The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Funding Crisis Shifts Research Focus

Is the pursuit of scientific knowledge such a noble human endeavor that all science should be nurtured regardless of whether any good is likely to come from it? Or should science be tailored to meet the most pressing needs of a society that now finds its economic resources severely restricted?

Those two basic questions lie at the heart of a schism that is spreading slowly throughout the scientific community. At issue is the fundamental concept that has guided scientific research in this country for most of this century. That philosophy, codified by Vannevar Bush in 1945, holds that science should be held above the fray, supported by society not because it might get something tangible in return but because the pursuit of knowledge is at the heart of what it means to be human.

Bush’s manifesto has become such an intrinsic part of the scientific culture that it has not been seriously questioned for the last few decades. Scientists have not felt the need to dabble in the unsavory world of politics because science, after all, marched to the beat of an inner drum. All the better if something worthwhile came from their work, but that has not always been a prerequisite for funding.

That is changing now, and professional scientific journals are filled with articles by leading scientists urging their colleagues to reexamine their work in light of the current funding crisis.

Neal Lane, director of the National Science Foundation, recently urged his fellow scientists to take stock of the “tangible societal benefits” of their work.

Others have gone further. Radford Byerly Jr., retired chief of staff of the House Science Committee, and Roger A. Pielke Jr., a visiting scientist at the Environmental and Societal Impacts Group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, argue that science policy must be reexamined “because the environment for science is changing fundamentally and ineluctably.”

The two argued in a recent report in the journal Science that the end of the Cold War, and thus the end of our compulsion to stay ahead of the Soviets at any cost, has left “science adapted to an obsolete environment.”

No longer can science be justified just because it is good science, Byerly and Pielke insist. It must address the needs of a society that now finds itself overwhelmed by problems that lie largely outside the domain of science--racism, violence and crime, among others.

That is a recurrent theme these days, but it has not been warmly embraced by the rank and file in the scientific community.

“Many hunker down, waiting for the storm to pass,” Pielke says.

Lane says the debate over funding for science has been met by a “stony silence” from the research community.

It is, of course, easier for some scientists to address the problem than it is for others. A scientist searching for a cure for AIDS has little trouble establishing the “societal benefits” of his work. A physicist looking for subatomic particles that existed only in the first milliseconds after the Big Bang has a tougher task.

The fact is that most science is already closely linked to at least some goals of society. Funding has always been competitive, and those who could demonstrate a high likelihood of social benefits have tended to fare the best.

It gets tougher in areas where the fallout is likely to occur a few generations down the road, if at all. Included in that category are such things as astronomy and some subdisciplines of physics. In the past, financial support was justified on the grounds that the science provided its own rewards, whether tangible or not. But that has changed, as evidenced by such things as the demise of the $8-billion-plus Supercollider that could have taken us closer to the moment of creation than we have ever been before.

What could come from this is a fragmentation of the scientific community into groups that pursue science despite the lack of practical benefits, and those who are involved in areas much more closely aligned with social needs.

No one today can argue realistically that scientists should be isolated from the budgetary cuts that strike at nearly every area of life in the United States. Scientists need to be involved, and they need to justify their work, just like the rest of us.

But let’s hope that in the end, the high road of science has not been abandoned. There are some things we need to know just because we need to know them.

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