Future of American Science (1979) / Chapter Skim
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The Future of American Science
The Future of American Science
Pages 15-28
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From page 15... ...
It is that elusive, triumphal quality of the human mind that we term "creativity" that, appearing with especial force in very rare human beings, has blazed the way from the caves of our ancestors -- only a moment ago, as geologic time is measured -- to the rich fabric of life in the industrialized nations of the world and most particularly in this one. That is an elitist view of history.
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From page 16... ...
Edison died in 1931, President Hoover contemplated a proclamation that would have turned off all electric power in the United States for two minutes -- but then recognized that such an action had become about as unthinkable as asking all American hearts to stop beating for two minutes. As others have noted, Edison's greatest gift to us was "the invention of invention," the gathering and leadership of what we now recognize as the world's first industrial research laboratory, which served as prototype for those at General Electric, IBM, Bell Telephone, Du Pont, RCA, HewlettPackard, Eli Lilly, Westinghouse, etc., as well as Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, NRL, and Wright Field, that have, in our time, offered the veritable cornocupia of technology that has totally transformed the nature of daily life and vastly altered the nature of the military endeavor.
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From page 17... ...
Modern science arose from the ashes of World War II, which for the first time witnessed in several countries full-scale mobilization of national scientific resources directed to the most critical circumstance of the moment. By integrating fundamental research, applied research, and development, the technological accomplishments were prodigious: not only rocketry, radar, jet engines, the proximity fuse, and nuclear weapons but also penicillin, atabrine, sulfonamides, fractionated blood plasma, treatment of shock and burns, and even the beginnings of peripheral nerve surgery.
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From page 18... ...
A limited number of special laboratories were created with purely scientific missions, usually centered about one or more major pieces of research equipment -- an accelerator, a telescope, or oceangoing vessels, for example. In this "big science" category may also be included several of the great industrially sponsored laboratories, the National Institutes of Health at Bethesda, the NRL and a few others.
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From page 19... ...
We are perhaps one third of the world total, West Europe and Japan together constitute a second third (although Japan spends disproportionately little on basic research) , and the East European nations together represent a more or less equivalent third major bloc.
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From page 20... ...
A decade ago every European scientist found it necessary to spend at least a year in the United States, and there was a flurry of planning of cooperative research between American and European laboratories. But today, driven by the high costs of major scientific instruments, those relationships are being replaced by a network of cooperative endeavors within Western Europe itself.
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From page 21... ...
Scientists work well on their toes -- not on their knees. Support of scientific research by government meant that, inherently, it was to be subject to a tension that has characterized American society from its beginning -- egalitarianism versus elitism, in this case, pressures to assure that funds appropriated in support of research are distributed geographically as widely as possible versus pressures to support only the very best of science wherever it may be.
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From page 22... ...
As you well know, a set of inhibitory phenomena has begun to afflict industrial research. There is a rising sense of national concern for the decline in innovation in American industry, concern that might not find expression were it not for the extraordinary invasion of the American market by technology designed and produced outside our borders, resulting in a negative balance of payments for technology itself.
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From page 23... ...
On one side we confront a potential military adversary whose government controls all aspects of their national life and deliberately invests in military preparation, including R&D, a far larger fraction of its GNP than will our country in the absence of a military emergency. The challenge to the relevant American scientific community is to assure that we compensate in quality for what we are unwilling to purchase in quantity.
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From page 24... ...
Their competitive success may rest, at least in some part, on the circumstance that the German and Japanese counterparts of our brightest scientists and engineers, shielded by the American military umbrella, are designing superior consumer products for the American market; no easy solution to that dilemma is evident. As a minimum, we should surely encourage those nations to do more basic research and help fund some of our large science projects.
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From page 25... ...
And when scientists fail to recognize that boundary, unspoken ideological or political beliefs becloud seemingly scientific debate. It is imperative that those who study technological risk carefully document their conclusions and recommendations.
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From page 26... ...
It is not that we know all we need to know -- we do not. But it is imperative that we contain the feckless debate concerning the magnitude of the risk of proliferation if we build breeders or engage in reprocessing, the risks involved in burning coal, the economics and feasibility of solar energy, the environmental consequences of a synthetic fuels program, and the myriad other ways that may contribute in various small degrees to the nation's energy supply.
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From page 27... ...
Harvey Brooks of Harvard University has pointed out that the optimists among scientists continue to see scientific understanding as a worthy goal in itself. We see it as the means for expanding the planet's energy resource base, for converting nonrenewable resources into an infinite resource base for minimizing human pain and disease, and, in his phrase, as "a means of so managing affairs that the goal of an equitable harmonious world need not be denied to mankind." But the path is perilous.
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From page 28... ...
Those expectations have taken on a new light as science has also revealed the true condition of man on earth. I see no alternative but to address vigorously the principal questions of science itself and to use our ever-widening understanding and increasingly sophisticated technology with grace and charity and wisdom.
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