Hard Times for Science : Going Into Its Second Century, Caltech Has the Blahs; Funding Is Down andthe Future for Graduates Is Not as Bright

The guest lecturers have gone home, faculty members have put away their tuxedos and the lofty symposiums have yielded their final provocative ideas.

All of the high-toned observances of the Caltech centennial celebration are over, but the world-celebrated science and technology center seems to be entering its second century with an uncharacteristic case of the blahs.

“It’s a terrible time for science,” biology professor Edward Lewis said.

There are money problems and, some say, identity problems. Federal research dollars--the source of about 95% of Caltech’s research budget--are harder to come by, private benefactors are cutting back, big projects like the space station are soaking up disproportionate shares of the available money and the competition for grants is becoming increasingly politicized.

“Right now, many senators and members of the House of Representatives are bringing home the bacon for their districts with research dollars,” Caltech President Thomas E. Everhart said glumly.

For the first time in memory, the Pasadena school, whose outpouring of scientific breakthroughs have elevated it to the pinnacle of American research centers, faces some funding uncertainties.

“I feel sorry for the young people,” said Lewis, 73, an eminent geneticist who presides over a revolving population of 2 million laboratory-bred fruit flies in a refrigerated room in Kerckhoff Hall. “They’re not getting funded to the extent that we did. It’s harder for even very good people to get funded.”

The “good people” have always flocked to Caltech, of course. This is the school that gave us seismology, applied mathematics, geochemistry and aeronautics, long before they were generally accepted scientific disciplines.

Von Karman and his rockets, Richter and his seismographs, Morgan and his fruit flies, Pauling and his molecules, among others, thrived and matured on the former pasture along California Boulevard.

There are plenty of young scientists at Caltech now, poised to make their own contributions to human knowledge.

But some faculty members feel that Caltech may be a much different place in its second century. Will the new federal funding game force the heirs of Pauling and the rest into massive collective research projects? Will the school’s student body of brilliant, carefree undergraduates succumb to career worries?

Will Caltech’s unique culture of independence and free-flowing ideas wither in the face of the new limits on science funding?

The consensus is that Caltech will survive intact, but it won’t be as easy as it used to be to keep its special character.

Caltech was founded in 1891 by Amos Throop, an elderly abolitionist and temperance advocate with $200,000 to invest. Throop University, as the school was first known, went through a series of name changes and program modifications, until out sprang the California Institute of Technology in 1920.

The resolutely small, independent Caltech of the 1920s and 1930s, with its student body of loopy overachievers, still chugs away, longtime Caltechers insist.

“It’s a place for the very best misfits in the world,” said physicist Rochus Vogt, with an exuberant swing of his arms as he strolled across the deceptively sedate campus recently.

But the idyllic little prewar institute, so far from the East Coast academic corridor and the sources of funding, has become a 124-acre campus of blocky buildings, rumbling with high-powered research projects and buzzing with the different languages of its diverse student body.

Many of those buildings hold incredibly sophisticated machines, such as a computer that can perform 8.6 billion calculations per second or a gravity detector that can measure movement one-millionth the diameter of an atom, to say nothing of a soon-to-be-completed Caltech facility 3,000 miles away, a telescope in Hawaii so powerful it will be able to detect a candle flickering on the moon.

Along with the big machines usually come big, labor-intensive projects. Among the largest at Caltech these days are the “human genome” project, part of a 15-year program to map the highly complex human genetic structure, and the Seismology Laboratory, which keeps track of 250 seismic stations around Southern California and informs the public about earthquakes.

Some senior faculty members say it all makes them nostalgic for a fading era, when research funding flowed freely, scientific experiments were “elegant” (simple in nature but broadly significant in results) and laboratory equipment was cheap.

Plenty of solitary scientists--”individual investigators,” in the jargon of federal science funding--continue to work at odd hours in small labs to solve the great mysteries.

“Science has to be pursued sometimes in directions that are not in fad,” said geologist Leon Silver, an expert on the evolution of continents. “The obscure project has a fascinating way of suddenly becoming relevant.”

But some worry that modern funding practices may begin to impose a sort of corporate order on scientific research. That would mean, the worriers suggest, expensive projects, such as seismology and genome sopping up most of the research funds.

“If the seismology lab makes a couple of big advances in detecting earthquakes, then phhht, there go the rest of us,” geochemist Clair Patterson said.

Earl Freise, director of the school’s office of sponsored research, says it’s hard to attribute the demise of one program to the funding of another. But small programs funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, for example, have been cut to accommodate the massive space station program, which is expected to absorb more than $30 billion in the next decade, he said.

“Anything coming through the space program is going to be impacted by the fact that the space station is chewing up NASA’s budget,” Freise said.

Even with an 11% increase this year in the total federal research and development budget, to about $75 billion, individual investigators are at peril from other funding sources, Caltech researchers say. Many talk of patching together smaller grants or stretching out existing grants to last longer, or of abandoning projects.

Electrical engineer William Bridges told of the uncertainties of funding his own laser and optical electronics project with Defense Department money. “We got funding for a year, and the contract monitor was very happy with the work,” Bridges said. “Then suddenly, it was, ‘Oops, we lost our funds.’ ”

The project still limps along, 14 months behind schedule, with a graduate student researcher who hasn’t been paid for more than a year, Bridges said.

Patterson, the geochemist who discovered the age of the Earth (4.6 billion years), is a good example of a researcher doing relevant work in relative obscurity, some colleagues say. Using newly developed radiometric techniques, Patterson, now 70, found in 1960 that lead was pouring into the ocean at a far greater rate than it had in prehistoric times.

His research was used by environmentalists to press for the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the elimination of leaded gasoline.

The “lead man,” as he’s known around the campus, still plugs away. But he has been denied funding on an application for a $2-million grant from the National Institutes of Science, which this year rejected almost three out of every four applicants.

