D. Allan Bromley on “Unified Statement on Research

The following remarks were made by American Physical Society President D. Allan Bromley at an October 22 U.S. Capitol press conference on the Unified Statement on Research and S. 1305, The National Research Investment Act of 1998. The remarks of the other two scientific organization speakers, Ronald Breslow, ACS and Winfred Phillips, ASME, can be found at http://www.chemcenter.org/decade.html

“Senator Gramm, Senator Lieberman, colleagues, members of the press, ladies and gentlemen, this is indeed an historic occasion. Science has brought us to the threshold of a golden era. We have a robot exploring Mars sending the pictures back live to our television sets and computers. We have the knowledge of the world at our fingertips. Our nation is more secure and more prosperous than it has ever been.

“My colleagues and I, the leaders of 105 professional societies, representing more than 3 million engineers, mathematicians and scientists, have gathered here today to renew our commitment to the investment in science and technology, a commitment that has made America the envy of the world. For decades, whenever our nation has called for assistance--to fight disease, to secure our shores or to improve our economic well being--America’s scientists have responded.

“Today, with no enemy threatening our shores, with our nation’s economy continuing to experience unprecedented growth and with more and more Americans living beyond the Biblical four score years, it is easy to be lulled into a false sense of security that our future is firm and assured. But the truth is that our extraordinary technological progress of recent years, which has produced countless benefits for our people, has had its roots in the research investments we made as many as three decades ago. Today, the rate of federal investment in research as a fraction of the gross domestic product has fallen to half of what it was thirty years ago.

“At the same time, our taxation, financial and regulatory policies have offered American industry no incentive to reverse its current policy of cutting back on the investments in long-term, high-risk research that were once prevalent. Today, the vast majority of that kind of research is carried out with federal funding in our universities and national laboratories. In fact, a recent survey has shown that almost three quarters of the citations listed in U.S. industrial patent applications now reference publicly supported research in our universities.

“Economists tell us that since the end of World War II, technology has produced more than one half of our nation’s economic growth. Today, technology is widely credited with sustaining the six years of strong economic growth and increasing productivity, which have led to the low rates of inflation and unemployment that we now enjoy.

“Economists also tell us that the social rate of return of our investments in basic research--the underpinning of technology--is extremely high. Some believe that it exceeds 50 percent; few believe that it is lower than 20 percent.

“So today, we, the leaders of our nation’s major science, engineering and mathematics societies have gathered here to issue a “Unified Statement” calling for a doubling of the federal investment in research over the next decade. We applaud Senator Gramm and Senator Lieberman for taking the lead in co-sponsoring legislation that strives to achieve this goal in the area of civilian research.

“We all recognize that turning those legislative words into a reality will not be easy, particularly when budgets are constrained and many worthy programs are competing for scarce federal dollars. But all of us also recognize that without sustained economic growth, driven by technological innovation and seeded by the fruits of long-term research, the balanced budget agreement recently adopted has little chance of becoming a sustainable reality. It is for this reason that we have gathered here at the Capitol today.

“Finally, I believe that I speak on behalf of all of my colleagues when I say that in the future our nation’s scientists, engineers and mathematicians will do their utmost to maximize the return on the federal research investment, just as they have done in the past.

“I thank you all for coming and for this opportunity to speak on this important matter.”