whatever they decide that they want to do. They are much better judges of how best to use their time and talents than is anyone in government.

This, too, was a revolutionary idea and is the basis for the unique American system of developing the federal government’s research program from the bottom up on the basis of proposals submitted by individual scientists and engineers, or small groups of such individuals, to the federal agencies rather than from the top down where someone in Washington decides what needs to be done and then passes that decision down through the agencies to the scientific and technological communities. I regret to say that in the recent Clinton Administration this latter top-down approach grew at what I consider to be a dangerous rate.

3) Leave them alone while they are doing whatever they are doing i.e., minimize reporting and all other paper work.

While no one argues about the need for accountability since after all it is the taxpayer’s money that is being spent, we, from time to time, forget what we are really trying to accomplish; during the Reagan years, for example, a White House Science Council survey of young faculty members in our leading universities, which I co-chaired with David Packard, showed that, on the average, Assistant Professors in the sciences and engineering were spending about 33% of their time writing new proposals or reporting on the results obtained as a result of older ones. This is surely a colossal waste of one of the nation’s most important resource — bright young minds — at a time when they are at their peak of creativity. If anything, this situation has gotten worse in recent years.

THE STRUCTURE OF US FEDERAL FUNDING OF R&D:

The United States is unique in that we have more than twenty federal agencies that support substantial research and development programs in furtherance of their specific missions instead of one single Cabinet level one as is common in most other countries. This I believe, has been one of our greatest sources of strength. We have been able to say over the years that no really good idea has had to wait very long before one or other of our agencies has found it of interest and has been willing to support it, while in single agency situations if that single agency does not like your work or your proposal you are dead!

Obviously, however, with more than twenty agencies involved in research and development there is the potential of inefficiency, of overlaps, and of gaps in the national program in any particular area. Coordination among the agencies is obviously of critical importance and I consider it one of my most successful activities during my tour of duty in Washington that we developed unprecedented communication and cooperation among these federal agencies using the Federal Coordinating Council for Science Engineering and Technology with the perhaps unfortunate acronym FCCSET (pronounced FIX-IT).

Averaging over the two decades from 1980 to 2000, the total US investment in R&D, expressed in 1992 dollars, has been roughly 100 billion per year. In 1980, the federal government and industry each provided roughly half of this total and by 2000, the federal component had shrunk to about a third of the total funding. On average annually over this period about 16 billion went to the roughly 150 research universities, 24 billion to the 726 federal laboratories, and 41 billion to industry – with its 16,000 laboratories spread out over an enormous range of size and quality. In 1980, about 75% of this federal funding was channeled through the Defense Department, but by 2000, this had decreased to something like 45% and the downward trend continues.

PRESIDENTIAL INITIATIVES:

Shortly after I arrived in Washington, President Bush asked me to suggest some 5 or 6 areas of major national scientific and technical importance to which he could give his personal support using the bully pulpit of the Presidency. To select these areas I turned to the FCCSET. The areas selected were mathematics and science education without which all other initiatives were doomed, high performance computing and communication which we felt were critical to the entire scientific and technical enterprises of the nation, global climate change which had risen to the top of the political agendae in nations around the world, material science and technology since almost everything that we do ultimately depends on the characteristics of some critical material or other, biotechnology because we believed that we were just beginning to see the fruits of generous funding of fundamental biology in the nation’s universities and advanced manufacturing because we recognized that we had lost the vital lead in manufacturing technology that we had enjoyed for so many decades.

Because these were identified as Presidential Initiatives and because we were able to pull together tightly coordinated national programs rather than heterogeneous collections of agency programs in each of these areas, the Congress was prepared to grant between 20 and 40% annual funding increases and we were able to move these areas ahead rapidly.

What we had in the Bush Administration, for the first time, was, in effect, a two-tiered system of federal funding. By far the greatest part of each agency’s program was built from the bottom up as in the past on the basis of proposals received in a continuing stream from across the nation. On top of that we had the six Presidential Initiatives where the activities of the federal agencies were closely coordinated and carefully planned for five years into the future. The reports of the individual multi-agency committees that developed these national programs were submitted to the Congress as addenda to the President’s Budget each year and subsequently we learned that they were translated into French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Chinese and, perhaps, other languages because they were considered to be models of governmental planning for science and technology.

US TECHNOLOGY POLICY:

The second general area of which I am most proud from my watch in the White House was that of industrial technology, where in, 1990, for the first time, we published a formal statement of US technology policy and, subsequently — following a number of Presidential talks on the subject — made it politically acceptable for the federal government to work with the private sector in the development of generic technologies just as it did in basic research. The reason, of course, was precisely the same as that for basic research, in that, by the very nature of the activity it was impossible to predict when, where, or to whom the benefits would flow and, therefore, impossible for any individual or institution to justify sufficient investment to make the activity competitive in international terms. Only the federal government can make such investments.

Our investments in the development of technology and of the underlying science have long been recognized as having a substantial payoff but only relatively recently have economists come up with actual numbers. Their results were typified in a recent speech by Alan Greenspan, the Director of the Federal Reserve, who noted that more than 70% of the growth of the US Gross Domestic Product in the last half century could be attributed directly to the exploitation of new technologies. This is a remarkable return on investment!

THE BUSH-CLINTON TRANSITION:

Before they were elected, Clinton and Gore expressed strong support for the FCCSET approach, for the federal involvement in the development of generic technologies, and, specifically, for the programs that we had in place. Unfortunately, the realities of politics, where no administration really likes to admit to supporting programs originated by an administration of the other party, meant that after a few months the Bush Presidential Initiatives in material science, in biotechnology, and in advanced manufacturing were all cancelled as was the Federal Coordinating Council itself. It was replaced by the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) chaired by the President, which clearly was a positive move since FCCSET had been chaired by the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology — me. Unfortunately, however, President Clinton found it possible to meet only once with his Council and then for only fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, the cooperation, coordination, and communication among the agencies has largely decayed and as I mentioned, previously, there has been a definite trend toward top-down construction of the Clinton-Gore budgets. I am convinced, that no small White House group, no matter how skilled, can in the long run successfully replace the collective wisdom of the entire scientific and technical community in this country. It is my hope that the second Bush Administration will return to the FCCSET two tiered approach.

