OSTP Director Gibbons on Role of Scientists in Policy Formulation
At a June 26 AAAS Forum, John Gibbons, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, addressed the role which scientists should play in policy formulation. A portion of his remarks on this subject, and the relationship between basic and applied research, follow:
“The Congress assumes that basic research can be neatly separated from applied research and development. That’s just plain wrong. In today’s society, where science and technology so thoroughly permeate our lives, these sharp distinctions can no longer be made....
“This month’s Physics Today provides an elegant example. In an effort to compensate for the flaw in the Hubble Telescope’s primary mirror, workers at the Space Telescope Science Institute developed a large collection of image-processing software. The software acts to help spot faint stars in blurry images. It turns out that finding that faint star is a lot like finding microcalcifications -- faint spots in a blurry mammogram image that can signal breast cancer....”
“How do we make sure that these kinds of breakthroughs keep happening, and that they bear fruit across the R&D spectrum and for all Americans?”
”...I want to emphasize that the primary responsibility for making the case to Congress and the American people belongs to the science and technology community. We are the ones who are the most familiar with both the potential and the limitations of science and technology. As C.P. Snow once wrote, `Scientists have the future in their bones.’ It is our obligation to convey that sense of the future to others.
“If we are to reverse the substantial momentum that lies behind proposed cuts in science and technology, we need to engage many different communities: the R&D community, the industrial community, the education community -- ultimately the entire American populace, because they are the ones who will suffer the most from these changes.
“But none of us will get a full meal if we continue to fight each other for table scraps. Rather, we need to present the best case for our future as a nation -- not our future as a high-energy physicist, or a biosystematist, or an immunologist. And we have to do this in the most effective manner we can. We need to capture the nation’s attention. If we can do that, the facts will speak for themselves....”
“For all the differences between the Administration and Congress, there are many convictions we share. For both, science is a most powerful agent for change in our society. In the end, that is why we must continue to support research, even as we move to balance the budget. Science and technology will not only enable us to stop digging deeper into the hole of deficit spending; they will enable us to climb out of the hole we have dug.”
