1cientific American, June 1948, vol. 178, No. 6]

THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION-ITS MOMENTOUS RESPONSIBILITY WILL BE TO ASSIST THE FUNDAMENTAL RESEARCH WHICH IS ESSENTIAL TO HUMAN PROGRESS

(By Alfred Winslow Jones)

On May 5 the Senate passed, by a unanimous voice vote, the long-awaited legislation in behalf of basic science. By the time this article appears in print the House may have acted and the President may have signed the bill. If so, there will be set up in Washington a national science foundation with unique responsibilities and powers. Almost everyone concerned will be happy about the outcome of a long, irksome debate, and reasonably satisfied with the compromises reached on the many issues that had to be resolved to bring the Foundation into being.

The Foundation will do its job mainly by making research grants and loans to nonprofit institutions and by giving scholarships and fellowships to individuals. It will support research for the armed services after consulting with the Secretary of Defense. It may set up commissions for special jobs and may establish divisions for dealing permanently with particular branches of science. The chief emphasis is on the natural sciences, but "other sciences" also may be assisted, which is as near as the present legislation comes to including the social sciences. Here, almost surely, is a realm for ardent future discussion within the Foundation. The spacious powers given to the Foundation are to be further defined and exercised by a 24-man board of persons "eminent in the fields of the basic sciences, medical science, engineering, education, or public affairs," serving part-time and appointed by the President. To execute the policies and decisions of the board, the Foundation will have a full-time $15,000-a-year director, also appointed by the President. According to the present budget figures, the Foundation will have $20,000,000 to spend during its first year. As it learns how to spend money, its appropriations should grow from year to year, reaching a figure that Presidential adviser John R. Steelman projects as $100,000,000 after 10 years.

United States scientists are almost unanimous about the need for large-scale Federal aid to basic research. Without it American scientific work would move more and more toward the periphery of application, leaving a less and less adequate ratio of basic work going on at the center-except, for a time, under military auspices. The ultimate result might be a hollow shell of mere technology, followed by the decline of technology itself.

The reasons are familiar enough. The practical Yankee genius has always tended toward the making of tools and the mass production of goods, at the expense of the essentially speculative enterprise of basic or pure science. The main sponsors of American science have been industry, the Government, the universities and the foundations. Industry, by and large, wants practical results for the money it spends. The people in charge of Government agencies and the legislators who make the appropriations have followed the bent of industry. All of the agencies listed on the next page have sponsored chiefly applied science. This leaves the universities and foundations as the main traditional promoters of basic research. They have done the best they could, but their funds have been limited and the pull upon them by industry for applied studies has been strong. As a consequence we have been notoriously dependent on European science for basic findings and even for development work, since Europeans, supported by their governments, have been by far the more adventurous pioneers at the frontier of knowledge. To cite one of many illustrations, of the 149 Nobel prize winners in physics, chemistry, and medicine since 1901, 123 were born and received all their early training in Europe, and only 22 were United States born and trained. (Two awards went to Canada, and one each to India and Argentina.) As between Europe and the United States, this is out of all proportion to national wealth and the application of scientific findings.

The war has obviously left Europe unable to maintain its old contributions to the international fund of pure science. If private American efforts could fill the gap, there would be no problem, but actually they are failing to maintain even the traditional insecure position of pure science in this country. In 1929 the funds laid out for scientific research by universities and foundations (the most accurate measure we have for the support of basic research) amounted to only 15 percent of a national research budget of about $170,000,000. By 1939 the ratio had shrunk to 10 percent and, although the dollar total of university and foundation research funds had increased to $35,000,000, a substantial part of this outlay included

income from research contracts with industrial concerns, which represented a diversion from pure to applied science.

More recently universities and foundations have suffered from lower yields on their investments and from higher costs of research, and the universities have had more students and hence greater deficits. During the war the Nation's proportion of development expenditures, other than those of industry and the Federal Government, shrank to 4 percent; it now stands at about 8 percent. Of the 2.5 million dollars which Columbia University, for example, had this year for physical research, only $16,000 was from university funds, the rest coming from the Government, most of it from the Atomic Energy Commission. Just as critical is the manpower shortage. Curtailment of education during the war cut the maturation of new scientists by half. The grievous loss may be estimated as some 20,000 graduates, including 3,000 doctors of science. Those who have been graduated are under an almost irresistible pull from industry. If it were not for a new interest in basic science on the part of the armed services, the plight of fundamental research would be cause for even greater alarm. The war itself brought an almost total inhibition of basic research in the United States. Virtually to a man, the scientists of the United States were brigaded under the command of the Office of Scientific Research and Development for the most massive campaign of applied research ever organized. The more than 2,000 projects to which they were assigned spent $300,000,000 directily and guided the spending of hundreds of millions more. Two of the projects, the atomic bomb and radar, began as hopes and developed into billion-dollar enterprises by the end of the war.

