“Long-Term Research and Its Impact on Society”

Last week, Burton Richter, Director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and past president of The American Physical Society (1994), addressed a Senate Forum on “Research as an Investment.” His remarks highlight the contributions that physics research have made to society, and the importance of federal support for science. His remarks, entitled “Long-Term Research and Its Impact on Society,” follow:

“It is a privilege to participate with this distinguished group in this forum on Research as an Investment. My perspective is that of a physicist who has done research in the university, has directed a large laboratory involved in a spectrum of research and technology development, has been involved with industries large and small, and has some experience in the interaction of science, government and industry.

“Science has been in a relatively privileged position since the end of World War II. Support by the government has been generous, and those of us whose careers have spanned the period since World War II have, until recently, seen research funding increase in real terms. Support for long-term research really rested on two assumptions: science would improve the lives of the citizens, and science would make us secure in a world that seemed very dangerous because of the US/USSR confrontation. The world situation has changed radically, both politically and economically. The USSR is no more, and economic concerns loomed much larger as our deficit grew and as our economic rivals became much stronger. It is therefore no coincidence that federal support for long-term research peaked in the late 1980’s (according to the National Science Foundation’s science and engineering indicators) and only biomedical research has grown in real terms since that time.

“The emphasis of this forum, the economic value of public investment in long-term research, looks at only one of the many dimensions in the impact of research on our society. In examining that dimension, it is important to understand the time scale involved. Product development, the province of industry, takes technology and turns it into things which are used in the society. Typically, these days, the product development cycle runs for three to five years. However, the research that lies behind the technologies incorporated by industry into new products almost always lies much further back in time--twenty or more years. I’d like to make four brief points and illustrate them with a few examples:

1. Today’s high-tech industry is based on the research of yesterday.
2. Tomorrow’s high tech industry will be based on the research of today.
3. The sciences are coupled--progress in one area usually requires supporting work from other areas.
4. Federal support for research has paid off and will be even more important in the future.

“Today’s high-tech industry is based on the research of yesterday.

“Telecommunications has been revolutionized by lasers and fiberoptics, coming from research in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Lasers allow much higher communications speeds and much lower communications costs on cables made of tiny glass fibers that carry pulses of light instead of electricity. The theory on which the laser is based goes back much further to work by Albert Einstein in 1917 (he did work on atomic theory as well as relativity).

“The Global Positioning System (GPS) that allows precise location of anything and anybody anywhere is based on ultra precise atomic clocks developed for research starting in the 1950’s. The GPS system has a growing commercial importance in activities ranging from transportation to recreation.

“The biotechnology industry is based in large measure on recombinant DNA techniques developed in the 1970’s.

“The explosive growth of the Internet--of such importance to commerce and information--is the result of four decades of work by a worldwide research community culminating in the development of the browser at the NSF’s super computer center at the University of Illinois, and the development of the World Wide Web by the high energy physicists at CERN in Europe. As a high energy physicist I can only wish that we had been smarter, and, instead of having people type WWW when they want to surf the Internet, we had them type HEP perhaps we would have bigger budgets now had we done so.

“Tomorrow’s high tech industry will be based on the research of today.

“The semiconductor industry’s road map for ever more complex chips which increase the power of computers will, in about a decade, run into a regime of such small feature size that the behavior of even wires is not understood--quantum mechanical effects will become important.

“The pharmaceutical industry is increasingly moving toward the design of drugs that interfere with the ability of pathogens to act. The designs are based on the detailed molecular structure of the pathogens determined by the structural biologists using the physicists’ x-ray diffraction techniques.

“The human genome project shows promise of developing the information to treat many health-related problems. It needs the development by the applied mathematicians of systems to allow efficient searching of huge data bases.

“The sciences are coupled--progress in one area usually requires supporting work from other areas.

“HIV protease inhibitors were synthesized by the chemists in the pharmaceutical industry based on the structure of HIV protease determined by the biologists using the physicists’ x-ray diffraction techniques. Two of the drug companies finalized their formulations using the ultra-powerful x-ray beams from synchrotron radiation sources built by the accelerator builders. Today, about 35% of the running time on the Department of Energy’s synchrotron radiation sources are used for this kind of structural biology.

“The development of neural network computing algorithms to efficiently sort complex multi-dimensional data sets has it origins in the neurobiologists developing understanding of the structure of the brain.

“Today, one of the most important treatment methods of cancer is irradiation with very high-energy x-rays. These x-rays are generated from small linear accelerators that are scaled-down versions of the machines made for nuclear physics and particle physics research. In the U.S. alone there are 3,000 such accelerators which treat more than 75,000 patients every day. There are 5,000 of these machines world wide. The first preclinical trial of this therapy took place in the 1950’s.

“Magnetic resonance imaging, the least invasive and most precise of the medical imaging techniques comes from the work of the chemists, mathematicians and physicists. The physics work goes back to 1938 when I.I. Rabi demonstrated nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) on one atomic nucleus at a time. NMR in solids was demonstrated in the late 1940’s. The mathematicians developed the two-dimensional Fourier transformer in the 1960’s which cut the time required for a MRI scan by an enormous amount. Those among us who have spent 20 minutes inside one such machine should realize that without that mathematical breakthrough, a scan of a single patient would take more near to a day.

“Federal support of research has paid off and will be even more important in the future.

“Patent applications in the United States are supposed to cite the prior art’ on which the particular patent is based. A recent study of patent applications from U.S. industry shows that 73% of the prior art’ cited comes from publicly-funded research. (F. Narin, K.S. Hamilton and D. Olivastro, The increasing linkage between U.S. technology and public sciences. To be published.)

“A recent publication from the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute looks at the impact of R&D on the economy ( Technology, R&D, and the Economy,’ B.L.R. Smith and C.E. Barfield, editors, 1996). In that book, Boskin and Lau studied the impact of new technology on economic growth and found that 30-50% of the economic growth in our society comes from the introduction of new technologies. Mansfield looked at the economic returns on research investment and found that they are 40-50% a year, though returns to an individual firm doing long-term research are much lower because it is not possible for an individual firm doing long-term research to keep all the potential benefits to itself.

“The Future Role of Federal Support

“Twenty and more years ago it was true that much new technology came from long-term R&D done in industry--one need only think of the glory days of Bell Laboratories, and the IBM, General Electric, and RCA research laboratories. However, the world economic system has changed and international competitive pressures have driven most of the long-term research out of U.S. industry. Today it is exceedingly rare to find an R&D program in industry whose time horizon is longer than three to five years to a product. We may regret this change, but it is real and it has come about because of deregulation and competition. If one’s rivals don’t spend money on research, in the short term they are going to have a better bottom line and our economic system, indeed the economic system of all of the developed world, rewards short-term results and punishes those who don’t do as well as their competitors. Thus, changes in society have made the federal investment in such long-term research much more important than ever before.

“As I said earlier, today’s high-tech industry is based on the research of yesterday, and that research was funded at a time when high-tech industry made up a much smaller fraction of our GDP than it does today. Since high-tech industry is a much larger fraction of GDP today than yesterday, and will be even larger tomorrow, the fraction of the federal budget invested in long-term research should also be larger. It is odd, and it is indeed dangerous for the long term, that the converse is true.”