As the keynote speaker at the American Association for the Advancement
of Science's 27th annual Colloquium on Science and Technology Policy,
Presidential Science Advisor John Marburger articulated his views of
the Bush Administration's strategy for science and technology. In his
speech, he discussed the roles of OSTP and federally-funded science
in the war on terrorism, developing a science policy based on seizing
the greatest opportunities for discovery, introducing clearly articulated
criteria to the process of evaluating science, and the important roles
of the social sciences and education.
Marburger was asked why, in light of workforce needs and declining
interest by U.S. students in the physical sciences, the Administration
did not place a priority on increased funding for physical sciences.
He responded that the discourse so far was missing "a discriminating
factor." To what fields, he questioned, should this increase be
applied? Should it favor one agency over another? Would tripling the
NSF budget solve the problem? What areas within DOE should receive increases?
Marburger asked for further justification of where increases should
be targeted and how they should be utilized.
Most of the prepared text of Marburger's April 11 speech follows. The
full text is available at http://www.ostp.gov/html/02_4_15.html.
"Thank you very much for inviting me to speak today about the
Administration's science and technology strategy. I received the invitation
just hours before the Senate confirmed my appointment last October,
and at that time I had only the dimmest notion of how our strategy would
be shaped by the terrorist attacks of the month before. My first actions
were to structure OSTP to serve the President in the war against terrorism,
and to reach out to the science and higher education communities with
a call to action.... This Colloquium comes at an ideal time to take
stock and reflect on what has happened, and what a reasonable future
course might be for the nation's science policy in this vulnerable world.
"OSTP TODAY: In the Bush administration the Office of Science
and Technology Policy continues to play a strong role in shaping science
policy. The interagency coordinating mechanism of the National Science
and Technology Council has proved important, not only for the integration
of agency actions in the war against terrorism, but also as a nucleus
for the crystallization of agency expertise needed for immediate response
to urgent issues. Early service to the Office of Homeland Security following
the exploitation of the U.S. mail for bioterrorism last fall was the
first in a series of new activities somewhat different from the historical
OSTP norm. Today OSTP manages the research and development needs of
Homeland Security through a shared senior staff member.... The entire
office is now organized to provide focused advice when and in the form
needed by the agencies and policy offices we support. The NSTC interagency
task forces, committees, and working groups continue to function as
before, with less emphasis on analysis by OSTP staff, and more on seeking
strategic input from other appropriate organizations including the agencies
and the National Academies. The President's Council of Advisors on Science
and Technology (PCAST) has been formed and is functioning through a
series of panels, one of which focuses on terrorism, others on energy,
telecommunications, and science funding policy. I have endeavored vigorously
to reconnect the office with the Academies, the science and engineering
societies, higher education, and the technically oriented private sector.
We are working closely with the Office of Management and Budget to implement
the President's Management Agenda, and to shape funding policies to
meet the rapidly changing conditions of contemporary science. Today
OSTP is active, engaged, and effective in the formation and execution
of the nation's science policy.
"INITIAL RESPONSES TO THE WAR AGAINST TERRORISM: My message
to the science and higher education communities last fall was first
and foremost to appreciate how deeply committed the President is to
winning the war against terrorism. That commitment includes the mobilization
of every sector, including science, engineering, and higher education.
Shortly after the September 11 attacks, many federal agencies launched
initiatives to respond to terrorism issues, and funded them with existing
appropriations.... Many of us realized that [the] longer-term issues
would require considerable thought and consultation with the nation's
intellectual community. To this end, the National Academies sponsored
an important meeting late in September to consider how they might organize
science input to the war effort. I...agreed to establish an interagency
task force that would take up recommendations produced by a NAS committee
proposed at the meeting...[which] will produce useful guidance by mid-summer.
"The institutions that produce science and technology are not
only sources of solutions and advice, they are also potential targets
and means of exploitation for terrorism. Universities can inadvertently
provide materials, skills, and concealment for terrorist operations....
Universities need to think through these responsibilities and advise
governments where to draw the line between avoiding terrorist risk,
and obstructing the processes of education and discovery. During the
weeks following September 11, I met with higher education leadership
organizations to urge them to begin dialogues on their campuses to define
their positions on terrorism and to clarify where the balance must be
struck in response to society's desire to protect itself. OSTP is fostering
and closely monitoring the broader dialogue on these issues within the
Administration.
"INNOVATION VERSUS IMPLEMENTATION IN THE WAR AGAINST TERRORISM:
As I learned more about the challenges of terrorism, I realized that
the means for reducing the risk and consequences of terrorist incidents
were for the most part already inherent in the scientific knowledge
and technical capabilities available today. Only in a few areas would
additional basic research be necessary, particularly in connection with
bio-terrorism.... The deep and serious problem of homeland security
is not one of science, it is one of implementation.
"This has two consequences. First, although antiterrorism efforts
contain an important R&D component, they will not be a significant
driver for science funding in general. Second, those seeking federal
agency customers for specific technology products are likely to be frustrated
while implementation strategy is being developed....
"SCIENCE BASED SCIENCE POLICY: I do not mean to imply that
the science role in the war against terrorism is unimportant. Nor that
substantial funds will not be forthcoming to solve technical problems
critical to the war effort. But science is moving forward with its own
powerful dynamic, and it is producing the means for addressing many
of society's difficult problems, terrorism among them. Federal support
of science must be directed first of all to sustain this dynamic, and
secondly to seize the greatest opportunities it is creating for discovery,
and for the improvement of the human condition. This is what I have
called a 'science based' science policy. It differs from what might
be called an 'issues based' policy in recognizing that discovery and
the creation of entirely new technologies are unlikely to emerge from
mandates in service to a particular social issue.