The stupendous achievements of the OSRD shortened the war and saved countless lives, but its after effects must now be reckoned with. During the war the armed services received from the scientists imaginative and efficient new devices and techniques useful in almost every branch of operations. The war, therefore, endeared science to the military mind and even won it over to the need for basic research. The military is now determined that there shall be no postwar divorce. Under military auspices, science in general, and even some branches of pure science, are now being maintained in a style to which they have never before been accustomed.

The best measure of the Government's and the military's present involvement in scientific work is the Federal budget estimate for research for the fiscal year beginning July 1. The grand total is likely to be about $825,000,000, an increase of almost 25 percent over this year and 15 times as much as was spent in any year before the war. Of this staggering sum, over $650,000,000 is for the Army, Navy, Air Force, and for the military work of the Atomic Energy Commission and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.

A rough indication of the proportion of Government funds which is being allocated to pure and applied research, respectively, was given in the so-called Steelman report, issued by the President's Scientific Research Board, John R. Steelman, Chairman. Analyzing research expenditures in the fiscal year that ended in mid-1947, the report estimated that some 570,000,000 out of a total of $625,000,000 went for applied and developmental studies. For the armed services the figures were $465,000,000 out of $500,000,000. Of the $100,000,000 spent by the four civilian agencies with the largest research budgets-Agriculture, Commerce, Interior, and the NACA-about $85,000,000 was spent on nonbasic work, chiefly background research, that is, fact-gathering, compiling, surveying, and the like.

Since the end of the war scientists have been actively debating the role of the military in the scientific affairs of the country. Some are contented enough, and see no serious threat to the integrity of their work. Others are extremely unhappy-alarmed about the fatal blight of secrecy, about dismissals on mere suspicion of unreliability, about the inevitably limited objectives of the Army and Navy. They are afraid of the intrusion of others into their work and afraid that military-sponsored basic science will be cut off in favor of applied efforts when the now copious funds may be curtailed-at a time when the universities will have become dependent on military contracts.

Most scientists are grateful for the stopgap aid they have had, but many are now eager for other sponsorship. The body of scientific opinion appears to be opposed to an entire new department with a secretary of science (as was once proposed) but in favor of a civilian, independent agency. Specifically, through the National Science Foundation they look for a good, solid compromise between the old days of freedom and poverty and the wartime binge of regimentation and inexhaustible funds.

The new agency has been at least 3 years in the making. The New Deal, the war, and the work of the OSRD under Vannevar Bush provided the impulse. Then developed a serious struggle over important details. In July of 1945, the creation of a "national research foundation" was urged by Bush in his report, Science, the Endless Frontier, written in answer to the request of Franklin Roosevelt. The following October, Senate committee hearings began on three bills. One of the two important ones, the Magnuson bill, followed faithfully the recommendations of the Bush report and put control of the Foundation in the hands of a part-time board appointed by the President. The Kilgore bill incorporated additional ideas by providing for strict patent controls in the interest of the Government and in giving control and responsibility to a Presidentially appointed Director, advised by a board of scientists. This matter of administration became the most hotly contested point in the subsequent debate. In July of 1946, a compromise Kilgore-Magnuson bill (S. 1850) passed the Senate, but was killed in the House. The compromise, which seemed to represent a majority view among scientists, leaned too far toward the Kilgore position to be acceptable to the Bush people.

Last year Senator H. Alexander Smith, of New Jersey, introduced S. 526, which passed both the Senate and the House. This bill leaned just as far toward the Bush position, but was supported by many scientists who had come to feel that it was about the best they could get. The Smith bill was regretfully vetoed by the President on the ground that it set up an impractical type of administration with the power in the hands of a board rather than a single director.

