Donald Kennedy On Fund Raising, Federal Aid and Scientific Fraud

Donald Kennedy’s career as biologist, educator and administrator reflects his belief that scientists and other academics should speak out on public policy issues and conskier devoting some time to public service. As a result, his views on science, education, federal regulation and related topics have received wide circulation, whether he was speaking as a White House consultant, U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner or in his current position as president of Stanford University. Kennedy was born in New York City and educated at Harvard University receiving a Ph.D. in neurophysiology in 1956. After a stint as a biology teacher and researcher at Syracuse University he moved to Stanford as an assistant professor of biology in 1960, and live years later was named chairman of its Biological Sciences Department. His interest in policy issues relating to food, nutrition and life sciences led to his appointment as a consultant to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in 1976. The following year, Kennedy was appointed head of the FDA, which was in disarray when he took office in April. He is widely credited with restoring credibility and boosting morale at the agency though many of his initiatives, including controversial efforts to ban saccharin and fluorocarbon sprays and update pharmaceutical laws, were blocked by Congress. Kennedy returned to Stanford as provost in 1979, and in 1980 was selected to succeed Richard Lyman as- university president. In various public forums he has championed continued federal support for higher education, has opposed Defense Department efforts to restrict publication of unclassified research data and has advised caution regarding commercial sponsorship of basic academic research. Kennedy was interviewed June 24 in Washington by Tabitha M. Powledge, editor of THE SCIENTIST. This is an edited version of their talk. Q: Earlier this year Stanford announced what’s said to be the largest fund drive in the history of higher education. Could you describe its goals and timetable? KENNEDY: We have about $570 million in priority goals. If you add that to what over a five-year stretch we raise now for ongoing purposes, it totals $1.1 billion. Q: Priority goals? KENNEDY: Those are goals we’ve identified as especially important to the core purposes of the institution. They’re really the primary targets of the campaign. Q: Are these bricks-and-mortar kinds of expenses? KENNEDY: There’s some of everything, but a very large piece of what we’re trying to do is a bricks-and-mortar objective having to do with science. If you look at the professorships and that sort of thing, our biggest people needs tend to be concentrated in the humanities and social sciences. But the physical facilities needs are heavily concentrated in the sciences, as you might expect. We’re going to need to raise about $180 million for what amounts to a regional renewal plan for the science area of our campus. We’ve got eight departments and three independent laboratories that really need rehousing. They are largely in cinderblock structures built during the heyday of conversion from World War II. Remarkably good science is still being done in them, but the time in which that continues to be possible is running out. It will be a real renewal project on a piece of the campus, west of the main quadrangle, that is occupied now by departments like electrical engineering, applied physics and so forth. CAPITAL FUND DRIVE PROGRESS Q: What’s the timetable? KENNEDY: The campaign lasts through 1991. We expect that the facilities construction and reconstruction for what I just described, which has already begun, will be basically a 10-year program; we expect it to be completed in 1995 or 1996. A second phase projected for after that is not being funded in the current campaign. Q: How far along are you toward your goals? KENNEDY: We’ve built one building, which is an important keystone because it makes a number of the other moves possible; it takes overflow. Architectural design on the second building, which will be a third biology building for us, is completed and we have it mostly funded. We have some foundation gifts toward other buildings. I would say that we’re a little better than a third of the way along toward the capital facility part of our plan and about a third of the way on all objectives. Of course, as far as facilities are concerned, this is an area that until about 1968 was helped a great deal by government assistance. The shortfall we have is due partly to the fact that the federal government has been absent from the facilities picture for 20 years. But during the postwar period all universities emphasized things other than facilities as fund-raising objectives. I think that’s had an effect on donor behavior. If you look at the last 10 or 12 fund-raising campaigns in major private research universities, they’ve met their aggregate goals, more than met them, but they’ve only met about twothirds of their facilities goals. It’s the hard- est dollar in university fund-raising today. Q: Is the federal government’s lack of interest in buildings a permanent condition? Do universities just have to make up their minds to raise that money here? KENNEDY: They have had to do that. We’ve done it successfully for several projects in the biomedical area. We constructed a cardiovascular research building and we’re now constructing a center for molecular and genetic medicine entirely on private funds. But no single university can do it in all areas, and certainly universities in the aggregate can’t hope to do it. The government has to get into that kind of support. Otherwise we’re going to find ourselves in a situation in which program support, which has held up reasonably well, suddenly has no infrastructure to go into. We’re very encouraged by the fact that more and more people are paying attention to the problem. It really is something that people are talking about again. That pleases me a lot, because Iwas one of the