"...The scope of existing science is defined by the limits of
existing technology. New science requires advances in technology that
are not obviously relevant to any social need.... This is a familiar
argument for societal support of basic science. But it is not the main
point of the science-based policy that I am advocating. The main point
is that science has its intrinsic needs and processes that have to be
supported if the whole apparatus is to work effectively. If we ignore
these needs, and direct funding according to the severity of social
problems we would like science to address, we tend to enrich only one
part of the machinery, and diminish our ability to address the critical
problems.
"BALANCE IN SCIENCE FUNDING: This is my way of discussing
the problem of 'balance,' sometimes expressed as too little funding
for NSF compared with NIH, or as too little for the physical sciences
compared with the life sciences. I think 'balance' is a misleading term
for the real issue, and it is a dangerous term. Elsewhere I speculated,
to make this point, that perhaps the recent large increases for NIH
have simply enabled health researchers to exploit the same fraction
of opportunities for discovery in their field as physical scientists
can in theirs under existing budgets. A strong case can be made that
the discovery of the molecular basis of life processes created research
opportunities vastly greater than those in the physical sciences. It
is not so much the balance among fields of science that is problematical,
it is the balance among the different parts of the machinery of science.
"We are witnessing advances in the technical infrastructure of
science that do justify large increases in certain fields, and large
increases have been forthcoming. The President's proposal to complete
the doubling of the NIH budget in FY03 is an example, so are the priorities
given to information technology and nanotechnology.... One product of
these capabilities is the current excitement of biotechnology and its
inorganic counterpart, nanotechnology. Both deserve support in proportion
to the potential they hold for discovery. My impression is that potential
is greater in the vastly more complex organic domain, but huge opportunities
remain to be exploited in both areas.
"This oversimplified revolutionary scenario has four central components:
two enabling technologies of instrumentation for atomic scale imaging
and control, and computation for simulation and management of the atomic
scale information, and two discovery-oriented fields of biotechnology
and nanotechnology that have been empowered by these tools. Only one
component, instrumentation, is not currently identified as a priority
in the federal budget. Attention to instrumentation will require analysis
of the related issues of aging or inadequate facilities. Because some
of the instrumentation dwells in the domain of 'big science' (for example,
synchrotron x-ray sources, or nuclear reactors) this issue is also related
to the funding of science within the national laboratories. If we want
to achieve balance in federal science funding, we are going to have
to understand how the complicated funding process works, or fails to
work, to sustain the essential tools upon which our most exciting and
productive areas of science and technology depend. Once the quality
of this infrastructure is assured, then the questions of priority and
adequacy of funding for the dependent fields remain. These questions
must be answered in different ways for the two types of research that
are typically described as basic and applied. I call them discovery
oriented, and issue oriented. Priorities for issue oriented science
are driven by the nation's policy agenda. For discovery science, priorities
must be consistent with the opportunity for discovery, and that is a
matter for the scientific experts.
"THE PRESIDENT'S MANAGEMENT AGENDA APPLIED TO SCIENCE:
Scientists do, of course, make judgments all the time about promising
lines of research.... It makes sense for the world's largest sponsor
of research, the U.S. Government, to want to make such choices as wisely
as the most productive scientists do. This, in my opinion, is how to
think about the President's Management Agenda as it applies to science.
I shared the podium last month with Budget Director Mitch Daniels at
a National Academy workshop on this subject, and witnessed much nervousness
in the audience about the prospect of evaluating basic science. But
is it possible to decide rationally when to enhance or to terminate
a project if we do not possess a way of measuring its success? Most
program officers within the science funding agencies insist on peer
reviews and peer judgments of the projects they are funding, and undoubtedly
peer review will remain an essential part of evaluation. I think peer
reviewers apply criteria in coming to their judgments, and I think the
process of evaluation would be more credible if those criteria could
be made explicit. That is why I support OMB's effort to introduce clearly
articulated criteria in the science evaluation process. Good advice
about the principles that should guide evaluation has been produced
by the National Science Board, and the National Research Council. More
needs to be done to adapt this process to different parts and different
ways of doing science.
"THE IMPORTANCE OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES: Management and
evaluation are activities that can be studied objectively and improved
systematically with the tools of social science.... I do not completely
understand why we have failed in the past to develop and use the social
sciences more effectively as a tool for public policy. Perhaps here
too, we have not paid enough attention to the structure of the field
itself, and what it needs to function well. Social science also possesses
the three tiers of infrastructure, discovery science, and issue-driven
science, and agency programs need to reflect these more explicitly...."
"WORKFORCE ISSUES: No issue deserves more attention from
the social sciences than that of the future of the technology workforce....
What would happen if all the foreign graduate students returned to their
countries of origin immediately after receiving their degrees? A catastrophic
loss of technical capability would ensue. Already many industries are
having difficulty recruiting technically trained personnel.
"The prospect of such a catastrophe is one motivation for a widespread
interest in education, especially math and science education. President
Bush cares passionately that children acquire skills systematically
throughout their education that will prepare them to participate in
the twenty first-century workforce.... I believe the workforce problem
is more complicated than we have yet acknowledged, and will be difficult
to define, measure, and resolve. The market for intellectual talent
has been a global one for many years, and will continue to be in the
future. How we ensure national security and national economic competitiveness
in such an environment is an unanswered question. Surely we will need
wise advice on this issue from the social science community. "I
wish to thank the Association for making it possible for me to reflect
on these issues at such a high level of abstraction."
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