AIP FYI #23: A View from the White House: Marburger on S&T Funding

OSTP Director John Marburger’s remarks at the recent AAAS
meeting provided important insights into the Bush
Administration’s thinking on basic research, nanotechnology,
funding priorities, management, and the rationale for the
funding of physical sciences. Selections from his remarks
follow:

“Important things are happening in science no less than in
world affairs, and the policies guiding the allocation of
resources for science, engineering, and education are evolving
too.”

“. . . there is no doubt that this [FY 2003] budget [request]
expresses priorities. It provides substantial new funding for
science, and it acknowledges that the nation’s highest
priorities — the war against terrorism, homeland security,
and economic revival — are all served by investments in
science, engineering, and education.”

“This is one of the imperatives of science — that exploration
at the frontier entails advances in technology — and it is
also a powerful and pragmatic argument for supporting basic
science. Many of us were drawn to science by the urge to
know. Society supports us because that urge is even more
productive for the improvement of the human condition than are
the immediate necessities that are often said to be the mother
of invention. The spin-offs of basic science are
fundamentally new technologies that never would have been
discovered solely in response to the needs they ultimately
address. Think of the laser, of nuclear fission, or even of
molecular biology, whose origins derive from a whole array of
technologies developed for other purposes.

“Today the frontiers of the large and the small — of
astronomy and particle physics remain unconquered. But they
have receded so far from the world of human action that the
details of their phenomena are no longer very relevant to
practical affairs. Not by accident, the instrumentation
required to explore them has become expensive. Because we can
no longer expect that society will benefit materially from the
phenomena we discover in these remote hinterlands, the
justification for funding these fields rests entirely on the
usefulness of the technology needed for the quest, and on the
joy we experience in simply knowing how nature works. (A joy,
I am afraid, that is shared fully by a rapidly declining
fraction of the population.)

“I believe society will continue to support the exploration of
the traditional frontiers of large and small, but it will do
so with increasing insistence on careful planning, careful
management, and the widest possible sharing of costs for the
necessarily expensive equipment. Fortunately, these fields
today do possess excellent planning processes, and for the
most part the great accelerators and telescopes have been well
built and well managed.

“But the greatest opportunities in science today are not to be
found at these remote frontiers. The inexorable ratcheting
advance of technology and conceptual tools have brought
science to a new and previously inaccessible frontier. It
seems to me — and I am not the first to point this out —
that we are in the early stage of a revolution in science
nearly as profound as the one that occurred early in the last
century with the birth of quantum mechanics.”

“This revolution is caused by two developments: one is the set
of instruments such as electron microscopy, synchrotron x-ray
sources, lasers, scanning microscopy, and nuclear magnetic
resonance devices; the other is the availability of powerful
computing and information technology. Together these have
brought science finally within reach of a new frontier, the
frontier of complexity. . . .”

“Let me return now to the realm of science policy. The
picture of science I have portrayed — and I am aware that it
is only part of science, but an important part — has
immediate implications and challenges for science policy.

“First, there is the need to fund the enabling machinery for
exploring the frontier of complexity. Some of this machinery
is expensive, such as the great x-ray sources operated by the
Department of Energy, or the Spallation Neutron Source. Even
the computing power required at the frontier is expensive and
not yet widely available to investigators. The continuing
priority given in the President’s budget to information
technology is therefore well justified. Not only does
information technology directly enhance the economy through
commercial products, it is also of fundamental importance for
the extraordinary new control of matter at the atomic level. .
. .”

“Second is the desirability of funding research in the fields
that benefit from the atomic level visualization and control
of functional matter. They fall into the two categories of
organic and inorganic. We call them biotechnology and
nanotechnology. I like to think of biotechnology as organic
nanotechnology. If the term ‘nanotechnology’ seems vague and
ill-defined, then think of the phenomena it describes as the
inorganic counterpart of biotechnology, a term that is no
better defined, but has the merit of having been in longer
use. Both areas receive priority in the President’s budget.

“Many people have asked me whether I think the huge
investments advocated in the budget for medical research will
distort or unbalance the pattern of funding for science.
Those concerned refer to a balance that must be re-established
between the life sciences and the physical sciences. I think
on the contrary that the opening of the frontier of complexity
creates far more opportunities in the life sciences, and that
given the new atomic-level capabilities the life sciences may
still be underfunded relative to the physical sciences. But I
do agree that new opportunities exist also for inorganic
functional materials, and these need to be exploited. And of
course the enabling instrumentation is largely a product of
physical science and engineering research, and these too
deserve continuing priority.

“Third, there is the very serious problem of the inadequacy of
resources to exploit all the new opportunities that now lie
before us along the vast frontier of complexity. The richness
of possibility is immense, and we simply cannot afford to
explore it all at once. Choices must be made. Not only must
we choose among the new opportunities in bio- and nano-
technology, but we must also choose between these and
expanding investments at the traditional frontiers of large
and small — or more generally between the issue-oriented
sciences that clearly address societal needs, and the
discovery-oriented sciences whose consequences are more a
matter of conjecture. We need both, but how much of either?

“The need for choice, and for wise allocation of resources to
seize the most advantage for society from our leadership in
these fields, is a strong motivation for better planning and
management of the nation’s science enterprise. The
President’s budget makes much of management, and proposes many
measures that are not designed particularly to save money so
much as to optimize its impact. I am referring to proposals
to transfer programs among agencies, to reward agencies and
programs that can document the success of their projects, to
find ways of making clear and explicit the basis for
investment in one program rather than another. Even the
horror expressed in the budget narrative at the long-standing
but rapidly growing practice of congressional earmarks for
science projects is consistent with the idea that the growth
in opportunity requires better decision making.

“I support these science management initiatives because I
believe they are essential to reassure the public — our
ultimate sponsors — that the ever increasing investment in
science is being made wisely. This is particularly true for
the physical sciences whose long run of support during the
Cold War was linked, correctly or not, to national security
concerns. Although the relevance of physics to national
security is no less now than then, the end of the Cold War
brought with it a reassessment of the rationale for funding
physical science, especially at the national laboratories.
This reassessment has left society more skeptical about the
national security argument, and agencies that support this
work, particularly the Department of Energy, are working hard
to clarify missions and provide strong rationales for their
work. The President’s budget features a management pilot
program at DOE that takes advantage of the wide range of
research conducted in this agency.

“At the dawn of the new millennium, public expectations ofó}•ÿ0Ascience are high, and public support for science is strong.
Science policy needs to reflect the actual state of science,
and its capacity for addressing the needs of society. One
requires continual contact with the scientists who lead the
work, the other depends upon the processes of government to
frame key social issues. The Office of Science and Technology
Policy stands at the strategic intersection of science and
government. I am grateful for this opportunity to give my
perspective on this critical juncture.”

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Richard M .Jones

Media and Government Relations Division

The American Institute of Physics

fyi@aip.org

(301) 209-3095

http://www.aip.org/gov

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