Government, Scientists, and the Priorities of Science
Maccoby, Michael
Massive federal financing of the sciences which in principle should be strengthening American society, in practice threatens to divert science and higher education from their proper goals. In...
...The program would be implemented by grants and contracts to various research institutions —"but not [those] organized for the manufacture or distribution of products"—and by the establishment of a university-industry extension service, similar to the agricultural extension service...
...32 The point of interest here is not the adequacy of Holloman's plan, but the fact that government-supported science involving non-military planning immediately arouses the spectre of socialism, outweighing the real threat to industry of falling behind in the economic competition with Western Europe and Japan...
...19 Cf...
...30 Ibid., p. 413...
...cit., p. 103...
...Most of the funds go to a few wealthy universities which use them to help attract the leading scientists and the best students...
...to hire some firstclass specialists to strengthen the AID research staff...
...Especially important here is the role of the scientific community, as it responds to government support and to the political dictation of priorities...
...3 " Federal Priorities and the Response of Science There is no question but that the federal government now dominates the setting of scientific priorities in the United States...
...The report on the economic effects of an arms control agreement issued by Senator Humphrey's subcommittee on disarmament in August, 1962, has not been made public, apparently because some Senators felt that the Russians would exploit information contained in the report—even though Secretary of Defense McNamara tried to assure them that it disclosed nothing the Russians could not learn by themselves...
...28 All quotations from the Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives, concerning Agency for International Development Contract Operations, (Office of Research, Evaluation and Planning Assistance Staff), (Part 1) (Washington: U.S...
...8 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1959...
...Recently the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Science and Technology, J. Herbert Holloman, stated that our overconcentration of research and development in military programs retards the growth of the civilian economy and thereby damages the ability of the United States to compete with other nations on the world market...
...To improve the "technological base" of our economy, Holloman suggested a program designed to increase "the basic technical work important to industry and to encourage a more rapid translation of technical information to industry...
...Why is it that the science most readily supported by Congress is either a science for death or a science for leaving the planet, when in fact there is so much to be done in developing our own planet...
...Much of it is devoted to outright destruction, and much of what is not—such as space exploration—diverts resources from the alleviation of pressing human problems...
...Not only does such concentration hinder the solving of non-military problems...
...24 Thus the investment in military R&D goes beyond the "rational" needs for defense, and besides being wasteful, it undermines the nation's strength...
...The average scientist thinks less about the ultimate purpose of his work than about the immediate investigation at hand...
...The scientific community has the knowledge, the ability, and the prestige to reorient the nation toward "biophilic" goals...
...We have not solved problems of water and air pollution...
...cit., p. 22...
...28 " The total expenditures for the solar boat project were estimated at the relatively small sum of $40,000...
...Most of the world is impoverished, although for the first time in human history we have the means to eradicate poverty...
...Considering the large government investment in military research, the character of scientists, and (as we shall see later) the government's fear of scientific projects that might radically change our society, there is a real danger that a bureaucratized scientific community, with a naive, games-playing mentality, will ally itself with the military-industrial complex...
...As the economist Yale Brozen puts it...
...just not enough fuel to go around...
...24 M. King Hubbert, "Are We Retrogressing in Science...
...26 As it to illustrate Congressional prejudices against non-military " science, Representative Charles R. Jones of North Carolina declared the following in the course of the hearings: I fail to see how, with the need as great as you say it is to develop scientists, you can justify paying a man $20,000 to spend two years studying the cultural evolution in peasant communities...
...9 For the effects of this game-like attitude on military strategy, see M. Maccoby, "Social Psychology of Deterrence," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September, 1961...
...30 In general Congress distrusts any non-military science which involves federal planning, conflicts with free enterprise ideology, or questions military policy...
...Even labor officials disliked the idea...
...eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by peasants 10,000 years ago...
...indeed, many administrators are themselves scientists...
...For all too often the scientific mind equates "winning" with "progress," and substitutes a belief in personal achievement and the "advancement" of a field for an authentic interest in knowledge and truth...
...But it is not clear that proper channels exist...
...21 " Federal Priorities in Science The bulk of science now supported by the government is not science for life...
...support of humanites, but that the kind of science now supported has a deadly effect on the spirit of scientific inquiry and the pursuit of human-oriented goals...
...Later, the same congressman repeated that the undertaking seemed something that "perhaps the military might do...