people who started yelling about it three or four years ago. I think that we are now getting some serious attention. STUDENT AID Q: The federal government has also been reducing its contribution to student aid. Is that on the way to privatization? KENNEDY: For us you’d have to say it’s already there. We spent $30 million last year in direct undergraduate financial aid and the federal government picked up less than $2 million of that. Government loan funds are still important and useful, and the modest amount of fellowship and scholarship aid that we get at the undergraduate level is much appreciated, but it’s no longer really a significant item in our total budget. At the graduate level, of course, the story is different. There federal aid is really important, especially in the form of traineesbips and fellowships in the sciences, where the government is playing a very significant role. Q: You’ve suggested that you don’t see any reason why social security and Medicare should be an entitlement available to everybody, while student aid is available only to those who undergo a means test. You’ve also argued that if social security is indexed to inflation, student aid should be, too. Do you see any realistic hope that that situation is going to change? KENNEDY: I have tried to call to people’s attention that, by and large, the social entitlement programs for the elderly in this society both indexed and not means-tested, whereas exactly the reverse is true of the payments made to our young people whom we’re trying to encourage into professional roles that this society desperately needs. I think that as we come to grapple with the federal budget deficit we’re going to reach the conclusion—at least I hope we will— that there has to be a combined solution, and that it has to involve reductions in the rate of increase for defense spending, or willingness to employ revenue-enhancing measures such as tax increases, and a willingness to think over once again the means-testing of entitlements. There isn’t any reason why a society that is pressing itself hard to cut back on terribly important social programs for the poor and to support research on which our national future as an innovative and productive country depends should not at least consider the savings available by means-testing these entitlement programs. SUPPORT FOR THE HUMANITIES Q: When you became president of Stanford, you told The New York Times that we have to try in the 1980, to get the humanities where the sciences have gotten. Can you expand on what you meant? KENNEDY: I meant that particularly with regard to Stanford, which is an institution that’s enjoyed a fabulous growth rate in terms of quality improvement in the sciences, and conspicuous improvement in the humanities. But the difficulty is, of course, that people are very good at detecting disparities. They see that, at my university, the sciences are still somewhat ahead of the humanities in terms of national reputation and regard. That is something we worry about. We don’t want to be a unidimensional institution. We don’t think we are, and we want to make very sure that we lean hard on the quality of those programs and that we give them the resources they need to improve continuously. We started out from a difficult position. My predecessor, Dick Lyman, did a very sound and sensible thing for the humanities at Stanford. He realized that we were way behind on strength of library holdings and built the library very impressively during the ‘70s. Now we have a really splendid resource in our library. Any humanist can feel that he or she can come to Stanford without a scholarly deficit in that domain. There is some handicap, I can’t tell how great, in being a humanities department outside the great urban centers of cultural production in this country. We’ve lost a couple of faculty members to institutions in the Northeast corridor. They said things are happening there that they need to be close to. We need to figure out how to overcome that handicap and provide things that are special to us and useful to those scholars. We’ve established a humanities center, which has a growing reputation. I can’t tell you that we’ve solved that problem. All I can say is that I continue to identify it as something we’ve got to do better on. FALLOUT FROM FRAUD, ERRORS Q: Are revelations of scientific fraud in the past few years likely to have any long-term effect on science or science funding? KENNEDY: Not a large one. I think perhaps a marginal one. They trouble me. Particularly in the basic biomedical sciences that have applications to clinical medicine, we are forcing practitioners to lead such multiple and hectic lives that we may be unwittingly creating an environment in which that stuff is too likely to happen. The places that have given rise to the known incidents of fraud are places that were hyperkinetic; that’s all you can say about them. You just can’t publish six or seven dozen papers a year from a modest-sized laboratory and be paying careful enough attention to what’s going on. We’ve got to get ourselves out of the pattern in which that kind of hyperplasin is routinely approved activity. It’s just not consistent with. the kind of thoughtful quality control that ought to be a hallmark of academic science. Q: Is there any realistic hope for changing that system? Funding is tied to quantity. How does one go about divorcing those? KENNEDY: I don’t really think funding is so tied to quantity. In evolutionary biology, or in the most fundamental fields—in, say, molecular genetics, physical chemistry, neurobiology—most awarding agencies haven’t been impressed by volume. Among the researchers who have fared best there are people who travel pretty light in terms of publication volume but pretty heavily in terms of impact. Where that tradition has not dominated is the fields that are tied to particular domains in clinical medicine. There, I think, there has been a tendency to reward volume. All we can hope is that some people who are important leaders in the field will establish their leadership