PERSPECTIVE ON SCIENCE : Yesteryear’s Labs Won’t Win Prizes : While Nobels testify to the past strength of U.S. science, our basic research today is on a steep slide to mediocrity.
Eight men and one woman--seven Americans and a Canadian--made a clean sweep for North America of this year’s Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry and medicine (and literature), awarded Friday in Stockholm. It would be easy to conclude that American science is not merely healthy, but dominant in the world.
It would also be wrong. Basic research, the work that wins Nobel Prizes and ultimately spins off products that improve life and create jobs, is on a steep slide to mediocrity in this country.
Princeton scientists Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor were awarded Nobels this year for their discovery of a special kind of pulsar; they did their research in 1974. Phillip Sharp of MIT and Richard Roberts, now of New England Biolabs, elucidated much of the nature of the genetic code in 1977; they waited 16 years for the Nobel.
Nobel Prizes testify to the past strength of American science, but say nothing about the present and the future. The budget of the National Science Foundation, which supports most of American basic research, forecasts the future of the scientific enterprise far better than this year’s score card in Stockholm. The NSF received a 7% budget increase for 1994, a gain well ahead of the inflation rate. Nonetheless, the NSF must contend with congressional demands that it devote a greater share of the pie to what the legislators called “strategic research”--applied work, where products are already visible at the end of the pipe--leaving less of that 7% for pure science.
The situation is no better at the Department of Energy. In the Administration’s request, basic energy science took a 7% hit; high-energy physics gained by a mere 2.3%, and nuclear physics just barely kept pace with inflation, receiving a 4.3% increase.
For the long haul, pure science is not much better off in other disciplines, such as geology, economics and the rest of physics. In biomedical research, AIDS and the “war on cancer” have generated significant increases.
The NSF request for academic research facilities remained constant, meaning that the slow erosion of university laboratories will continue. Research conducted with equipment that is less than state-of-the-art, housed in labs with peeling paint and water leaks, is bound to be slower and less likely to yield breakthroughs than work in top-line facilities. My colleagues in Europe and Japan enjoy the luxury of modern equipment; my friends here do not.
Basic research matters most. The investigator has no idea what his or her results will bring; the applications may be enormous or nonexistent, but on average they are significant. An applied scientist trying to improve a metal-cutting torch may get a better metal cutter but not a “welder” for detached retinas.
Arthur Schawlow of Stanford University, the Nobel laureate co-inventor of the laser, once remarked, in so many words, that if one wanted a retina welder, a metal torch, a pointer for lecturers to use in darkened rooms, a “knife” for bloodless surgery, better stereo systems, new surveying instruments and a fast way to check out at the supermarket, one could have gotten each by slow improvements of existing tools. Today, these all use lasers, and each is a quantum leap better than what would have emerged without Schawlow’s basic research.
Magnetic-resonance imaging started out as two physical curiosities: nuclear magnetic resonance, discovered at Harvard and Stanford in the 1950s, which was almost unused by physicists but became a standard tool of organic chemists; and superconducting magnets, discovered near the dawn of the 20th Century, which held out the promise of incredibly strong magnetic fields produced simply and cheaply. No “strategic research” would have given us either magnetic resonance or superconducting magnets starting from earlier discoveries; small-scale basic research done in universities provided both. Half of a century later, strategic research combined the two.
Keeping basic science underfunded while steering the most productive investigators toward applied work might yield new products in the short term, but will certainly lead to a lack of intellectual ideas on which to build the innovations needed for success in the next century. The human cost is also enormous, because the nation has encouraged many of its brightest young people to choose scientific careers. When these scholars graduate, they find the job market closed; the lucky few who find employment then spend their most creative years awaiting enough seniority to be allowed to propose experiments to the funding bureaucracies.
This situation is so dire that this year two bright, young, but disappointed physicists were nominated, by the rare route of membership petition, and then elected to the governing Council of the American Physical Society. Zachary Levine, one of the new councilors, won on a platform urging his elders to “limit the growth of the physics community in the U.S.” and to find “help for young scientists who wish to make a transition out of physics”--ironic proof that America’s educational resources are being squandered.
North Americans have dominated world science in the second half of the 20th Century. The trend will not continue unless the slippage that began in the 1960s is reversed and its damage repaired. Strategic research, profitable in 1990s, will do little good for science in the third millennium.
