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SS January 15, 1981

JOSHUA LEDERBERG

PRESIDENT

The Honorable Harrison Schmitt
United States Senate

248 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, D. C. 20510

Dear Senator Schmitt:

Your letter to Science, which just appeared, was too
important a statement for me to let it pass by without com-
ment. Bravo!

I am generally more enthusiastic about Milton Friedman's
ideas than he would be willing to acknowledge and, like him,
would place strong reliance on the discipline of the market-
place for resource allocation. To attach a license fee to
the exchange of every bit of new fundamental knowledge,
which would be necessary to apply market doctrines to the
world of science and scholarship, would encumber the system
with transaction costs likely to exceed the material value
of each piece of the puzzle. Such a system would be inherent-
ly unworkable and unenforceable. So in addition to the prob-
lems of risk absorption by the privaté sector, there is a
vitally important area of work for common benefit which simply
cannot be advanced without common participation in its support.

The clarity and force of your own insight on these matters
is most gratifying; and I would welcome ways to offer my col-
leagues' and my own support towards promulgating a wider under-
standing of the issues. I. could not agree more with the par-
ticular remarks that you made on the missions of NSF and NIH.

Here at The Rockefeller University, which is dedicated to
biomedical research, we are also looking very positively and
intently at research relationships with industry. These rela-
tionships could help in moving to practice useful products
stemming from fundamental, government-supported work. The
most important function of government in this sphere is prob-
ably to remove encumbrances rather than to add financing to
those efforts. There are, however, programs precisely in
The Honorable Harrison Schmitt
January 15, 1981

-~2-

fields like agriculture, where the possibility of propri-
etary return on investment is hindered by structural factors,
and where government participation is indispensable, jointly
with industry, to meet urgent national and global problems.

X s sincerely,

—

  
 

 

   

Jgshua Lederberg

  

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