...20 "Science and Society," Science, 9 November 1962, p. 651...
...he is open to new and better ways of doing things...
...27 Ibid., p. 369...
...Federal Support and the Universities The results of government financing of university research have been studied systematically by Harold Orlans and summarized in his book, The Effects of Federal Programs on Higher Education, A Study of 36 Universities and Colleges.' On the basis of 400 interviews with administrators and 3500 faculty questionnaires, Orlans concludes that large-scale, high-level scientific programs cannot survive without federal support, but that the manner in which grants are doled out creates dangers and imbalances...
...The quality of science is also diluted by government demands for secrecy and that projects be planned that are easily explained to untrained legislators...
...One scientist writes: Despite the large amount of superficial evidence to the contrary, the present state of science in the United States is one of considerable confusion...
...Price, in Government and Science, suggests that generally American science goes along with fixed political goals, rather than trying to influence society toward better goals...
...Thus scientists alienate themselves from that tradition which stems from the Enlightenment: that through reason and science, man can create a better society...
...Consequently, science, rather than serving men, has become increasingly the enemy of life...
...The current federal research and devolpment budget asks Congress for $14.9 billion, continuing that trend which since 1956 has increased appropriations by 10 to 35 per cent every year.4 Fifteen per cent of total expenditures in American universities derive from government sources...
...13 At the present time the scientific community is receiving from the government more or less what it demands...
...We have no recourse but the hard one of disentangling the hypnotic skein in which we are all enmeshed—of finding a way out to rationality...
...Fromm also shows that the complex, overly-bureaucratized and mechanized society conditions the spread of necrophilia...
...15 Price, Ibid...
...Government Printing Office, 1962...
...Shaw's Man and Superman, where the Devil tells Don Juan: I have examined man's wonderful inventions...
...17 The physicist Ralph Lapp writes that while many scientists accept military employment reluctantly, the complex problems of weaponry which now enlist the majority of the nation's scientists also attract the best of the younger men—because these problems are so scientifically fascinating...
...and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of weeks...
...Such an attitude is easier to observe in the biological than the physical sciences, for example in the work of Hans Selye on stress reactions and the medical possibilities of reinforcing natural homeostatic mechanisms while guarding against destructive side effects and over-reactions by these same mechanisms...
...Orlans indicates that 70 per cent of the scientists he interviewed realize that the present concentration of federal funds in the sciences is not in the "long-run national interest," although over 50 per cent do believe it to be "in the present national interest...
...political scientists about the shying away from political implications which lie at the heart of their field...
...The best scientists also worry about the trivializing of research...
...12 Quoted by Sidney Lens, "The Professors and the Pentagon," The Progressive, October, 1962, p. 34...
...Lapp also refers to the fact that weapons of destruction have traditionally compensated man for his physical weakness and given him the means to master others.18 Elaborating on man's age-old fascination with weaponry, Lapp quotes from G.B...
...Thus the internal life of science must be preserved without a too direct dependence on the policies of the moment, or the official fashions of thought...
...Since the days of McCarthy, government support has grown to the point where not only research but also teaching programs and salaries of permanent faculty members often depend heavily on federal funds...
...But the testimony indicates that this was due more to amateurism than underhandedness...
...Yet it is difficult to secure appropriations for direct non-military research into these problems...
...11 Orlans, loc cit., p. 98...
...Yet, while supporting scientists, government funds have not necessarily opened new scientific frontiers...
...1$ Ralph E. Lapp, Kill and Overkill (New York: Basic Books, 1962...
...It also depends upon the productivity of the economy...
...3 Ibid., p. 292...
...and in the most heavily supported schools some 78 per cent of the natural scientists receive federal subsidy...
...In general, the harvest of scientific discovery is disappointing, considering the investment involved, for too often the supervision of governmental agencies has reinforced the trend toward bureaucratized projects which produce trivial, non-controversial findings...
...cit., p. 98...
...Fromm shows that necrophilia is characterized by a love of death, a need for certainty, for complete predictability which can result in commitment to force, a preference for machines over living organisms (and the desire to make men into machines...
...You think in view of the condition of the country, its finances, etc., that we can well afford $20,000 of the taxpayers' money to make a comparative study of village life27 Another example of Congressional feelings came from a hearing by the Subcommittee of Government Operations of the House (August 9-16, 1962) , concerning a project by the Research, Evaluating, and Planning Assistance Staff of the Agency for International Development (AID...