Patterson wants to raise lead-free rats in his laboratory and compare them with ordinary rats. “I was criticized for not saying what results I expected to get,” said a frustrated Patterson. “You can’t do that. It’s an unknown field.”

Hard times for individual investigators have spread like a virus across the country, say representatives of other research schools. Scientists applying for grants are increasing much faster than the federal dollars, they say.

The University of Chicago, for example, is holding its own, said the school’s assistant vice president for research, Joyce Freedman. But even there, the number of funded grants have decreased, she said. “We’re up a little in dollars but down a little in the number of grants,” Freedman said.

Caltech President Everhart and others pooh-pooh the notion that individualism is in any way threatened at Caltech. If a new, highly organized order is to be imposed on American science, they insist, the last place it will happen is Caltech.

Since its beginnings, the school has struck a balance between the individual investigator and “big science,” Everhart said. “The Hale Telescope was the biggest science project of its kind when it was built,” he said, referring to the Caltech-administered 200-inch telescope on Mt. Palomar, which was completed in 1947. “For a private university to undertake a project like that was mind-boggling.”

But most researchers at the school are “individual scientists, working with a few graduate students or postdoctoral fellows,” Everhart said.

There are only 1,875 students at Caltech, more than 1,000 of them graduate students. (The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the school with which Caltech is most often compared, has almost 10,000 students.) The faculty is small too, with 270 professors (compared with MIT’s 941) and a research staff of 360.

But the campus is peppered with major scientists, many of whom arrived as fledgling researchers 30 or more years ago and found a compatible place to “do” science (nobody studies science at Caltech). The school’s faculty and alumni have hauled in 21 Nobel Prizes so far and 31 National Medals of Science.

What keeps them at Caltech? Many mention a tradition of informality, with only glancing attention paid to academic protocol.

“They hire the best people, raise some money for research, then get the hell out of the way,” says physicist Robert Carr, who runs the “Yellow Submarine,” a 3-million-volt particle accelerator in the basement of the Kellogg building.

Out of Caltech’s special brand of academic freedom comes what many refer to as “Caltech culture,” an uninhibited exchange of ideas between specialists in different fields and between professors and students.

“Students are your co-workers, not your serfs,” chemist Nathan Lewis said. Other campuses tend to be more formal and “Ivy Leaguish,” Lewis said. “Students call you Prof. Lewis instead of Nate, and they hesitate to approach you. They have to make appointments.”

A majority of this year’s entering freshmen scored higher than 1,400 of a possible 1,600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, placing the school at the top of the SAT heap, Caltech officials say. Many come with dreams of running their own laboratories, maybe winning a Nobel Prize.

“Two types of people come to Caltech,” sophomore physics major Todd Rope said. “There are those who worked very hard in high school and did well and those who didn’t work very hard in high school and did well. But there’s no two ways about it here. At Caltech, you work.”

Those who don’t work hard enough talk about the painful experience of “ASHing out,” being suspended by the school’s Academic Standards and Honors Committee for flunking too many classes.

But there still seems to be time to uphold the longstanding Caltech tradition of technological pranksterism.

Last June, a resident of Blacker Hall made the mistake of telling fellow students that she’d get married “when hell freezes over.”

It happens that there’s a corridor in the residence that, because of its tendency to get steamy hot on summer days, is known popularly as “Hell,” residents recount. A committee of Blacker residents quickly rounded up copper tubing, plastic sheets and a half-ton refrigeration unit that some campus laboratory had declared obsolete. Then they flooded Hell with three inches of water and turned it into an instant hockey rink.

“They let us keep it up for a week,” says Bevan Bennett, a sophomore engineering student. “We played a lot of hockey and broom ball.”

The same funding problems that have cast a pall over research are affecting students’ prospects for budding science careers. A recessionary economy and a shrinking federal science budget have thrown a monkey wrench into a lot of big plans, says Sally Asmundsen, director of the career development center.

“People from Caltech used to have a lot of choices about where they’d go,” Asmundsen said. “But last year, very few people had choices.”

New Caltech Ph.D.s, who would routinely become assistant professors at major state universities in past years, are finding themselves taking “post-doc” research jobs, with average salaries of $29,000, Asmundsen said. “That’s not a lot of money for their level of expertise, education and creativity,” she said.

And on research, despite the difficulties of some individual investigators, Caltech still makes out better than most, administrators say. Almost 75% of funding applications from the school get approved, Freise said.

Even without taking into account the school’s high-powered sister institution, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech still sweeps up almost 1% of federal research and development dollars every year. This year, that amounts to about $100 million.

Ultimately, Caltech’s future rests not just on continuing to get large grants, but on continuing to be perceived as a special place, where the best minds are at work to arrive at those magical moments when dark corners of the universe are illuminated, Everhart suggests.

“Scientific research is a very non-linear process,” he said. “The human mind can make fantastic advances or it can make humdrum advances. It all depends on the quality of the human mind. Caltech is unique in the high quality of its faculty and students. It deserves more support than institutions which are benefiting simply because of their location.”

Caltech scientists obviously still carry a lot of clout with the funding agencies.

Take physicist Vogt, 60, a brusque man with an ironic smile, who oversees that super-sensitive gravity detector, which is just a prototype for a much larger one.

Congress just allocated $23.5 million for the so-called Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO. The final product, in about five years, will be a series of facilities at various locations around the globe, each with a pair of crystal masses suspended by delicate wires in 2.5-mile vacuum tubes and with laser beams focused to pick up the slightest vibrations.

With all the LIGO centers in place, physicists should be able to read gravity waves going all the way back to the Big Bang, Vogt said. At the very least, he added, “we’ll be learning a tremendous amount of new physics.”