What then is the present outlook? Back in 1996, the American Association for the Advancement of Science issued a scary prediction to the effect that federal support of R&D would decline by 25-30% in the period from 1997 to 2001 a decrease that would have wrecked a great number of important programs across all sciences and engineering.

As President of the American Physical Society in 1997, and working closely with chemists, astronomers, and mathematicians, although it was like herding cats, we organized 110 professional societies representing about 3.5 million members and were able to put together a coherent case that a 7% increase was required in going from 1996 to 1997 to restore a proper level of investment. When the smoke of Congressional battle cleared, we did indeed have 7% increases across the board and this held during 1998 and 1999, but dropped back to about 0% in 2000 activating the society group again. Because of its actions, a lame duck President, and of course because of the growing federal surplus – science and technology fared remarkably well in 2001 with an across the board average annual increase of over 9%.

THE CURRENT SITUATION:

Let me now turn to the present situation involving science, technology, and politics. While the details are not yet clear for the years ahead, the general outline is available. As I have mentioned previously, for a number of reasons peculiar to this particular year, the Clinton Administration and the Congress found themselves in a position where – on the basis of a whole series of frequently conflicting reasons – they appropriated a record increase in the proposed R&D funding of something over 9% across the board. This was clearly an anomaly but the scientific and technical communities assumed that it was the indicator of better days ahead where they could expect large annual increases – perhaps not as much as 9% on average – but still substantial. It was clear from the outset that this was not a sustainable assumption because it would soon eat up the discretionary component of the US budget, but the new Administration of President George W. Bush has made this very clear.

In his recent report to a joint session of Congress on his proposed budget, President Bush addressed four major areas: education, the tax-cut, the military and heath care. I strongly support his initiatives in these areas however, I am very deeply concerned that the critical role that will necessarily be played by science and technology has been downplayed or forgotten and that the necessary investments are not being planned for in the years ahead. Let me discuss each of these areas in turn.

Our goal in education is clearly to prepare a workforce in America appropriate to the 21st century – a workforce that will be at home with modern technology and the underlying science. Unfortunately however, although our students do relatively well compared with the rest of the developed world at grade 4, by grade 8 they have fallen substantially behind and by grade 12 in mathematics they are second from the last of 22 nations and in physics they are the last. In American K-12 education we are wasting between 2 and 3 years of each student's time – a wastage that we can no longer afford if we ever could because the foreign scholars and students upon whom we have relied to fill the gaps in our economy will in the future be much less available, both because of recognition in their home countries of the importance of the brain drain they are currently experiencing and because of the pressures of organized groups in this country to make it much more difficult for foreign scholars and students to spend time in the US. I fully support President Bush's intention to enforce objective standards for teaching and learning and to insist on annual competency testing for both students and teachers. Currently less than 50% of those teaching mathematics and science in our K-12 educational system have any formal training in either subject. I applaud the President's emphasis on reading and mathematics but science must be included.

Currently averaging across the US we pay more per student for K-12 education than does any other place in the entire world with the possible exception of one or two Cantons in Switzerland. Clearly money is not the problem – nor is it the solution. What we need are more competent and better trained teachers who can respond to objective standards.

The fundamental assumption underlying the proposed 1.6 trillion dollar tax cut is that the American economy in the out-years will remain robust. As noted above in a recent Congressional testimony, Alan Greenspan the Director of the Federal Reserve pointed out that fully 70% of the growth of the American Gross Domestic Product since W.W.II can be directly attributed to the implementation of new technologies. Technology is clearly the driver of our economy and without investment now in the development of new technologies and their underlying science we will simply not have the expected economic growth. A year ago I wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post that was simply titled "No Science No Surplus." This tells it all.

The President has repeatedly promised that our armed forces will in future be equipped with the very latest technology, but it is important to remember that the technology deployed in Desert Storm in the early 1990's that caught the attention of the entire world resulted from investments in science and technology made in the early 1960's. If our forces are to have world-class technology in the 21st century the time to make corresponding investments in science and technology is now.

And lastly, the question of health and medicine. During the recent campaign, Governor Bush, on several occasions, stated his intention to double the funding for the National Institutes of Health over the next 5 years reflecting his understanding of the enormous progress that has been made across the health and medical sciences in the past 5 years. Unfortunately, however, as Harold Varmus the former Nobel laureate director of NIH pointed out repeatedly, much of this progress in the past 5 years has reflected NIH's dependence on breakthrough developments in physics, chemistry, engineering and in many other areas of science. This increased interdependence of all the sciences is a relatively new phenomenon wherein it is impossible to predict in what scientific sub-area the breakthrough will occur that will be of major importance to the life and health sciences. The fact that we have understood more about the human central nervous system in the past 5 years than in all of prior history reflects the existence of nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, of positron emission tomography, the development of specific new target chemicals and the development of entirely new engineered research and clinical medical instrumentation. Clearly if such areas fall behind, within a matter of a few years NIH will no longer be able to call on them for new developments as they have in the past.

So what then does the initial budget that President Bush recently submitted to the Congress have to say on this question. Instead of an overall average of over 9% for federal funding of research and development in this present year the budget calls for an overall 1.4% in 2002. While NIH is slated for a 15% increase, NSF – representing much of physical science and technology, gets cut by 2.6% and the Department of Energy, which supports a major research program throughout the nation is slated for an alarming 7.1% cut.

In part, this reflects the fact that as yet no one has been nominated to serve as the Assistant for Science and Technology to the President – the Science Advisor in short -- and thus no one is present in the current highly centrally focused White House making these fundamental decisions, who is responsible for emphasizing the points raised in the above paragraphs and in my recent op-ed piece in the New York Times entitled Science and Surpluses.