...Snow reports the scientific ideology accurately enough, but his evaluation of it is overly optimistic...
...Professors in Orlans' sample note that agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and even the Navy with all their limitations, show more courage in backing adventuresome ideas than do private foundations...
...Clearly, many scientists are aware of the danger I am citing...
...Produce enough energy from uranium to light and heat our homes and offices, electrify our railroads, and run all our factories and mills...
...23 "The Role of Government in Research and Development," The American Behavioral Scientist, December, 1962, p. 25...
...instead, a group of industries become increasingly strong at the public expense...
...For the first time in the NSF's twelve-year history, the House Appropriations Committee has refused proposed increases in funds and directed NSF to refrain from setting up new programs...
...The report cited not only the concentration of military investment in a few specialized aircraft and electronic firms which would go bankrupt without military contracts, but also pleas from certain industrialists for a start in peacetime planning before industrial resistance to disarmament becomes overwhelming...
...By fearlessly exploring our environment, science would inevitably show that the profit motive often works to the public detriment, stimulating false needs while ignoring real necessities...
...Besides blocking economic and scientific development, massive military subsidies increase the chances and the destructiveness of war...
...Congress ignored the positive implications of this research, and instead saw it as an instance of government competition with private industry...
...This scientific attitude reinforces the tendency to seek technical solutions while ignoring political realities and long-range unintended effects of policy...
...Science for What...
...Apart from the effects of federal financing on the universities, one must question the results of concentrating funds in research bearing on national defense...
...For example, when Congress passed President Kennedy's program for mental health facilities, the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee slashed away funds for salaries and research grants...
...they "equated research with automation and, hence, with less labor...
...Tragically, the behavior of the scientist is being moulded like that of the rat in a Skinner box, who is reinforced only for the right kind of action, so that gradually he learns to want to do what is rewarded and loses interest in what is not rewarded...
...We are a world power as much because of our productivity as because of our arsenal of guided missiles and atomic bombs...
...some private universities, including Harvard, Yale and Princeton, receive a larger percentage of operating revenue than do land grant colleges such as Illinois, Kentucky and Maryland5...
...Since World War II these have become so deeply engaged in the pursuit of various kinds of applied research that they have seriously neglected their primary duties as institutions of learning and of education...
...To the "biophilic" scientist, a problem does not end with the supression of a symptom or the discovery of a relationship...
...4 Science, 26 July 1963, P. 339...
...Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1962...
...But it is clear from Orlans' interviews that the quality of scientific work is compromised as much by the scientists themselves as by the agencies, which in fact are often troubled by the lack of courage and imagination in the research projects proposed to them...
...15 Since the scientists themselves suffer the same temptation, the two groups unconsciously conspire to promote the kind of work which is most likely to gain congressional support...
...Similarly, administrators in Washington are more often characterized by breadth of vision than many within universities who measure success—as do scientific guilds themselves—by quantity of publication...
...5 Harold L. Enarson, "Free Universities and National Policy," Science, 2 Novem ber 1963, p. 582...
...One of the AID officials had conceived a plan to provide a cheap and efficient source of power for underdeveloped areas far away from large power centers such as hydro-electric dams...
...which federal employee was trying to get rich on government time...
...As Lapp reminds us, for those fascinated by problems centering "on gyro-mechanisms, on miniaturized electronics, on plasma physics," it is "easy to forget the monstrous machines of destruction to which their work is contributing...
...The committee accused no one of illegal or immoral behavior, only of working outside of proper channels...
...Defense potential is more than a matter of having technologically advanced weapons...
...Even the problem of explaining scientific problems to Congressmen might not be insurmountable, if scientists were firm in their convictions...
...It is not my purpose to make a wholesale indictment of American science...
...The younger men have become concerned with making their reputations as quickly as possible...
...34 Orlans, loc...
...Contributing to this situation is the state of the universities...
...21 Lapp, loc...
...That is a very nice field for someone to go into, but I doubt if it contributes greatly to our store of scientific knowledge...
...Through science, to be sure, man has found many ways to preserve and extend life...
...32 Ibid...
...And I tell you that in the arts of life man invents nothing, but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine...
...23 Furthermore, it is not mere coincidence that bureaucratization of university research dates from World War II and the beginning of military subsidy...
...7 National Science Foundation, Federal Funds for Science X, (Washington: Govern ment Printing Office, 1962...