The 1948 Smith bill (S. 2385), which will pass in the closing days of the Eightieth Congress-or, failing that, the similar bill that clearly should be made a law in 1949-is a reasonable enough compromise, though it is still administratively not what the President hoped to get. The chief executive officer of the National Science Foundation will be appointed by the President, to be sure, but he will be fully governed and guided by the Foundation's legislative body, its 24-man Board of eminent scientists and others. To this Board is left the final decision on most of the controversial matters that have been fought over for the last 3 years.

The Foundation will decide just how wide a geographical distribution to give its grants and contracts. It will decide to what extent it can hold as public property patents resulting from work in which it takes part, and how far it will have to go in allowing patent rights to those with whom it makes contracts. It will decide whether or not to set up its own executive committee. It will prescribe its own rules and regulations. It may acquire real and personal property. It may receive funds donated by others. It may publish freely in the field of science.

The Foundation must clear security matters with the Secretary of Defense, and it may not go into atomic research without the permission of the Atomic Energy Commission. It is authorized to cooperate in international scientific research but any such activity "shall be exercised in such a manner as is consistent with the foreign-policy objectives of the United States as determined by the Secretary of State, after consultation with the Director."

The greatest of the Foundation's considerable powers is that of deciding just what jobs to tackle. Certain obvious divisions-(1) medical research, (2) mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences, (3) biological sciences, and (4) scientific personnel and education are suggested by Congress, but even these are not insisted upon.

With the probable passage of this legislation, the scene shifts. The Foundation itself now becomes the focus of arguments as to what it should do and how it should do it. The most vital and difficult single issue will be whether or not the Foundation shall undertake work in the field of social science.

Such a venture is admittedly fraught with difficulties. The social sciences differ from the physical and biological sciences more than the latter differ from each other. By the accepted standards of scientific work, the social sciences are less mature. Experimentation in them is usually impossible. Those who operate with social data are forced into more complex and higher abstractions and into many areas where measurement is impossible. Social science has ill-defined limits. At the end of its spectrum farthest from the biological sciences, its lines tend to blur into an area (from the scientific point of view) of mere heat-the warm, disorderly, ethically supercharged humanities.

A more serious difficulty stems from the deep and stubborn cleavage between pure and applied effort in social science. As James Bryant Conant has pointed out, there was a time when such a condition did not constitute a detriment to any

branch of science. Until perhaps 100 years ago, science was almost entirely pure, and technology was in another realm. But now, the sphere of science has become so completely integrated that a scientific effort which remains endlessly pure, with no eventual application, is not thought of as science at all but as some sort of recondite, priestly discourse.

To a degree, this is what has happened to social science. Frightened away from the periphery of application by the fierce heat of controversy that is engendered there by conflict of interests, some "social scientists" take refuge in "pure" effort that is not, nor ever will be, called into practical play. Many an able social scientist spends his time endlessly gathering facts which are not really gathered to be used, because their use would get the user into trouble.

Organization of the Foundation is depicted on the basis of the Senate bill introduced by Senator Smith. Its power is principally in the hands of the 24-man Board, although the President appoints the Director. Many of the organizational details have been left to the discretion of the Board.

Pure and applied social science can serve special interests admirably, but the National Science Foundation is being set up to serve the general interest. Can it do so in the field of social science? The difficulties will loom so large that it will take a board of 24 (or at least a majority of 13) brave men to make the effort. Yet none of this is to deny the scientific and human potential of social science, nor its great and urgent need. True, the direction of effort in the social sciences must differ sharply from that taken in the natural sciences. In the latter the emphasis will rightly be on pure or basic work, since the spontaneous drift is away from it. In the social sciences, more attention will have to be given to practical problem solving.

Some things the Foundation can do easily. It can help develop the tools of social science, such as statistics and semantics. It can go into certain fields that seem relatively factual and remote from the battle, such as anthropology and demography. It could look at such problems as labor mobility, which would have to be gone into simultaneously in all parts of the country and would cost some $800,000. It could study the adjustment of individuals to handicaps and illness. It could look at the procedures of that big and influential industry, public-opinion polling—its sampling methods, panel studies, interviewer bias, and the like.

Since none of this promises to solve basic social and economic problems, the Foundation could, once its formula is worked out and once it has the necessary experience, go after the things that really matter.

Science is increasingly becoming a part of our culture, and general Federal aid is hardly more than a recognition of that fact. Science has given us much of what we have of material wealth, and is certain to give us more. But it is now generally recognized that material progress brings the exaggeration of social and economic problems, while at the same time it makes their solution possible. Will the coming National Science Foundation try to realize that potential, or will it be satisfied to act merely as one more vitally needed agency for still more material progress? Here the President, who appoints the board of the Foundation, and the board itself will face a major decision.

