Kiss-Off for Science

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has fallen on hard times. The job of science adviser to the President--which used to be filled by luminaries like George Kistiakowsky, Jerome Weisner and Lee Du Bridge--has now become a consolation prize given to someone passed over for a more important job. After five months of searching, the Administration couldn’t find a distinguished scientist willing to become President Reagan’s science adviser. So it has given the post to William R. Graham, last seen as acting administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration when the Challenger exploded. He wanted to be the administrator, but that spot went to James Fletcher.

Small wonder that no world-class scientist could be persuaded to be the President’s science adviser. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the job, the idea was to bring the nation’s best scientific advice into the White House. For a while, Presidents reached out to highly respected scientists to fill it. How much access and influence they actually had is an open question. They probably had less than they thought they would when they took the job.

Some Presidents don’t really want independent advisers on their staffs. But they still need advice on technical matters. If anything, issues of science policy are more important today than they were in the 1950s. They include the Strategic Defense Initiative, the reorganization of NASA and the future of the manned space program, the regulation of biotechnology, a decision on whether to build the $3-billion superconducting supercollider that physicists want, what to do about AIDS policy, and whether to move ahead on the “Orient Express” airplane, to name a few. Yet the science adviser has become just another spokesman for the President rather than a source of tough-minded, independent advice.

Richard M. Nixon did away with the job in 1973, but Congress restored it by statute. Gerald R. Ford’s science adviser, Guy Stever, and Jimmy Carter’s, Frank Press, both had stature within the scientific community.

But Reagan has had trouble from the outset. When he came to office in 1981, several distinguished scientists turned him down, and he had to reach into the ranks to tap a little-known physicist at the Los Alamos weapons laboratory, George A. Keyworth II, to fill the post. Keyworth’s main qualification was that he shared the President’s political views. He left last January to go into the consulting business.

The appointment of Graham does not inspire confidence about this Administration’s view of the importance of science or the need to ground its decisions in fact. It should have gotten somebody better, and it could have if they considered the job significant, which it doesn’t.