...The failure of American scientists to oppose pressures which could reduce their community to a technical bureau contrasts markedly with C. P. Snow's description of the scientific ethos in The Two Cultures.8 According to Snow, the scientist is supremely qualified to set the priorities of society, because his intellectual outlook is molded by his professional method...
...The major problems that arise from government and science are not the fault of either large-scale government support or the scientists' lack of say in setting priorities...
...It happens that one of the promoters of the solar boat did make some questionable contacts with private firms and did attempt to bring in a magazine to publicize the expedition...
...Social scientists who might be expected to warn of this danger are often seduced into harmless research by government and foundation grants...
...lo But it is unjust to lump all scientists together, as both Snow and his critics tend to do...
...Hans Bethe has noted that with large computers doing so much work, scientists do not think enough: "They lose the inspiration for further research that came from an intimate contact with every phase of the calculations...
...p. 16...
...Science must be allowed to gather information without regard to "historical predictions and prejudgments which belong primarily to one particular age, and may be proved false...
...According to Lee A. DuBridge, member of the National Science Board and President of the California Institute of Technology, we now possess the scientific knowledge to: Produce enough food to feed every hungry mouth on earth—and to do this even though the population should double or triple...
...He believes in progress...
...14 Don K. Price, "The Scientific Establishment," Science, 29 June 1962...
...Price remarks, however, that "We will do well to recognize that a government bureau is tempted to be more concerned with its own status and power than with the purposes of national policy...
...A free science searching for truth is bound sometimes to question the goals of private interests...
...As Lapp states, "No one .. . is responsible—and everyone is responsible...
...Orlans notes that "sociologists complained about the restriction of government programs to quantitative, statistical, and computer analysis to the exclusion of qualitative and descriptive approaches...
...The dairy interests demanded that he be dismissed...
...I was a little surprised," one Congressman stated, "that foreign aid was being used to develop and promote a speculative power source...
...While the universities have some power to resist government interference in regard to educational policies and academic freedom, it remains an open question whether in fact they would resist, should the issue arise with fresh McCarthy-style hysteria...
...A more serious consequence is that the majority of scientists will search for "interesting" research problems with military significance...
...The important question is whether the motives are weighted in favor of understanding rather than power, and whether the thrust of scientific work in general is toward life— enhancing goals...
...No one tries risky problems because the machine is expensive and he fears wasting money on a worthless result...
...In the reorganization act of 1961, some 'supergrade,' higher-level executive appointments for scientists and others with technical training were authorized, but 65 appropriations for pay were never voted and the jobs were never filled...
...But scientists in general, according to Orlans, are satisfied with the present form of government support...
...Make fresh water out of sea water and thus irrigate all the world's and regions...
...13 Melvin Schwartz, "The Conflict Between Productivity and Creativity in ModernDay Physics," The American Behavioral Scientist, December, 1962, p. 36...
...There is a great difference between the scientist whose pleasure begins and ends in the elegant development of a device, whether it be a triggering mechanism for a bomb or a new drug, and the scientist impelled by a vision of widening the scope of natural knowledge or understanding human existence...
...But its future depends, as Science reports, on "whether or not funds are provided...
...In other words, although the scientific community may have a great deal to say in setting its own priorities, there is a reluctance to risk power, prestige, and support by clashing with priorities set in advance by the interplay of political forces...
...It can be argued that some of the research done in military and space programs has contributed to our store of useful knowledge concerning new plasmas, improved communications systems, etc...
...26 Science, 18 October 1963, p. 368...
...Perhaps in physics the distinction is more subtle, involving the choosing of problems, the use of techniques as means not ends, and the quest for truth rather than for power...
...Lens also cites the opinions of other eminent scientists that many of the best investigators waste much of their time on administrative work...
...Massive federal financing of the sciences which in principle should be strengthening American society, in practice threatens to divert science and higher education from their proper goals...
...In contrast to the necrophilic attitude, Fromm describes a biophilic attitude, based on the love of life...
...2 Ibid., p. 93...
...He pointed out that between 1954 and 1961 three-quarters of the scientists entering research and development were absorbed by defense and space programs...
...16 Orlans, loc...
...large-scale spending on military research is restraining the growth of civilian research...
...cit., p. 21...
...33 The government would have to stand strongly behind science if it were to be given the power to criticize uses by private enterprise of drugs, insecticides, chemical pollution of air and water etc...
