Summary of Commission Retreat Session:
Themes for Final Report and Follow-Up Strategies

Woods Hole, June 28, 1991

At chair Joshua Lederberg’s invitation to introduce the session, David A. Hamburg
urged the Commission to produce a final report, although it could, as an alternative,
simply point to an array of individual reports. In his view the final report should
Start with a discussion of why science and technology are important to achieving
humanitarian goals—the rationale for creating the Commission. In addition to
highlighting the key recommendations of the individual reports, it should formulate
the recurrent themes that cut across the substantive activities of the various task
forces. The report should assess near-term gains, such as those achieved in the
White House, and also the long-term outlook—our hopes for the future. The task
force chairs should have the first crack at deciding what is essential from their areas
of work. There needs to be a small drafting group, pooled from among the
Commissioners and Advisory Council members, who would work closely with the
Chairs and David Robinson.

Regarding dissemination, Hamburg stressed the need for both an “insider’s strategy”
and one involving nongovernmental mechanisms, including the media, in order to
influence government. His commitment from the very beginning, when this first-rate
group was put together, has been a wide dissemination effort, noting that Carnegie
Corporation is not hindered, as so many organizations are, by an inability to fund
dissemination activities.

With regard to audience, Hamburg said the final report should be distributed to
federal and state policy makers and to scholars, and also to the educated public,
given the right form of exposition. There should be extensive free mailings, op-ed
pieces contributed by members of the Commission and the Advisory Council, one or
more press conferences, and personal meetings with the policy community and also
with the scientific and public administration communities, as there is no substitute
for face-to-face meetings in which people can hear what the Commission said and
why it said it. He noted that all of these dissemination activities would heavily
involve members of the Commission and the Advisory Council.

Hamburg raised the possibility of periodic reconvening of the Commission, to review
the implementation status of the Commission’s recommendations or to revise some
recommendations to accommodate intervening events. Such a convocation could be
a very high-visibility national or international occasion if there were an opportunity
to get higher on the national agenda.

Hamburg noted that during his nine years the foundation has developed “policy
linkage” and even “media linkage” as a high art form in which experts in the field
meet with leading serious and high-quality policy-makers, policy advisors, and media
people in mini-retreat settings (like Woods Hole). This is expensive, but there may
be circumstances for which the expense is worthwhile.

Regarding “life after death” for the Commission, Hamburg indicated that from the
beginning there was a hope that there would be one or two or three places where the
Commission’s business on S&T and government would be continued—analytical work,
publications, lectures, convening functions, consulting functions. He had thought of
these primarily based at universities, but a scientific organization or a policy analysis
organization are also possibilities. He envisions seeding quality existing organizations
rather than starting new organizations, possibly with joint sponsorship from other
foundations such as MacArthur and Sloan. The time scale under discussion is the
five years remaining in his term as president of Carnegie Corporation, with the
possibility that some grants could be made at the end of his term that wouid carry
over two or three years beyond it; therefore we are looking at a five-to-seven year
period. Finally, he urged the Commission to try to get the government itself to
support serious analytical work on science, technology, and government.

Hamburg reiterated that he sought the Commissioners’ guidance on these activities,
but warned that the guidance would have “terrible reverberations” for the
Commissioners because he and others would be “on their case” to make all this
happen.

Discussion

Lewis Branscomb agreed with David Hamburg that implementation is key, citing
Harvey Brooks’s notion that one should do policy design rather than policy analysis.
Hamburg responded to Branscomb’s question about whether to wait for the final
report by saying that individual reports should be vigorously pushed to their own
constituencies when they are published.

David Robinson cited Avery Russell as one expert who says that individual reports
have a much better chance of being pushed due to their specialized nature, but the
final report must be more than just a compilation of the other reports if it is to
receive much attention; it has to have something exciting in it.

Branscomb said the big challenge on the final report is to have “one giant ‘Ah Ha!’”
Hamburg added that the final report offers an important opportunity for enriching
the work by developing recurrent themes of integrated concepts; to which, he said,
he hoped that Joshua Lederberg would address himself, although he didn’t want to
put Josh on the spot. Lederberg indicated that he would be counting on a lot of help
from Jesse Ausubel and others.

Jerome Wiesner mentioned that a large audience for our words is important. Before

we can be convincing, we ourselves must understand how the world is changing in
terms of science and technology.

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Richard Celeste’s point one is that, although an insider strategy has merit since our
goal is to affect the decision-making process, there needs to be an audience beyond
the insiders if one wants to have long-term impact, as well as building constituencies
and reaching the popular imagination. This means the final report has to be
dramatically different from what we have issued so far. Point two is that we all have
the sense that changes in the world are bigger than the specifics we have discussed
and that the U.S. is lagging behind some other countries in its development and that
science and technology can help us catch up. Moreover, it is generally assumed that
the U.S. leads the world in university research and post-graduate studies but from
what he has heard in the last thirty six hours, we are in danger of losing our lead
here; this can tie in to the popular imagination. Point three is that we need to set
specific benchmarks and follow up to see if we have achieved them. Last, we should
try to translate some of what we are about into images that can be communicated
electronically via CNN, PBS, or NPR to the generation that is looking over our
shoulders.

Shirley Hufstedler said it would be good to have a national assessment of how we
are doing in science and technology every five years at least. It is important to
define the criteria by which success will be measured.

Rodney W. Nichols noted that Congressional hearings should be considered as
conduits for disseminating and implementing the reports. David Hamburg noted that
some of the mini-retreat “policy links” he mentioned should be primarily
congressional. Nichols continued by observing that soon there will be a presidential
election, and in the midst of the campaign, few will be interested in taking time off
from electioneering to hear about intellectual things.

Sheila Widnall observed that NSF is the only place in town for funding fundamental
engineering research—chemical, civil, mechanical, and computer. Aeronautics has
a special problem right now because NASA has abandoned it totally and NSF won’t
touch it.

Eugene Cota-Robles said he would like to stress the issue of service, that is science
in the service of the national good.

Robert Solow said the final report should go only a little bit beyond the
Commission’s reports and that we should stick to what we can back up out of our
own work. We should stay away from the economic competitiveness issue even
though it provides part of the interest and emotion. Several participants responded
to the latter remark, including Hamburg who said he assumed that it would be
legitimate and proper and even desirable to attempt some kind of innovative
statement out of what comes from the Inman, Perry, and Brademas task forces
bearing on economic competitiveness. Solow agreed, but said that he thought that
the Inman report’s output is weak, acknowledging that he was one of the forces that
made it weak. Lederberg said that the final report would have a place for critical
commentary on the Commission’s own work.

Themes for Final Report and Follow-Up Strategies Page 3
Richard Atkinson stated that he would like to put a lot of weight on individual
reports. Each report should be strong, and pushed independently. However, the
final report should, as Josh suggested earlier, focus on the broader set of principles
that guided the Commission’s decision-making discussions. In other words, the final
report should stress principles, while citing individual reports for specific
recommendations.

Joshua Lederberg responded that the final report is not the best place for individual
recommendations, but rather how we thought about the problem.

Herbert York noted that the issue of personnel in the government needs to be
emphasized in the final report, especially the connection between structure and
people—the structure affects the kind of people who are going to fill the structure,
and the ability to recruit them out of the pool that’s out there, especially in those
areas where going to the government is not helpful to a career.

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