President Bush has also indicated that it is his intention to invest in science and technology in the years ahead at the inflation level as will be the case with NIH, too, once its budget has been doubled at the end of 5 years. Unfortunately, however, the real rate of inflation in research and development is at least twice and probably three times the Consumer Price Index (CPI) which is the normal measure of inflation. This projection, if implemented, will result in a systematic reduction in our national investment in all research and development over the years ahead. This puts our hard-won leadership in science and technology, our national security, our international economic competitiveness, and our quality of life in real jeopardy.

It is up to the scientific and technological communities to make the case that this is an unacceptable future and we are currently reactivating the group of more than 100 professional societies to make this case. In this current fire year the across the board average increase in R&D investment over 1999 was over 9%. As currently scheduled for 2002 it will be 1.4% but this is certainly not the final word since the Congress has yet to act.

WORKING WITH POLITICIANS:

It is important to emphasize that there still is a very real sense in the Congress that we are under-investing in science and technology — and thus in our national future. It is, in fact, the case in the past few years that science has been treated better than almost any other area in the federal budget. Technology, on the other hand, has been slashed — particularly in terms of the hard won cooperation between the federal government and the private sector which has been viewed — I believe quite incorrectly — by recent Republican Congresses as, "corporate welfare."

Unfortunately, during the halcyon days of the immediate postwar period and during the post-Sputnik crash funding program for the universities, American scientists and engineers began to take the support of politicians for granted. Worse, they sometimes came to consider politicians as a lesser breed with whom they preferred not to have to interact — assuming, however, that the dollar flow would, of course, continue. For many years, reflecting Congressional belief in the benefits of the investment in science and technology the flow did continue and we built, in the US, the strongest science and technology enterprise that the world has ever seen. It is still the world’s strongest science and technology enterprise but our leadership — both economic and scientific — is in considerable jeopardy.

Federal support for science and technology constitutes some 20% of the total discretionary budget of the nation and is thus both highly visible and highly vulnerable. Supporters of new political initiatives must find areas that can be cut to liberate resources for the proposed new programs and there we are! Repeatedly, in conversations with senior Representatives and Senators I have been told what an ineffective constituency are the scientists and engineers. If they ever talk to members of the Congress they do so only when they wish to make specific demands on their own behalf, or that of their institutions and thus they lack the trust and credibility that can only come from a long-standing, continuing acquaintance and interaction. Far too few are involved in such interactions. In my own case, for years I met with Robert Giamo, my member of the House of Representatives, for lunch about once a month. We had no agendae, I never asked him — as the first chairman of the House Budget Committee — for anything that would benefit either me or Yale. Over time we developed a sense of mutual trust so that when he had a vote that had technical aspects that he didn’t fully understand he picked up the phone and called me. When I had general concerns about any subject I did not hesitate to call him. He said publicly, on many occasions, how much help this had been to him and it certainly was to me.

While I was President of AAAS I tried very hard to line up at least one scientist or engineer in each Congressional district who would be willing to take the time and make the effort to get to know his or her member of Congress on a continuing, personal basis. I regret to report an almost complete failure; people said that they were too busy!

I can only suggest then that you, as individuals, get to know your politicians before a crisis develops so that when it does — and it will! — you will have the credibility to be an effective constituent.

Difficult and often wrenching decisions lie ahead in the next few years for the entire scientific and technological communities and, in particular, for the research universities. I anticipate, for example, that between 20 and 30% of the graduate programs in the US may well be either terminated or very much refocused on highly applied topics over the next five years. On the other hand, I do not expect that the number of undergraduate programs will change significantly. This reflects a little known demographic statistic that more than 75% of American youths go to college within fifty miles of their homes. This is taken by the Congress as a mandate to provide high quality undergraduate educational programs distributed geographically across the nation. There is no similar mandate for geographic distribution of graduate programs, however, and it has always been recognized that in almost every field of graduate study the top ten universities produce more than 30% of the graduates and the top 20 universities produce substantially more than 50% of the graduates.

PERVASIVE PESSIMISM:

Over the past decade I have been privileged to travel over much of the planet and to talk to leaders in the scientific and technological communities worldwide. After the past fifty years of remarkable progress and new discoveries in field after field I might have expected an air of celebration and self-congratulation but what I find instead is deep pessimism — pessimism about continuing support for their own research, pessimism about attractive careers for their young people, and indeed, pessimism about the future of their national societies wherever they may be. There are grounds for such pessimism I will admit, but on the other hand I remain a confirmed optimist. If I look back over the past fifty years to when I received my first engineering degree in 1948, I recall that at that time television and antibiotics were laboratory curiosities, polio still stalked the summer playgrounds and swimming pools, the DC3 was the backbone of the transportation industry, the transistor had just been invented, portable communication devices were firmly in the domain of Dick Tracy and man in space was pure science fiction. All this has changed — and changed dramatically — in these short fifty years. I believe that you have to be a very pessimistic individual, indeed, not to believe that the discoveries, developments and surprises of the next fifty years will make those of the last fifty pale my comparison.

CONCLUDING REMARKS:

Let me conclude then. While I do see a few difficult years ahead I am extremely optimistic about the future of science and technology in this country and, indeed, in the world. Those of us who have been privileged to call ourselves scientists and engineers have been part of the greatest adventure that is accessible to humans. We have made major contributions to the quality of life of all of us and I am confident that there are many more such developments waiting just over the horizon. One of our major challenges will be to make the improved quality of life that has resulted from scientific and technological developments available to a much larger fraction of the world’s population than now enjoys them. Given today’s global communications, unless we are perceived to be working to reduce the present enormous gap in quality of life between the developed and developing world we face a planet in turmoil.