...Scientists with the "game-like attitude 9 seldom come to grips with the needs of the " world they live in, believing instead, as Don K. Price comments, "that the public interest is the same as their professional specialty...
...cit., p. 97...
...Unlike the military, AID has little experience in pushing a research project...
...Some of them seem not to believe man wants a better society...
...to do this they are forced to choose problems they are sure will yield publishable results in a short time, rather than the more difficult problems with uncertain results...
...If scientists were truly determined to attack more important problems, there is no evidence that the government would stand in their way...
...Yet plans to realize these possibilities awake fears of socialism, despite the fact that they would create a higher standard of living and help solve the problems of the underdeveloped world...
...In the universities, the influx of government funds has often narrowed rather than broadened the search for knowledge and has resulted in neglect of teaching...
...1 Washington: The Brookings Institute, 1962...
...Thus many scientists appear as members of teams out to win contests, concerned more with personal batting averages than with the value of the game or the cost of winning...
...I had not realized that foreign aid was being used for that purpose...
...Price recalls the case of the Iowa State research assistant who found that oleomargarine is as nutritious as butter and more efficacious in producing edible fats...
...For example, of $9 billion invested by the government in R & D in 1961, $6.2 billion went into national defense, $1.4 billion into space research, $.9 billion to atomic energy, and the remaining billion was divided among smaller programs such as health, agriculture, the Bureau of Mines and the National Bureau of Standards...
...3 1 Quoted in Science, 28 June 1963, p. 1381...
...Secondly, there is the strong possibility that concentration on military research has weakened our long-term economic and scientific capacities...
...He wanted to produce a small solar-powered battery recharging center...
...Because the implications of a more humanly useful science might upset the current ideological equilibrium, military and space science become ways to keep the economy running without clashing against powerful vested interests...
...29 Science, 2 August 1963, p. 412...
...But there is far more to the difference between science for death and science for life than is expressed in the contrast between making weapons and making medicines...
...Within the universities themselves, the money goes almost entirely to natural scientists and psychologists, who consequently improve their positions and prestige at the expense of other social scientists and humanists...
...According to a recent report from the House Labor and Education Committee, 90 per cent of the federal funds were concen * NoTE: This article is based on the Gabrielson Lecture on Government and the Priorities of Science delivered at Colby College, February 14, 1963...
...7 What are the results to science and to the nation of directing so much energy and genius into the arts of weaponry...
...This may represent an uneconomical use of research even from the point of view of increasing our military strength...
...Orlans states that while the "best" or most well-known scientists can get support for projects of their own choosing, the "average" scientist must do the work the government wants in order to receive its support...
...Furthermore, because it is so costly, and so shielded from criticism, Congress can rationalize a penny-pinching approach to more constructive science by emphasizing the priority of military needs...
...Necrophilic" scientists who revel in a science of destruction are probably rare, statistically speaking, but their strong minds and pur posive attitude may significantly influence the direction of scientific endeavor...
...A certain amount of red tape and inefficiency under the project system seems an inevitable price for progress in those fields that cannot be developed without huge financial investments...
...Irrational overconcentration in military spending and congressional unwillingness to support wholeheartedly a science in the service of life walk hand in hand...
...35 Lapp, loc...
...6 The most essential statistic concerning federal involvement in science, however, is that most of the funds spent on research and development (R & D) fall under the military budget...
...31 Immediately Fortune opposed the plan in its May issue, stating that "nothing in the record suggests that government can organize research more efficiently than industry...
...2 " Although government support has sometimes led to important discoveries, Orlans emphasizes the view, as stated by one professor, that federal financing is creating a higher education that is "nationalized" rather than "universalized...
...And Orlans writes that "The preference of government agencies for 'safe' and 'projectable' rather than venturesome research, and for experimental rather than theoretical work, was noted by many observers...
...They have need for power in remote places as it affects their mobility...
...Most universities hire and fire purely on the basis of work published, without regard to the work's significance or lack of it...
...It was hoped that "If you could find a simple way of capturing the power of the sun for small projects .. . you could begin to bring . . . energy way out in the areas where, if you wait for rural electrification to take place, 25 or 30 years from now, the problems of economic development will have simply gotten beyond us...
...But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of a finger all the hidden molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far behind...
...The results of this attitude go beyond the concentration of research in safe but unimportant areas...