on the basis of a few highly significant publications instead of simply raising the water level. Q: You’re not deeply concerned about the impact on public perceptions of science? KENNEDY: Yes, I am. But I’m also cautious about overreading it. I think people are sensible enough to understand that in any vast and successful enterprise there’s going to be a certain instance of activity that is not in the best traditions of the enterprise. People are going to continue to make judgments on the basis of how successful it is overall. The number of instances of fraud is, after all, quite small with respect to the size of the venture. Q: Of course, some people have asked whether many such cases may go unrevealed. KENNEDY: It’s legitimate to raise the question, but we’re accustomed to the tradition that people are innocent until proven guilty. Science is a sufficiently vigorous activity with respect to efforts to confirm important findings that eventually we will discover errors if the finding is significant enough to encourage other people to build on it. Q: Even if there are not many cases of outright fraud, some people are concerned that there may be a lot of noise in the literature— various small mistakes, mostly accidental, whose effects may be incremental. Do you think that that could turn out to be an important problem? KENNEDY: No. That’s something that all of us who do science understand about it, that there’s a certain mistake level. How do we deal with that? We deal with it, first, with a tradition that holds confirmation in high esteem, and second, by tough and rigorous peer review and quality-control procedures that operate in the publication system. There will still be errors that escape detection in that system, no question about it. But if those contribute to wrong results that other people try to build on because they are highly significant, it’s very likely that somebody’s going to try and confirm those findings and do the experiments over. That’s the way the system deals with undetected error. An undetected error is just a charactersitic of scientific work. Experiments are hard! Particularly these days, they are very complicated. Everybody who does them lives in fear of mistakes. To a degree, the good scientists are the people who are so aggressively suspicious of their own work that they’re good mistake-detectors for themselves. SCIENCE AND THE ECONOMY Q: You’ve said that we depend on the nation’s science base to fuel an innovative society. Those who’ve been arguing for increased science funding have recently stressed that argument very strongly, tying it especially to improving our competitive position with respect to world trade. Is science really important to a strong economy? KENNEDY: It’s very important, but nobody can tell how important exactly. In a sense it’s an article of faith, but if you look at the history of major technological advances in this country that have spawned an array of economically important products, they depend in very significant part on work that’s been done in basic science. You can’t ever say that economic success can’t be achieved without a strong basic science sector, because people immediately point at Japan and say there is not a particularly strong basic science sector. But that’s a nation that’s doing very well economically because it has an enormously efficient technology-transfer apparatus and a tradition of quality control in engineering and production. There are other ways of building strong national economies; probably a powerful basic science component is not necessary. But at its best it can be sufficient. It could even survive a rather sluggish technology-transfer system, which I happen to think we have in this country, except in agriculture. Q: Do you see any danger that the competitiveness argument as a justification for science is being overworked? KENNEDY: Yes, I do. And the danger is that there are important reasons for pursuing science that are less utilitarian. What I actually said in that remark you quoted was that science fuels an innovative society that is not just innovative for purposes of international competitiveness but also for purposes of self-inspiration. Science, after all, is a quest for human understanding and knowledge. It’s an intellectual adventure; it represents some of this society’s aspirations. We ought not to be making the argument just on the grounds of international competitiveness. We ought to be saying science is something a successful society does by way of justifying its highest aspirations. We want to increase our own understanding of ourselves and of the universe we live in and of nature for the purpose of guiding wiser policies or informing our own recreational time. Those are important ends in themselves. PLANS FOR THE FUTURE Q: Your tenure at FDA was widely praised even though you lost some of the battles that were dearest to your heart. Do you see yourself ever returning to government service? KENNEDY: I enjoyed my time at FDA. I could see myself coming back after I finish what I have to do at Stanford if there were a tailor-made role for me. What I mean by that is if there were some agency that had to do with an area I knew something about in which there were some problems that needed fixing and I thought I could fix them. I wouldn’t come back just to come back. Q: What are your future plans? How long do you hope to stay at Stanford? KENNEDY: I’ve been creatively ambiguous about that point. I love my job. I don’t feel tired of it or burned out in it at all. We’ve got a big campaign going. I certainly expect to finish that out and see Stanford turn 100 in 1991. I really don’t think about duration of tenure. Some mornings I feel like it’s going to be forever, and other times, as noon rolls around, I think it might not last till 5 o’clock.

Donald Kennedy On Fund Raising, Federal Aid and Scientific Fraud

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Tabitha M. Powledge

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August 1987

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