There are still major problems facing our global civilization. They include, world population growth, hunger, disease, the fear of weapons of mass destruction, destruction of the global environment, and many more. It has become traditional to lay most, if not all, of these problems at the doors of science and technology. But if we look more closely at the situation, we will find, I believe, that in each case the science that we require is already at hand. What we do not understand are the behavioral, economic, and social consequences of the various possible scenarios that science lays out for us, nor, indeed, do we have any agreement on the value system within which some of the most difficult decisions will necessarily be made. To give a single example — modern medical technology has advanced at a remarkable rate to the point where a great many individuals who in the past would simply have died can now be kept not only alive but fully productive. Unfortunately, in some cases the costs can be enormous. I am told, for example, that the son of a very prominent — and wealthy — Senator requires about a third of a million dollars worth of medical care each year to remain a happy and active young man. While his family perhaps can afford this, most cannot and among the most difficult decisions that lie ahead is that of who will receive the medical technology and to whom will it be denied on economic grounds? In Britain they have chosen a very simple path, namely, if you are over sixty, forget it! In my seventies, this approach holds less and less appeal and I become evermore convinced that we have to be able to do better!

Scientists and engineers are typically optimists. They tend to believe that unless they can find some ironclad reason why something cannot be done, then it will be done. Social scientists tend to be pragmatists, prepared to take the world as it comes and not get too excited about it. Humanists I find are typically pessimists. They have studied the human species and I suppose have reasons for pessimism, but they after all are the guardians of our value systems. If we are to have any hope of addressing the kind of global problems that I have just mentioned, then it is absolutely essential — and long overdue — that the natural scientists, the social scientists, and the humanists make common cause and begin to consider jointly how best to address such problems. The only place where such interaction seems feasible is in colleges and universities and, in my opinion, we have long been remiss in going our separate ways in splendid isolation. The time has come when we must face up to what we can and, should, do together. I am confident that any solution will necessarily involve a complex mixture of science, of technology, and of politics and for this to happen we simply must work together much more than we ever have in the past. There will be serious difficulties but the stakes are high and the potential returns enormous.

Dramatic developments are occurring on a rapid pace; we no longer claim to have to worry, or even think about bandwidth, speed, and memory capacity as was the case even a few years ago. On the horizon – but not yet available – are molecular level, self-assembling computers and quantum computers that in thirty seconds – it has been calculated – could solve problems that would take today’s most powerful supercomputer more than 10 billion years. There are major surprises ahead!

Next, the Biotechnology Revolution of the 1990’s — the sixth on my list — is also still in its infancy. So far it has been focused almost entirely on health, and health-related issues but its real power and its real impact will occur not there, but rather in agriculture, in manufacturing, in marine biology, and in fields as remote as solution mining. Here, again, particularly in the use of biotechnology in manufacturing, the focus will be on energy. Instead of using the high temperatures and high pressures that typically drive today’s chemical and other industrial production reactions we will have learned to use nature’s enzymes to carry out these reactions at atmospheric temperature and pressure and with enormous savings in energy.

Biotechnology, from the outset, has been a uniquely American technology reflecting the more than 40 years of generous federal support of fundamental biology research – primarily in the nation’s research universities – that is now beginning to pay off. We came close to losing our unique position through neglect, but I believe that we have – in the past few years – regained it. The very recent announcement of the completion of the mapping of the human genome with its major surprise that we have less than a third of the 100,000 genes long expected in the genome has consequences beyond even our present imagination. The fact that several plants are known to have more than 25,000 genes implies that the old idea that each gene produces one protein is no longer tenable. The greater complexity of the human must reflect differences in the way, and the number of, proteins for which each gene is responsible and this leads to the new scientific and technological field of protenomics.

The seventh of the technological revolutions is – I suppose to be consistent – embryonic but growing very fast. The ability to make devices measured in billionths rather than millionths of a meter opens up a whole new world of nanometrics where quantum mechanics rules. Thus far the emphasis has been on sensing and imaging devices but increasingly the sensor is accompanied on a tiny chip by an automatic data processing unit and a transmitter that communicates with the outside world. It is only a matter of time before such chips are implanted in humans for remote medical diagnosis and care. Laboratories on a chip are becoming commonplace. The question of how to power such chips is a daunting one. In many cases it appears that the electrical voltages already present in the human body are more than adequate for the electrical needs. Mechanical power is even more challenging, but already nanomotors are being fabricated. One interesting one resembles a pinwheel and uses tiny droplets of burning hydrocarbon fuel on its arms to spin the wheel and attached gear trains. The exhaust from such nanomotors is being developed for ultra-precise control of the orientation of spacecraft. What is important to remember here is that hydrocarbon fuels have an energy density more than a factor of ten greater than does any electrical battery yet developed.

ENERGY — THE ULTIMATE RESOURCE:

You will have noted that in all of these revolutions but the first — that of printing — a dominant factor has been the use of energy. Energy is the ultimate resource; with abundant energy we can recycle indefinitely the elements of the earth’s crust for our repeated use; we can fix nitrogen from the atmosphere; we can liberate phosphorus from the rocks and we can have unlimited pure water through desalinization of sea water or pumping from deep aquifers; with all this we can then maintain agricultural economies beyond anything of which we have even dreamed as yet.

This, and a second Green Revolution mentioned earlier may indeed come not a moment too soon. The world population, now 5.7 billion persons, has doubled since the late 1950s. Many demographic experts believe that it will grow to 12.5 billion by 2050 and predict consequent famine, wars and unspeakable suffering.

At the Third U.N. International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo, in 1994, a goal of 7.27 billion was agreed upon for 2015 with eventual stabilization to 7.8 billion by 2050. Unfortunately, there is little confidence – or evidence – that this goal is achievable although what is required is quite generally known: universal education for women and a long-term contraceptive that can be used by women while it remains not detectable by men! Otherwise men will simply prevent its use since the number of children fathered is, in far too much of our world, taken as the measure of manhood.

The creative use of energy is intimately related to our quality of life which is particularly closely coupled to our use of electricity. Here in the United States, for example, our use of total energy has been relatively constant since the oil shortages of 1974 taught us a much needed lesson about conservation. On the other hand, our use of electricity has grown in lockstep with our Gross Domestic Product and worldwide is now considered the best index of quality of life. We, in the United States, represent about 6% of the world’s population and yet we use something over 30% of the world’s total energy. This is not as bad as it may sound. First of all, we are a very large country and more than 40% of our total energy use is in transportation. It is also, true, that over the decades since World War II we have accepted the responsibility for the national security of much of Europe, Japan, Korea, and all of the Americas and a very significant fraction of our energy utilization is tied up in these national security activities.