...As Norbert Weiner points out, science is most useful to society when scientists set priorities themselves, free from political pressures...
...Unless science wakes up to the dangers of acquiescence and objects to priorities set by fear and political expediency, there is little hope of reversing a process which at best leads to waste and stagnation and at worst to moral disintegration and suicide...
...The question is no longer whether or not the government will support science, but what kind of science will be supported...
...We cannot single out the scientists, or the politicians, or even the military, as the villains of our danger...
...Possibly the greatest source of this disruption is the government contract-grant system upon which the universities are becoming increasingly dependent for continued existence...
...22 Cited by Alan T. Waterman, "Science in the Service of Man," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May, 1963, p. 4. Dr...
...Some of the participants in this Conference felt that the research of younger men is becoming more superficial and even trivial, although in the past it was the younger men who made the deepest and most striking contributions to science...
...Such a development would have an enormous effect on countries where "there is simply an absence of fuel, not merely high cost fuel but...
...If noncatastrophic solutions of these problems are to be found, it is urgent that our universities again become institutions of learning...
...Thus Orlans quotes from the Proceedings of a Conference on Academic and Industrial Basic Research (National Science Foundation, 1961): The present atmosphere of the intense competition for jobs, for prestige, and for research grants places too much emphasis on the achievement of quick and fairly certain results at the expense of the slower and more valuable maturing of the scientist...
...And no one takes responsibility for accuracy, for it is the machine that does the work...
...It might be something that Atomic Energy, Space, or the military might do in their research contracts or grants, sponsor some programs of the kind, but it sort of shocked me to know that the AID funds were being used in this speculative endeavor...
...It is doubtful, however, whether the Congress will appropriate all this money, especially the requests for non-military research which House subcommitteees have already begun to cut...
...34 The same criticisms were levelled at private foundations...
...The new generation of scientists, raised in the shadow of world war and anesthetized by the anxieties of the cold war and the bomb, has little faith that man can control his destructive impulses or that individuals can influence society...
...Even among scientists, government grants carry greater prestige and chance of advancement than do good teaching and individual research outside of the government-financed project system...
...Build houses, buildings, and indeed whole cities, which are essentially weatherproof—heatproof, coldproof, and stormproof...
...It is noteworthy that Einstein became one of the very few scientists to refuse political power when President Roosevelt offered it to him in 1939...
...while the investment in destruction and space, involving at least as much government control, is rationalized as national security...
...At the same time, the problems confronting the human race today are such that a widespread knowledge of science is essential if they are to be dealt with effectively...
...4 Orlans, loc...
...What was the gimmick...
...14 It is a common belief that to improve our society all we need do is give more money and power to science...
...The project was killed, however, and the originator of the idea left AID to work for a private research firm, after the chairman of the subcommittee, Porter Hardy of Virginia, pressed for his dismissal29 AID, under its new Administrator, David Bell, is now striving to strengthen its research program and enlist more help from the scientific community...
...Science, 8 March 1963, p. 890...
...trated in 100 universities, 38 per cent in ten...
...This means that the scholar must retain for his own efficacy something—not too much—of the ivory tower attitude which it is the spirit of the times to decry.20 " Yet the government provides massive support mainly for military research and development, and most scientists are neither capable nor interested in setting their own priorities based on pure scientific interest...
...Unlike Einstein, they are too concerned with worldly power...
...12 Professor Melvin Schwartz, a physicist at Columbia, " writes that with expensive machines, science becomes assembly-line research...
...To answer such questions requires an examination not only of the forces that determine Congressional appropriations, but also of the scientists' motives, the bureaucratization resulting from the project system, and the manner in which political priorities blunt the free spirit of scientific inquiry...
...Science for life implies research motivated by a profound vision of harmony, of ecology in its broadest meaning, of rational inquiry into the interrelation of things—whether it be expressed by Einstein's interest in mass-energyspacetime or by Rachel Carson's concern with protecting the balance of nature from technological assault.is The difference between science for life and other science is not one of method, but of openness to a larger universe of variables...
...He is democratic and objective, influenced by considerations of utility rather than established authority...
...The peasant...
...Furthermore, medical scientists report that although the military services may at first offer to support an investigator's non-military work, once his laboratory is dependent on their funds he may be pressured into military research...
...And of the $613 million spent by the government directly on university research (as opposed to "development"), one-third supported work related to military purposes...
