Keeping Research Engines Fueled

Curiosity--piqued by experiment and underwritten by federal research funding--is the wellspring of California’s intellectual wealth.

While there may be no objective measure of the inquisitive spirit that underlies innovation and new technology, the first full accounting of federal science spending around the country shows that California ranks first among the 50 states in the amount of federal research funding it receives.

Indeed, California receives almost twice as much federal research funding every year as any other state. Its share amounts to $14.4 billion annually, according to a new database created by the Rand Corp., which comprehensively catalogs all federal spending on research and development.

About two-thirds of the state’s money comes to Southern California, Rand experts said.

Created at the request of the federal office of science and technology policy, the Rand database covers $80 billion in yearly spending by 24 federal agencies, involving about 200,000 research projects and 300,000 people nationwide.

That is about 0.5% of the total of federal expenditures and 14% of all discretionary funds; yet until now there was only the vaguest idea of where it all went.

“California is a microcosm of this vast research enterprise,” said senior policy analyst Donna Fossum, who led the six-person research team that created Rand’s RaDiUS database.

In California, the study reveals a research landscape that--despite severe cutbacks in the aerospace industry and a decade of military base closings--is still dominated by defense agency spending.

Direct federal spending in California on biomedical research in human genetics and biotechnology is a fraction of that spent on military projects.

The leading sources of federal research funding in California are:

* The Department of Defense, which accounts for 56% of federal research and development funding in the state.

* The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which accounts for 19%.

* The Department of Health and Human Services, including the National Institutes of Health, 10%.

* The Department of Energy, 9%.

* The National Science Foundation, 3%.

Details of federal research spending--once an arcane interest of policy planners and academic economists--have attracted broader interest recently because scientific innovation now is widely viewed as the key to regional prosperity.

To be sure, it has long been of special concern to California, where researchers have especially benefited from federal largess.

One in every 10 U.S. scientists with a doctorate lives in the state, as does one in every five of the country’s computer specialists, mathematicians and engineers with doctorates.

Of the 10 universities that receive the most federal research support, four are in California. National Science Foundation statistics show that 10 of the country’s top 100 research universities--as measured by federal research and development expenditures--are clustered between San Francisco and San Diego.

The National Science Foundation tracks some research funding. But the foundation doesn’t count much of the money spent on federal research because it is allocated through cooperative agreements or direct contracts, rather than competitive grants.

The Rand survey for the first time links the broad outlines of the national annual budget to the hundreds of thousands of actual studies, experiments and laboratories run by scientists with federal funding.

The database provides “far greater clarity of how and where federal research activities connect with the average American,” said White House science advisor Neal Lane.

The database, which encompasses 450,000 records, took almost seven years to create. It became available on the Internet this month at:

https://www.rand.org/radius.

“It was a massive undertaking, as you can imagine,” Fossum said.

The Rand team found surprisingly little duplication of effort across the thousands of research sites in the database. But it did find substantial regional concentration.

In 1998--the most recent year for which complete figures were available--15 states received 80% of federal research and development money, with California in the lead.

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About one in every five dollars coming to California in federal tax funds is earmarked for research and development.

The work for which it pays ranges from the relatively obscure to the famous. A sampling from the database shows the little-known Smithsonian West Coast Research Center in San Marino, which maintains a national archive of original papers and manuscripts concerning the visual arts, receives about $100,000 a year. The internationally renowned Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena annually receives about $1.1 billion.

University of California campuses received 8,095 federal basic research grants in 1998, totaling $1.13 billion. Stanford University received 1,331 research grants totaling $249 million. USC received 674 research grants totaling $132 million, and Caltech received 609 federal grants totaling $86 million.

Substantial funding in the form of federal research and development grants also went to a number of nonacademic centers.

The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla received $116 million; Science International Corp. in San Diego, $63 million; City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, $22 million; and Rand in Santa Monica, $17 million.

Federal research grants, however, account for only part of the tax-funded research in California. At least $276 million in cooperative research agreements was channeled into the state.

In the largest of these, the National Science Foundation paid Caltech $34 million to operate the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory. The department of Commerce paid the Scripps Institution of Oceanography $8 million to operate the Joint Institute for Marine Observations.

While university-based research often gets the most attention, a number of companies also received major cooperative research contracts, in addition to direct federal research grants.

Lockheed Martin, for example, received close to $775 million in 1998 from the Defense Department for research on programs like Theater High-Altitude Air Defense. TRW received $647 million; Boeing, $565 million; Science International Corp., $339 million; and McDonnell Douglas Corp., $298 million.

Because it pulls together so many different funding sources, the database offers a way to track valuable research across the artificial boundaries of agencies, funding categories and departmental reporting procedures.

Cancer research, for instance, is conducted by 10 different federal agencies, each of which may be unaware of the other’s work.

“Thinking of research in terms of an agency is not going to get you anywhere these days,” Fossum said. “Discovery does not know a home.”

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Robert Lee Hotz can be reached at lee.hotz@latimes.com

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Where the Money Goes

R&D; Dollars in California

Sources of federal R&D; funds spent in California (total federal R&D; about $14.4 billion), with a sample of projects:

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Department of Defense $8 billion

* Air Force Flight Test Center

* Naval Health Research Center

* Army Corps of Engineers Hydrologic Engineering Center

* Project Air Force

* Arroyo Center

* Nat’l Defense Research Inst.

* Aeroflightdynamics Directorate

* Naval Health Research Center

* Navy Personnel R&D; Center

* Naval Facilities Engineering Services Center

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Health and Human Services $1.4 billion

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NASA $2.7 billion

* Dryden Flight Research Center

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* R&D; contracts

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Department of Energy $1.3 billion

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National Science Foundation $392 million

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Other $544 million

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R&D; Grants and Higher Education

Sources of federal R&D; grants to educational institutions in California: (Amounts in millions of dollars)

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Source: Rand Photo images, clockwise from left: Reuters, CARLOS CHAVEZ / Los Angeles Times, MARK BOSTER / Los Angeles Times and Associated Press