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS:

Here, again, our science and technology have been intimately involved in aspects of our foreign policy and in our politics. To some degree this, of course, has been true since the founding of our nation. It was Pierre DuPont who, shortly after the founding of the United States, pointed out that, "The only way we can continue to beat the British is through superior manufactures" and in the decades prior to World War II we depended almost entirely on the Europeans for new scientific knowledge and new technologies which we subsequently developed, improved, and used as the basis for our rapidly growing manufacturing output. The resulting burgeoning economy stabilized and protected the new political entity. Effective use of technology gave this nation a jump-start in the global economy.

Of course, until very recently, the Japanese in like fashion since World War II, have turned to us for new scientific and technological developments which they subsequently improved and developed making them, in a few decades, a world-class technological power. The Japanese added a new political twist to the old process of importing science, in the form of a powerful governmental agency, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) that could, and did, set national technological priorities and then coordinated the national efforts, industrial, governmental and academic, to achieve these priorities. They selected the steel industry, the consumer electronics industry and the automobile industry early on as ones where they were determined to become world leaders and they have been remarkably successful. It is interesting to note that in recent years, the Koreans and the other Pacific Tiger nations are using similar approaches to science and technology importation from Japan.

POSTWAR US SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY:

How did we in the United States follow-up on the enormous progress made in both science and technology during the 1940 war years and develop what is universally recognized as the strongest science and technology enterprise that the world has ever seen? Two remarkable men, Emmanuel Piori and Robert Conrad in 1946 in the Office of Naval Research, were given the task of deciding how the federal government could support research in universities without impacting academic freedom, and without destroying the creativity that they hoped to foster. Piori and Conrad came up with three fundamental rules which bear remembering. They were the following:

1) Find the best people in the nation on the basis of peer review.

This was a revolutionary idea and one that President Truman found impossible to accept. He and many others referred to peer review as creating a situation, "where the pigs decided who gets into the trough." Indeed, it was President Truman’s reluctance to accept this idea that held up the formation of the National Science Foundation for over three years. Subsequent experience, however, has fully borne out Piori and Conrad’s wisdom and their faith in peer review.

2) Within the total funds available, support these brightest individuals to do whatever they decide that they want to do. They are much better judges of how best to use their time and talents than is anyone in government.

This, too, was a revolutionary idea and is the basis for the unique American system of developing the federal government’s research program from the bottom up on the basis of proposals submitted by individual scientists and engineers, or small groups of such individuals, to the federal agencies rather than from the top down where someone in Washington decides what needs to be done and then passes that decision down through the agencies to the scientific and technological communities. I regret to say that in the recent Clinton Administration this latter top-down approach grew at what I consider to be a dangerous rate.

3) Leave them alone while they are doing whatever they are doing i.e., minimize reporting and all other paper work.

While no one argues about the need for accountability since after all it is the taxpayer’s money that is being spent, we, from time to time, forget what we are really trying to accomplish; during the Reagan years, for example, a White House Science Council survey of young faculty members in our leading universities, which I co-chaired with David Packard, showed that, on the average, Assistant Professors in the sciences and engineering were spending about 33% of their time writing new proposals or reporting on the results obtained as a result of older ones. This is surely a colossal waste of one of the nation’s most important resource — bright young minds — at a time when they are at their peak of creativity. If anything, this situation has gotten worse in recent years.

THE STRUCTURE OF US FEDERAL FUNDING OF R&D:

The United States is unique in that we have more than twenty federal agencies that support substantial research and development programs in furtherance of their specific missions instead of one single Cabinet level one as is common in most other countries. This I believe, has been one of our greatest sources of strength. We have been able to say over the years that no really good idea has had to wait very long before one or other of our agencies has found it of interest and has been willing to support it, while in single agency situations if that single agency does not like your work or your proposal you are dead!

Obviously, however, with more than twenty agencies involved in research and development there is the potential of inefficiency, of overlaps, and of gaps in the national program in any particular area. Coordination among the agencies is obviously of critical importance and I consider it one of my most successful activities during my tour of duty in Washington that we developed unprecedented communication and cooperation among these federal agencies using the Federal Coordinating Council for Science Engineering and Technology with the perhaps unfortunate acronym FCCSET (pronounced FIX-IT).

Averaging over the two decades from 1980 to 2000, the total US investment in R&D, expressed in 1992 dollars, has been roughly 100 billion per year. In 1980, the federal government and industry each provided roughly half of this total and by 2000, the federal component had shrunk to about a third of the total funding. On average annually over this period about 16 billion went to the roughly 150 research universities, 24 billion to the 726 federal laboratories, and 41 billion to industry – with its 16,000 laboratories spread out over an enormous range of size and quality. In 1980, about 75% of this federal funding was channeled through the Defense Department, but by 2000, this had decreased to something like 45% and the downward trend continues.

PRESIDENTIAL INITIATIVES:

Shortly after I arrived in Washington, President Bush asked me to suggest some 5 or 6 areas of major national scientific and technical importance to which he could give his personal support using the bully pulpit of the Presidency. To select these areas I turned to the FCCSET. The areas selected were mathematics and science education without which all other initiatives were doomed, high performance computing and communication which we felt were critical to the entire scientific and technical enterprises of the nation, global climate change which had risen to the top of the political agendae in nations around the world, material science and technology since almost everything that we do ultimately depends on the characteristics of some critical material or other, biotechnology because we believed that we were just beginning to see the fruits of generous funding of fundamental biology in the nation’s universities and advanced manufacturing because we recognized that we had lost the vital lead in manufacturing technology that we had enjoyed for so many decades.

Because these were identified as Presidential Initiatives and because we were able to pull together tightly coordinated national programs rather than heterogeneous collections of agency programs in each of these areas, the Congress was prepared to grant between 20 and 40% annual funding increases and we were able to move these areas ahead rapidly.