...for the worst effects of government influence are aggravated by the willingness of scientists to pursue those goals least likely to arouse division or debate...
...Thus, the two main dangers of federal aid, as cited by Orlans: "(1) that academic values and objectives will be surrendered to those of a business enterprise or the more important goals of a nation, and (2) that some form of political control will, indeed, follow federal aid...
...10 Don K. Price, Government and Science (New York: N.Y.0 Press, 1954), p. 26...
...Of the nearly $16 billion spent by the nation on research and development during 1962, over $12.2 billion was appropriated by Congress, most of it in contracts to industry ($5.8 billion) and universities ($4.2 billion...
...1B What concerns me, however, is not support of science vs...
...17 Necrophilic is here used not in the sense of the rare sexual perversion but in a broader definition suggested by Erich Fromm in War Within Man (Philadelphia: American Friends Service Committee, 1963...
...it also diminishes our capacity, as Norbert Wiener puts it, "to react homeostatically to the vicissitudes of the future...
...As Price points out, scientists in the United States have more influence at the highest levels of government than do those of other countries...
...the central question is how the cure or discovery affects a wide balance of forces...
...The result has been that budgetary obsessions cripple scientific programs directed toward human betterment...
...Like many other Americans, the scientist does not want to be told what to do, but he will gratefully accept a clue as to what will sell so he can then suggest it himself...
...He explains that the decentralization of science into private institutions facilitates the carryingout of specific projects, "but not our ability to give integrity and direction to our total effort...
...First the United States has a sizeable advantage over Russia in armaments, though it is in the interests of the military-industrial-scientific complex to remain unsatisfied...
...The "biophilic" scientist is not so intent on conquering nature as he is on discovery or on learning how to employ the forces of nature to create a greater harmony for man within his environment...
...But Lapp also cites Tartaglia, the 16th-century ballistics expert who wrote, " 'One day meditating to myself, it seemed to me that it was a thing blameworthy, shameful, and barbarous, worthy of severe punishment before God and man, to wish to bring to perfection an art damageable to one's neighbor and destruction to the human race...
...The trouble with the first kind of scientist is that he might do just as well on a project designed to destroy the planet as on one to bring cheap power to the underdeveloped world...
...We do not yet understand the processes of physical and mental disease...
...If solar energy was such a good idea, why wasn't private industry already developing it...
...Waterman, the outgoing director of the National Science Foundations goes on to cite the need for large-scale research in oceanography, pollution, and the development of plasmas...
...we appear to have lost sight of our intellectual foundations and have reverted to authoritarianism...
...33 Price, Government and Science, p. 103...
...The claim that military and space science serves as a guarantee of national security can be disputed from two separate points of view...
...25 Science, 30 August 1963, p. 791...
...I do not mean to insist that the priorities of scientific work be totally determined by social priorities, nor that society does not benefit from science based on mixed motives...
...Science comments that "The Congress is clearly peeved by the mounting costs of research, by its own inability to grasp the substance of scientific matters, by the conflicting counsel that it receives when it seeks advice in the scientific community, and finally, by imbalances in the geographical distribution of research funds...
...Why does this trend continue even though, as we shall see, it is economically and morally self-defeating...
...the trouble lies in the very ease with which they accommodate their activities to the going market...
...Yet even if one grants that the scientists—especially the best of them —might claim somewhat more autonomy than they do, that institutions accepting federal funds hoard more independence than they spend, and that the opinions of scientists are heard at the highest levels of government, one must still ask how the scientific community uses its power and influence...
...Yet the universities appear to be more concerned with beating one another in the race for money than in banding together to assert their autonomy...
...35 But the same forces which block humane science and free scientific inquiry also nourish the apathetic and self-destructive tendencies in our society...
...Frank T. Bow of Ohio, the ranking Republican on the appropriations subcommittee, attacked the proposal as coming "about as close to destruction of the free-enterprise concept as anything can get," since scientific information would be distributed to small firms as well as the large ones which maintain their own research departments...
...As Science remarked, "The results of the committee's total deletion of the $427 million slated for the salaries of the staffs at the community mental health treatment centers may be 'shiny new buildings with inadequate professional staffs.' "25 In its attempt to cut budget deficits, Congress has even begun to attack the National Science Foundation and its policies...
...Furthermore, Congressmen criticized the very entry of AID into such research...
Vol. 11 • January 1964 • No. 1