STANDARD OIL CO.,

Chicago 80, Ill., April 28, 1948.

Re H. R. 6007, National Science Foundation.

Hon. CHARLES A. WOLVERTON,

Chairman, Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce,

House Office Building, Washington, D. C.

DEAR CONGRESSMAN WOLVERTON: Thank you for your letter of April 16, 1948, inviting me to express my views with respect to H. R. 6007. I have long been in favor of a National Science Foundation. H. R. 6007 seems to me, on the whole, a good bill and I am generally in favor of it. However, I do question some of the details, as noted below.

I should like to comment briefly on two principal points, concerning which I still feel much as I did last year, when in my testimony I urged

1. Administration of the Foundation by a part-time board of distinguished scientists and engineers to which a full-time Director and the necessary staff should be responsible and definitely subservient; and

2. Patent provisions that leave the Foundation free to establish its own set of rules regarding the administration of such patents as may arise as an incident to its operations.

Referring first to the question of patents, I fully support the provisions of section 12 of H. R. 6007, which I believe are sound, fair, and workable. OSRD handled its patent matters in substantially this way, and with conspicuous

success.

As to administration of the Foundation, however, I am frank to say that I much prefer the arrangement described in my earlier testimony. But I recognize, of course, that the inclusion of provisions to that effect is supposed to have influenced the President to veto the bill passed by the last session of Congress. I understand that the present bill represents an attempt to satisfy, if not fully to meet, his point of view.

My present objections to the administration provisions of the present bill primarily concern what I conceive to be a basic fault: Ultimate responsibility rests with neither the Foundation nor the Director. Quite obviously, the Foundation is not responsible to the Director. But neither is the Director responsible and definitely subservient to the Foundation. According to section 6 (b), the Director shall, "in accordance with such general directives as the executive committee shall * * * prescribe," exercise the powers set forth in the act "within the general policies developed by the Foundation." The Director, although he is to receive general instructions and directives, will be at liberty to interpret and apply these in the light of his own judgment and conscience, but without being responsible to the Foundation or its executive committee, neither of which is empowered to insure the execution of its will. The Director's responsibility, if any, seems to be to the President, by whom he is appointed and by whom alone he may be removed.

This sets the stage perfectly for buck-passing as between the Foundation and the Director-the Foundation blaming a Director who failed to follow its instructions, and the Director blaming a Foundation which tied his hands. Past experience shows this possibility is a real one.

There is only one other point I would mention. Section 4 (b) states that it shall be an objective of the Foundation "to achieve the results of scientific research in the most efficient manner possible." But how can one evaluate the "efficiency" of research-especially basic research, to which the bill relates? Criteria are either lacking or too numerous and conflicting, depending upon the point of view. And by what means, in what manner, is the Foundation "to achieve" this objective? Regimentation of science is more to be avoided than efficiency is to be sought. I judge that the bill would be improved as to form, without any loss of substance, by deleting all reference to the efficiency of research.

Very truly yours,

BRUCE K. BROWN.

STANDARD OIL CO.,

Hon. CHARLES A. WOLVERTON,

Chicago 80, Ill., May 21, 1948.

Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce,
House Office Building, Washington, D. C.

DEAR CONGRESSMAN WOLVERTON: I appreciate the courtesy of the invitation extended to me on behalf of your committee by Mr. Elton J. Layton to testify at the hearings relative to the proposed National Science Foundation. Unfortunately, a New York meeting of the Military Petroleum Advisory Committee will prevent me from being in Washington on the dates set.

My views on the bills in question can be expressed adequately in writing, particularly as I have testified at other hearings on this subject.

I feel that a properly defined and properly directed National Science Foundation would be a national asset. Of the two bills now under consideration, H. R. 6007 and S. 2385, I prefer the former, since it seems to state more clearly the intent of Congress to grant control to the board rather than to the Director. It might be well to clarify this wording even further.

The clause of H. R. 6007 providing for appointment of a Director after nominations have been received from the Foundation also seems highly desirable. I favor retention of the commissions provided by H. R. 6007 but deleted by the Senate from S. 2385.

With these exceptions I am in favor of the bills and their general objective, and I should be glad to have this letter used as my statement on this proposed legislation.

Very truly yours,

BRUCE K. BROWN.