What we had in the Bush Administration, for the first time, was, in effect, a two-tiered system of federal funding. By far the greatest part of each agency’s program was built from the bottom up as in the past on the basis of proposals received in a continuing stream from across the nation. On top of that we had the six Presidential Initiatives where the activities of the federal agencies were closely coordinated and carefully planned for five years into the future. The reports of the individual multi-agency committees that developed these national programs were submitted to the Congress as addenda to the President’s Budget each year and subsequently we learned that they were translated into French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Chinese and, perhaps, other languages because they were considered to be models of governmental planning for science and technology.

US TECHNOLOGY POLICY:

The second general area of which I am most proud from my watch in the White House was that of industrial technology, where in, 1990, for the first time, we published a formal statement of US technology policy and, subsequently — following a number of Presidential talks on the subject — made it politically acceptable for the federal government to work with the private sector in the development of generic technologies just as it did in basic research. The reason, of course, was precisely the same as that for basic research, in that, by the very nature of the activity it was impossible to predict when, where, or to whom the benefits would flow and, therefore, impossible for any individual or institution to justify sufficient investment to make the activity competitive in international terms. Only the federal government can make such investments.

Our investments in the development of technology and of the underlying science have long been recognized as having a substantial payoff but only relatively recently have economists come up with actual numbers. Their results were typified in a recent speech by Alan Greenspan, the Director of the Federal Reserve, who noted that more than 70% of the growth of the US Gross Domestic Product in the last half century could be attributed directly to the exploitation of new technologies. This is a remarkable return on investment!

THE BUSH-CLINTON TRANSITION:

Before they were elected, Clinton and Gore expressed strong support for the FCCSET approach, for the federal involvement in the development of generic technologies, and, specifically, for the programs that we had in place. Unfortunately, the realities of politics, where no administration really likes to admit to supporting programs originated by an administration of the other party, meant that after a few months the Bush Presidential Initiatives in material science, in biotechnology, and in advanced manufacturing were all cancelled as was the Federal Coordinating Council itself. It was replaced by the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) chaired by the President, which clearly was a positive move since FCCSET had been chaired by the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology — me. Unfortunately, however, President Clinton found it possible to meet only once with his Council and then for only fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, the cooperation, coordination, and communication among the agencies has largely decayed and as I mentioned, previously, there has been a definite trend toward top-down construction of the Clinton-Gore budgets. I am convinced, that no small White House group, no matter how skilled, can in the long run successfully replace the collective wisdom of the entire scientific and technical community in this country. It is my hope that the second Bush Administration will return to the FCCSET two tiered approach.

What then is the present outlook? Back in 1996, the American Association for the Advancement of Science issued a scary prediction to the effect that federal support of R&D would decline by 25-30% in the period from 1997 to 2001 a decrease that would have wrecked a great number of important programs across all sciences and engineering.

As President of the American Physical Society in 1997, and working closely with chemists, astronomers, and mathematicians, although it was like herding cats, we organized 110 professional societies representing about 3.5 million members and were able to put together a coherent case that a 7% increase was required in going from 1996 to 1997 to restore a proper level of investment. When the smoke of Congressional battle cleared, we did indeed have 7% increases across the board and this held during 1998 and 1999, but dropped back to about 0% in 2000 activating the society group again. Because of its actions, a lame duck President, and of course because of the growing federal surplus – science and technology fared remarkably well in 2001 with an across the board average annual increase of over 9%.

THE CURRENT SITUATION:

Let me now turn to the present situation involving science, technology, and politics. While the details are not yet clear for the years ahead, the general outline is available. As I have mentioned previously, for a number of reasons peculiar to this particular year, the Clinton Administration and the Congress found themselves in a position where – on the basis of a whole series of frequently conflicting reasons – they appropriated a record increase in the proposed R&D funding of something over 9% across the board. This was clearly an anomaly but the scientific and technical communities assumed that it was the indicator of better days ahead where they could expect large annual increases – perhaps not as much as 9% on average – but still substantial. It was clear from the outset that this was not a sustainable assumption because it would soon eat up the discretionary component of the US budget, but the new Administration of President George W. Bush has made this very clear.

In his recent report to a joint session of Congress on his proposed budget, President Bush addressed four major areas: education, the tax-cut, the military and heath care. I strongly support his initiatives in these areas however, I am very deeply concerned that the critical role that will necessarily be played by science and technology has been downplayed or forgotten and that the necessary investments are not being planned for in the years ahead. Let me discuss each of these areas in turn.

Our goal in education is clearly to prepare a workforce in America appropriate to the 21st century – a workforce that will be at home with modern technology and the underlying science. Unfortunately however, although our students do relatively well compared with the rest of the developed world at grade 4, by grade 8 they have fallen substantially behind and by grade 12 in mathematics they are second from the last of 22 nations and in physics they are the last. In American K-12 education we are wasting between 2 and 3 years of each student's time – a wastage that we can no longer afford if we ever could because the foreign scholars and students upon whom we have relied to fill the gaps in our economy will in the future be much less available, both because of recognition in their home countries of the importance of the brain drain they are currently experiencing and because of the pressures of organized groups in this country to make it much more difficult for foreign scholars and students to spend time in the US. I fully support President Bush's intention to enforce objective standards for teaching and learning and to insist on annual competency testing for both students and teachers. Currently less than 50% of those teaching mathematics and science in our K-12 educational system have any formal training in either subject. I applaud the President's emphasis on reading and mathematics but science must be included.

Currently averaging across the US we pay more per student for K-12 education than does any other place in the entire world with the possible exception of one or two Cantons in Switzerland. Clearly money is not the problem – nor is it the solution. What we need are more competent and better trained teachers who can respond to objective standards.

The fundamental assumption underlying the proposed 1.6 trillion dollar tax cut is that the American economy in the out-years will remain robust. As noted above in a recent Congressional testimony, Alan Greenspan the Director of the Federal Reserve pointed out that fully 70% of the growth of the American Gross Domestic Product since W.W.II can be directly attributed to the implementation of new technologies. Technology is clearly the driver of our economy and without investment now in the development of new technologies and their underlying science we will simply not have the expected economic growth. A year ago I wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post that was simply titled "No Science No Surplus." This tells it all.

