New Reports Cite Science Priorities

The same decision-making process was displayed by Fisher's Council of Competitiveness,which was formed in 1986 by a group of prominent leaders from industry and academia. Instead of requesting more for research, the council asked Congress to take the billions now going into what it called "national prestige technology projects," such as the space station, the superconducting supercollider, the Hubble space telescope, the national aerospace plane, and the Human Genome Project, and put them into smaller efforts that promise a quicker economic return. "That list could be expanded without much trouble," says Fisher. "We think it's time to look at these big-time projects and ask if their rate of development should be slowed." The council also asked the government to apply new criteria in making decisions about funding big science. "In allocating resources to its science and technology programs," the report suggests, "the government should consider the magnitude of the potential benefit to U.S. competitiveness." One week earlier, a second NRC panel had issued its own critique of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's latest plans for the agency's troubled space station. Despite its continuing support for federal spending on space science, the Space Studies Board concluded, in a six-page position paper, that NASA was wasting the taxpayers' money with its plans to use the station to conduct research on prolonged human exposure to space flight and on microgravity processing. "The space station Freedom," wrote the board, "does not meet the basic research requirements of the two principal scientific disciplines for which it is intended." To emphasize its point, the board noted that the annual cost over the next five years to build a space station to conduct microgravity and life sciences research would amount to more than 10 times the present level of spending on both of the research programs. The money, the board stated, would be much better spent on grants to scientists directly engaged in such research than on untested hardware. It wasn't the first time that the scientific community had criticized the estimated $37 billion project. In January the American Physical Society (APS) issued a strongly worded statement saying that the space station lacked "scientific justification" and that space science could proceed "vigorously . . . for the foreseeable future without a manned space station." And APS didn't stop at the space station. For the first time in its history, APS also took a stance on the appropriateness of a major scientific project. Showing concern for small, investigator-initiated science, the society's executive board stated that funding for the superconducting supercollider "must not come at the expense of the broadly based scientific research program of the United States." Science isn't the only factor used to weigh the importance of these projects. For one thing, politicians need to bring home the bacon to their districts. "Genetic industrial technology is less sexy than an $8 billion supercollider," Motorola's Fisher says. "And it's harder to see which states are going to benefit as a result of pursuing some of these technologies." There's also national pride at stake, as presidential science adviser Allan Bromley reminded an audience of space science supporters in a speech shortly after the Space Studies Board released its report. "They [the board] conclude that science alone cannot justify the space station. I agree," he said. "But that was never the question. Science [is not] the only or even necessarily a particularly important consideration in decisions involving space. A vastly more compelling rationale is that it is the first step in the great adventure that will take our species away from the home planet and eventually out toward the stars." Members of Congress are accustomed to such disagreements within the scientific community, and may view competing priorities as normal. Last month, for example, the chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA, NSF, and EPA noted as much in a question to NSF's new director about his agency's request for healthy increases in all the foundation's programs. "It's hard to choose from among your own children, isn't it?" Rep. Bob Traxler (D-Mich.) asked Walter Massey in a review of the foundation's budget request for 1992. Massey nodded. In one way or other, say their authors, each of the new reports tries to do exactly that, but it will be several months, if not years, before it's possible to measure success. That will come, they say, only after Congress decides which projects shall benefit from the country's scarce research dollars. (The Scientist, Vol:5, #9, pg. 3 and 23, April 29, 1991)

New Reports Cite Science Priorities

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