John Marburger’s Comments on “Science Based Science Policy” at the Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Last year I addressed
an AAAS symposium on “The War on Terrorism: What Does it Mean for Science?”
(December 18) I made some predictions then about the future of science
in the current Bush administration, and remarked on the state of science,
but the talk focused on the war against terrorism. This morning I
would like to expand on these remarks in the context of the President’s
budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2003, released last week. 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. It is my great privilege to serve
science during this time of change, and this meeting where all the sciences
come together is a good occasion to report my perceptions of these policies
and the assumptions that underlie them. Let me restate some remarks
I made last December that have been widely quoted:

“This administration is determined
not to let terrorism deflect America from its trajectory of world leadership
in science. Our nation’s prowess in technology, especially information
technology and instrumentation, have opened extraordinary new vistas in
science. It has made it possible to visualize and manipulate matter
on the atomic scale, leading to unprecedented understanding and control
of the processes of life as well as of inanimate matter. Having produced
the means for great strides in science, and in accompanying technologies
for improved health care, economic competitiveness, and quality of life,
it would be foolish to turn aside now from the course of discovery while
we engage the monster of terrorism — an evil force that denies the benefits
of progress and the search for truth. Thus I expect that science
in America and the world will forge ahead relatively unaffected by the
war against terrorism. I expect the President’s prior commitment
to increase funding for health related research to be realized. I
expect the tremendous momentum in the information sciences to roll forward.
I expect the technologies of measurement and analysis — atomic scale microscopy
and manipulation, light sources, probes, detectors and analyzers — to
continue to win new ground on the frontiers of complexity as well as of
scale. Science has its own intrinsic imperative and this nation will
continue to pursue it.”

The President’s FY03 budget proposal
provides some data points to test these expectations. It does add
nearly $4 billion to the budget of the National Institutes of Health.
It does favor research in computing and information technology, and it
favors as well the collection of activities we are calling nanotechnology.
I will mention some numbers in a moment, but there is no doubt that this
budget 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.

As a university president and national
laboratory director, I wrestled with the reality of annual budgets, and
I deplored the processes that left funding gaps in research programs that
were demonstrably productive. I am well aware that improvements “on
the average” are usually achieved by peaks of prosperity in a landscape
that includes valleys of poverty. That is inevitable whenever opportunities
exceed resources. It is desirable when the opportunities differ in
their promise. Having a science policy at all implies that we have
a systematic way of ordering the opportunities so finite resources can
be invested to best effect.

As a scientist, I believe science
policy should reflect what I referred to as the “intrinsic imperative of
science.” Let me explain. Galileo and Hooke launched the first
generation of instruments for extending our senses to perceive the very
large and the very small. They crafted their instruments at a time
when powerful conceptual tools of theory and analysis also began to appear,
exemplified by the work of Isaac Newton. During the centuries since
that dawn of modern science, the frontiers of discovery have been defined
by the limits of technology.

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.

The quantum technologies of the chemistry
and physics of atoms, molecules, and materials developed rapidly through
several generations during the Cold War. By 1991, when the Soviet
Union finally dissolved, scientists were beginning to wield instruments
that permitted the visualization of relatively large scale functional structures
in terms of their constituent atoms. The importance of this development
cannot be over-stated. The atom-by-atom understanding of functional
matter requires not only exquisite instrumentation, but also the capacity
to capture, store, and manipulate vast amounts of data. The result
is an unprecedented ability to design and construct new materials with
properties that are not found in nature.

The revolution I am describing is
one in which the notion that everything is made of atoms finally becomes
operational. For the first time we have tools that give an edge to
this sweeping reductionist vision. We can actually see how the machinery
of life functions, atom-by-atom. We can actually build atomic scale
structures that interact with biological or inorganic systems and alter
their functions. We can design new tiny objects “from scratch” that
have unprecedented optical, mechanical, electrical, chemical, or biological
properties that address needs of human society.   I need not
give specific examples here because this conference is filled with them.
Their images are ubiquitous in newspapers and magazines, and the application
of our knowledge of them appear not only in technical journals, but also
in the Wall Street journal.

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. Many
fields of science converge at this frontier because most of the objects
of science are made of atoms. Although complex phenomena occur in
nuclear and particle physics — think of the intricate tracery of collisions
imaged by the great detectors of modern particle accelerators — and in
astrophysics, nothing in these fields approaches the complexity of living
organisms. And yet we are now beginning to unravel the structures
of life, atom-by-atom using sensitive machinery under the capacious purview
of powerful computing.

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. The reason, of course,
is that any physical or biological system large enough to perform a function
of human interest is going to be made of a colossal number of atoms.
The computing power is needed to keep track of all the types and positions
of the atoms, estimate how they will move under various conditions, and
produce a visual representation of all these images that the human mind
can grasp.

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 of science 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.