The President has repeatedly promised that our armed forces will in future be equipped with the very latest technology, but it is important to remember that the technology deployed in Desert Storm in the early 1990's that caught the attention of the entire world resulted from investments in science and technology made in the early 1960's. If our forces are to have world-class technology in the 21st century the time to make corresponding investments in science and technology is now.

And lastly, the question of health and medicine. During the recent campaign, Governor Bush, on several occasions, stated his intention to double the funding for the National Institutes of Health over the next 5 years reflecting his understanding of the enormous progress that has been made across the health and medical sciences in the past 5 years. Unfortunately, however, as Harold Varmus the former Nobel laureate director of NIH pointed out repeatedly, much of this progress in the past 5 years has reflected NIH's dependence on breakthrough developments in physics, chemistry, engineering and in many other areas of science. This increased interdependence of all the sciences is a relatively new phenomenon wherein it is impossible to predict in what scientific sub-area the breakthrough will occur that will be of major importance to the life and health sciences. The fact that we have understood more about the human central nervous system in the past 5 years than in all of prior history reflects the existence of nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, of positron emission tomography, the development of specific new target chemicals and the development of entirely new engineered research and clinical medical instrumentation. Clearly if such areas fall behind, within a matter of a few years NIH will no longer be able to call on them for new developments as they have in the past.

So what then does the initial budget that President Bush recently submitted to the Congress have to say on this question. Instead of an overall average of over 9% for federal funding of research and development in this present year the budget calls for an overall 1.4% in 2002. While NIH is slated for a 15% increase, NSF – representing much of physical science and technology, gets cut by 2.6% and the Department of Energy, which supports a major research program throughout the nation is slated for an alarming 7.1% cut.

In part, this reflects the fact that as yet no one has been nominated to serve as the Assistant for Science and Technology to the President – the Science Advisor in short -- and thus no one is present in the current highly centrally focused White House making these fundamental decisions, who is responsible for emphasizing the points raised in the above paragraphs and in my recent op-ed piece in the New York Times entitled Science and Surpluses.

President Bush has also indicated that it is his intention to invest in science and technology in the years ahead at the inflation level as will be the case with NIH, too, once its budget has been doubled at the end of 5 years. Unfortunately, however, the real rate of inflation in research and development is at least twice and probably three times the Consumer Price Index (CPI) which is the normal measure of inflation. This projection, if implemented, will result in a systematic reduction in our national investment in all research and development over the years ahead. This puts our hard-won leadership in science and technology, our national security, our international economic competitiveness, and our quality of life in real jeopardy.

It is up to the scientific and technological communities to make the case that this is an unacceptable future and we are currently reactivating the group of more than 100 professional societies to make this case. In this current fire year the across the board average increase in R&D investment over 1999 was over 9%. As currently scheduled for 2002 it will be 1.4% but this is certainly not the final word since the Congress has yet to act.

WORKING WITH POLITICIANS:

It is important to emphasize that there still is a very real sense in the Congress that we are under-investing in science and technology — and thus in our national future. It is, in fact, the case in the past few years that science has been treated better than almost any other area in the federal budget. Technology, on the other hand, has been slashed — particularly in terms of the hard won cooperation between the federal government and the private sector which has been viewed — I believe quite incorrectly — by recent Republican Congresses as, "corporate welfare."

Unfortunately, during the halcyon days of the immediate postwar period and during the post-Sputnik crash funding program for the universities, American scientists and engineers began to take the support of politicians for granted. Worse, they sometimes came to consider politicians as a lesser breed with whom they preferred not to have to interact — assuming, however, that the dollar flow would, of course, continue. For many years, reflecting Congressional belief in the benefits of the investment in science and technology the flow did continue and we built, in the US, the strongest science and technology enterprise that the world has ever seen. It is still the world’s strongest science and technology enterprise but our leadership — both economic and scientific — is in considerable jeopardy.

Federal support for science and technology constitutes some 20% of the total discretionary budget of the nation and is thus both highly visible and highly vulnerable. Supporters of new political initiatives must find areas that can be cut to liberate resources for the proposed new programs and there we are! Repeatedly, in conversations with senior Representatives and Senators I have been told what an ineffective constituency are the scientists and engineers. If they ever talk to members of the Congress they do so only when they wish to make specific demands on their own behalf, or that of their institutions and thus they lack the trust and credibility that can only come from a long-standing, continuing acquaintance and interaction. Far too few are involved in such interactions. In my own case, for years I met with Robert Giamo, my member of the House of Representatives, for lunch about once a month. We had no agendae, I never asked him — as the first chairman of the House Budget Committee — for anything that would benefit either me or Yale. Over time we developed a sense of mutual trust so that when he had a vote that had technical aspects that he didn’t fully understand he picked up the phone and called me. When I had general concerns about any subject I did not hesitate to call him. He said publicly, on many occasions, how much help this had been to him and it certainly was to me.

While I was President of AAAS I tried very hard to line up at least one scientist or engineer in each Congressional district who would be willing to take the time and make the effort to get to know his or her member of Congress on a continuing, personal basis. I regret to report an almost complete failure; people said that they were too busy!

I can only suggest then that you, as individuals, get to know your politicians before a crisis develops so that when it does — and it will! — you will have the credibility to be an effective constituent.

Difficult and often wrenching decisions lie ahead in the next few years for the entire scientific and technological communities and, in particular, for the research universities. I anticipate, for example, that between 20 and 30% of the graduate programs in the US may well be either terminated or very much refocused on highly applied topics over the next five years. On the other hand, I do not expect that the number of undergraduate programs will change significantly. This reflects a little known demographic statistic that more than 75% of American youths go to college within fifty miles of their homes. This is taken by the Congress as a mandate to provide high quality undergraduate educational programs distributed geographically across the nation. There is no similar mandate for geographic distribution of graduate programs, however, and it has always been recognized that in almost every field of graduate study the top ten universities produce more than 30% of the graduates and the top 20 universities produce substantially more than 50% of the graduates.

