Science Projects Can Wait, Says Academy Chief

In an unusual statement tinged with anguish and frustration, the president of the National Academy of Sciences said Tuesday that the nation’s scientific community is failing to give Congress and the White House useful advice as the government confronts an unprecedented array of multibillion-dollar research proposals and an equally mountainous budget deficit.

“Our internal dissension and the mixed, conflicting and self-serving advice emanating from our community are threatening our ability to inform wise policy-making,” said academy President Frank Press, a respected but outspoken geophysicist.

Putting aside the academy’s customary neutrality in budget debates, Press suggested the possibility of postponing major commitments to a number of prestige projects such as a $16-billion space station, a $4.4-billion atom smasher and a $3-billion project to map the human genetic material.

Funding Basic Science

Precedence, he said, should be given to the broad funding of basic science and research to deal with national crises, such as the AIDS epidemic. Other high priorities should be addressing the loss of the nation’s spaceflight capability and exploiting “extraordinary scientific breakthroughs” such as the commercially promising new superconducting materials, he said.

The relegation of civilian research projects with “important” but distant goals, such as the superconducting atom smasher, to a second priority may be necessary because of budgetary pressures, he said, in a recommendation likely to elicit howls of protest from physicists and biologists.

“If full funding must be delayed . . . let it be so,” he said in a speech prepared for the academy’s annual meeting.

Press lumped into a third “polit ical” category the Defense Department’s research budget and the Administration’s proposed orbiting space station--programs, he said, whose merits have less to do with science than with value judgments by elected officials.

“It may be wise for huge multi-billion-dollar projects like the space station to be left for major funding decisions by the next President, who will be in office in a scant eight months and will have the responsibility for seeing them done,” Press said.

The 125-year-old academy is a private organization chartered by Congress in 1863 to provide the government with advice on policy issues of science and technology. Part honorary society, part think tank, the academy has come to be regarded as the nation’s leading font of scientific wisdom--although one that rarely dispenses unsolicited advice.

Press, however, said the urgency of this year’s budget dilemma warranted a break with this custom.

Scientific Elite

While taking care not to “subsume a governmental role,” he said, the nation’s scientific elite must be willing “for the first time to propose priorities across scientific fields, if the times call for it.”

“We see confrontation and competition bordering on the unseemly between basic and applied work, between traditional and new fields, between modes of doing research, from the single investigator to centers.

“At a time when we should revel in dazzling progress in almost every field of science,” Press said, “this sniping and carping among scientists is disturbing and destructive.”

Amid pressures to curb the federal deficit, a multitude of major research programs and projects are seeking funds:

--The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is pushing for a $16-billion space station to rival the Soviet program, and for a hypersonic aircraft to which more than $800 million has already been committed.

$4-Billion Super Collider

--The Department of Energy wants a $4.4-billion superconducting super collider, a 53-mile particle accelerator intended to maintain U.S. leadership in high-energy physics into the next century.

--Geneticists, backed by a committee of the National Academy of Sciences, are promising major advances in medical care from a $3-billion project to map the structure and function of all 100,000 genes in human chromosomes.

--Many researchers are scrambling for money to compete with Japan and Western Europe in the race to commercialize cheap, high-temperature superconducting materials that could dramatically improve nearly every technology that uses electricity, from computers to motors.

--The Reagan Administration, in a strong commitment to basic science, has called for doubling the $1.7-billion budget of the National Science Foundation, a $10-billion renovation of the nation’s aging university laboratories and $1.3 billion in fiscal 1989 for AIDS research.

Under last year’s deficit reduction agreement with Congress, the White House pledged to limit increases in total non-defense discretionary spending to $3.1 billion. Nearly all of that has been assigned in the President’s proposed budget to science, space and new technology, rather than social programs.

By its failure to attach relative priorities to its wish list, Press warned, the scientific community risks putting itself in the damaging position of arguing “for science at the expense of the homeless.”