SCIENCE / MEDICINE : In Era of Tight Budgets, Scientists Discover Lobbying : Congress: The days of automatic funding for projects are gone. Researchers are forced to put aside the belief that lobbying is beneath them.

When more than 100 researchers descend on Capitol Hill Wednesday, their unprecedented lobbying effort will mark another milestone in a new and somewhat painful era for the nation’s science community.

No longer can scientists count on knee-jerk support from Washington. Instead, as the competition for dollars intensifies in an age of whopping budget deficits, recognition is increasing that they will have to compete with other interest groups for a share of the pie.

“Lobbying is something that researchers are just starting to get comfortable with,” said Kenneth R. Kay, a Washington attorney and mastermind of this week’s lobbying activities.

“Five or 10 years ago, if you told the science community that it needed lobbyists, it would have rejected and cringed at the thought,” he said. “But the days of scientists having their wish list automatically granted are long gone.”

Such lobbying, many say, is long overdue.

“There is a strong base of support on Capitol Hill for science and technology, but the next few years will not necessarily be easy ones,” warned D. Allan Bromley, the White House science adviser.

As director of the President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, Bromley has repeatedly pleaded with fellow scientists to make themselves heard in Washington.

In talks around the country, he has related a personal anecdote to drive home that point. It ends with a telling comment made to him by Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), who chairs the Senate appropriations subcommittee that controls funding for agencies such as NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Veterans Administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

If the funding prospects for science and technology are really as dire as Bromley says, Mikulski asked him, then why hadn’t she heard from the scientists? Instead, the senator said, she only hears from veterans and housing advocates.

That, Bromley says, is a fair question.

“Science and technology in the federal budget are also in direct competition with programs that have very active and vocal constituencies,” he said. “R&D; must have a constituency that is more commensurate with the importance of science and technology to our nation.”

Scientists have been slow to act partly because they have not needed to, given the high level of support they have enjoyed for decades.

Another reason, Kay said, “has been this view among scientists that lobbying is something they didn’t dirty their hands with, that it was beneath them.”

But that attitude began to change during the fight over tax reform in the mid-1980s, when it dawned on scientists that their cherished projects were in danger of “falling off the plate,” Kay recalled.

In response, organized lobbying by scientists initially focused on issues such as preserving R&D; tax credits.

By 1987, a lobbying consortium named the Council on Research and Technology (Cortech) was formed, representing 165 universities, corporations and trade associations. Its current chairman is Roland W. Schmitt, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. Kay is Cortech’s executive director.

Cortech’s first “Lobby Day” in 1988 drew 30 participants, 90% of whom had never lobbied before. Last year, the number of participants doubled.

On Wednesday, more than 100 scientists from 35 states will be pressing key members of Congress and their staffs on such issues as doubling the funding for the National Science Foundation, providing a permanent tax credit for research and development, rebuilding the nation’s research facilities and improving science education.

“It works for good causes,” Frank Press, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said of Cortech.

But he added that he strongly disapproves of the lobbying being done not on behalf of science at large but on behalf of individual institutions for specific projects--the construction of a research lab, for instance.

That, Press said, “is known as a pork barrel, and is a terrible mistake that undermines the (peer review) evaluation system which is responsible for the great accomplishments of American science.”

Whether Cortech’s lobbying efforts, modest by Washington standards, will be effective remains to be seen.

“Scientists can be off-putting,” said Bruce Smith, a senior staffer at the Brookings Institution’s center for public policy education and author of “American Science Policy Since World War II.”

“The idea of unleashing a swarm of scientists and thinking that that’s going to cause an outpouring of sympathy may be misplaced.”