PERVASIVE PESSIMISM:

Over the past decade I have been privileged to travel over much of the planet and to talk to leaders in the scientific and technological communities worldwide. After the past fifty years of remarkable progress and new discoveries in field after field I might have expected an air of celebration and self-congratulation but what I find instead is deep pessimism — pessimism about continuing support for their own research, pessimism about attractive careers for their young people, and indeed, pessimism about the future of their national societies wherever they may be. There are grounds for such pessimism I will admit, but on the other hand I remain a confirmed optimist. If I look back over the past fifty years to when I received my first engineering degree in 1948, I recall that at that time television and antibiotics were laboratory curiosities, polio still stalked the summer playgrounds and swimming pools, the DC3 was the backbone of the transportation industry, the transistor had just been invented, portable communication devices were firmly in the domain of Dick Tracy and man in space was pure science fiction. All this has changed — and changed dramatically — in these short fifty years. I believe that you have to be a very pessimistic individual, indeed, not to believe that the discoveries, developments and surprises of the next fifty years will make those of the last fifty pale my comparison.

CONCLUDING REMARKS:

Let me conclude then. While I do see a few difficult years ahead I am extremely optimistic about the future of science and technology in this country and, indeed, in the world. Those of us who have been privileged to call ourselves scientists and engineers have been part of the greatest adventure that is accessible to humans. We have made major contributions to the quality of life of all of us and I am confident that there are many more such developments waiting just over the horizon. One of our major challenges will be to make the improved quality of life that has resulted from scientific and technological developments available to a much larger fraction of the world’s population than now enjoys them. Given today’s global communications, unless we are perceived to be working to reduce the present enormous gap in quality of life between the developed and developing world we face a planet in turmoil.

There are still major problems facing our global civilization. They include, world population growth, hunger, disease, the fear of weapons of mass destruction, destruction of the global environment, and many more. It has become traditional to lay most, if not all, of these problems at the doors of science and technology. But if we look more closely at the situation, we will find, I believe, that in each case the science that we require is already at hand. What we do not understand are the behavioral, economic, and social consequences of the various possible scenarios that science lays out for us, nor, indeed, do we have any agreement on the value system within which some of the most difficult decisions will necessarily be made. To give a single example — modern medical technology has advanced at a remarkable rate to the point where a great many individuals who in the past would simply have died can now be kept not only alive but fully productive. Unfortunately, in some cases the costs can be enormous. I am told, for example, that the son of a very prominent — and wealthy — Senator requires about a third of a million dollars worth of medical care each year to remain a happy and active young man. While his family perhaps can afford this, most cannot and among the most difficult decisions that lie ahead is that of who will receive the medical technology and to whom will it be denied on economic grounds? In Britain they have chosen a very simple path, namely, if you are over sixty, forget it! In my seventies, this approach holds less and less appeal and I become evermore convinced that we have to be able to do better!

Scientists and engineers are typically optimists. They tend to believe that unless they can find some ironclad reason why something cannot be done, then it will be done. Social scientists tend to be pragmatists, prepared to take the world as it comes and not get too excited about it. Humanists I find are typically pessimists. They have studied the human species and I suppose have reasons for pessimism, but they after all are the guardians of our value systems. If we are to have any hope of addressing the kind of global problems that I have just mentioned, then it is absolutely essential — and long overdue — that the natural scientists, the social scientists, and the humanists make common cause and begin to consider jointly how best to address such problems. The only place where such interaction seems feasible is in colleges and universities and, in my opinion, we have long been remiss in going our separate ways in splendid isolation. The time has come when we must face up to what we can and, should, do together. I am confident that any solution will necessarily involve a complex mixture of science, of technology, and of politics and for this to happen we simply must work together much more than we ever have in the past. There will be serious difficulties but the stakes are high and the potential returns enormous.

Obituary...The New York Times:

February 13, 2005

D. Allan Bromley, a Yale University professor, nuclear physicist and architect of national science policy during the administration of President George H. W. Bush, died here on Thursday. He was 79.

The cause was a heart attack shortly after teaching a class, a Yale spokeswoman said.

As the first President Bush's top science adviser from 1989 to 1993, Dr. Bromley pushed for sizable increases in money for scientific research in a race to keep United States manufacturing ahead of Japan's and Germany's.

He supported the expansion of the high-speed network that became the Internet, and, after years of questioning the science behind global warming, he was credited with ultimately persuading Mr. Bush to attend a summit on the issue.

Serving as the president's science and technology adviser and as chairman of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Dr. Bromley was seen as one of the most influential science advisers ever.

John H. Sununu, Mr. Bush's former chief of staff, said on Friday: "He gave the president his best advice rather directly. That made him a superb adviser on hard issues."

Dr. Bromley was an early champion of what he called the "data superhighway," which later became the Internet. "Ten years from now," he said in 1991, "I'd like it to be widely available and looked upon like the telephone network."

Mr. Sununu said that Dr. Bromley "understood its value" both for global communication and exchanging information.

Dr. Bromley was born in Westmeath, Ontario. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees at Queen's University in Ontario, and a doctorate from the University of Rochester in 1952.

He was the founder of the A. W. Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory at Yale, and its director from 1963 to 1989. His field of study was the structure and dynamics of atomic nuclei. In 1988, he received the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest scientific award.

Dr. Bromley's first wife, Patricia, died. He is survived by his wife, Dr. Victoria Sutton; a son, David; a daughter, Lynn; two stepchildren, Summer Stephanie Sutton and Remington John Sutton; a sister, Dawn Anderson; a brother, John W. Bromley; and three grandchildren.

Dr. Bromley became a United States citizen in 1970 under unusual circumstances. "I had been shown the deepest, darkest secret known in the United States out at the Weapons Flats in Nevada," he recalled in a 1992 interview with The Toronto Star. "And just about the time it was all finished, someone said, 'Oh my God, Bromley is not a citizen.' "

A judge was dispatched, Dr. Bromley said, and he was quickly sworn in.


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