The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Recognizing Research’s Hidden Value

In the name of a balanced budget, the new Republican majority in Congress is threatening to severely reduce funding for scientific research. Current proposals could cut federal support for science by several billion dollars a year, and by 2000, federal research spending could be as much as a third lower than what it is today.

That prospect has left many scientists yearning for the good old days of the Cold War, when all they had to worry about was beating the Soviets. For it really was the Soviet “threat,” and not our affluence, that led to the explosive growth in U.S. science over the past few decades.

Geopolitical change has now dramatically altered the playing field, particularly in the physical sciences, where most of the Cold War funding for research ended up. Though the scope of the recently proposed cutbacks is frightening, the change in philosophy may not be all bad.

The technological cold war began with the plaintive beeping of Sputnik, the Soviet satellite that was launched in 1958 and signaled that we were not as safe and secure as we had thought. Our archenemy was ahead of us in science--or so we thought--and we harbored visions of terror raining down on our cities from orbiting battle stations while our own space program languished on the drawing boards.

But it ended almost as quickly as it had begun, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Cold War provided trillions of federal dollars for research that could help us beat the Soviets. If we had faced a massive deficit in those days, it probably wouldn’t have reduced funding for science. Staying ahead of the Soviets was the nation’s top priority.

“In a sense, the Cold War was one of the greatest stimulants to federal investment in lots of good things that we’ve ever had in the United States,” says Daniel Kevles, professor of humanities at Caltech. “It’s ironic, but it’s true.”

Gone now. And with it, the way that much of the science in this country was funded.

For decades, it seemed that anything that helped demonstrate the technological superiority and combat readiness of the United States was assured of funding--from building highways for moving troops to building the world’s largest atom smasher beneath the plains of Texas. The superconducting super collider was to assure this nation’s preeminence in the arcane world of high-energy physics, but it died when the Cold War did.

Today, researchers in the physical sciences will have to do what their colleagues in biomedical fields have done all along: justify their projects on their own merits. It’s hard to argue with that: As Kevles notes, the Cold War “probably led to a distortion of investment” because funding policies were shaped by fear of the Soviets more than the need to do good science.

This will undoubtedly lead to major changes in what, why, when and even how much science is done in this country.

But if change in itself isn’t necessarily bad, the ideology behind it is worrisome: There seems to be a desire in Washington to fund only those projects with immediate payoffs.

This approach jeopardizes work on some of science’s most exciting frontiers. The search for the smallest particle in the universe has beguiled physicists ever since Democritus of Abdera proposed 2,500 years ago that all matter is composed of a single particle so small it cannot be seen or divided. Many scientists believe that once we have captured that key subatomic building block and understand how it works, we will pass through the forbidden gates that will allow us to know how it all began.

The super collider might have done that for us. But at a cost of many billions of dollars, it would have done so at the expense of thousands of smaller research projects deemed less likely to keep us ahead of the Soviets. With the outbreak of peace, other physicists outside the field of high-energy physics joined forces to help kill it.

But big science requires big tools, and they cost billions. It is impossible to tell what discoveries may lie down the road if we build things like the super collider. If we knew the answer to that, we wouldn’t need to build the tools.

In a perfect world, we would have built the super collider not to keep ahead of the Soviets, but because we wanted to know the answers.

We won’t be doing that any time in the foreseeable future. The phoenix of federal science will not be rising from its ashes for a long, long time. And it will never happen without some kind of national leadership that recognizes the hidden value of basic research, even with its uncertain rewards and high costs.

Let’s hope it won’t take another Cold War to revive the dream that one species on an inconspicuous planet orbiting an ordinary star may someday understand how the universe began.

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Lee Dye can be reached via e-mail at 72040.3515@compuserve.com.