Conference at Columbia University, June 9 1995
Science - The Endless Frontier:  1945-1995
A renewed contract between academia and government?

[Don Fredrickson -- former dir. NIH; Bill Spenser -- Sematech
 Harvey Brooks: has written a lot on science policy]

They will have talked about all the technological wonders that
are payoffs on government investment in science.

Brief presentation by JL on Basic Science.
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 Notes--

I could use at least 10 of my 20 minutes in reviewing all of the
accomplishments of basic science since WW-2.

Of course any such recitation would heavily overlap the resumes
presented by my colleagues this morning -- especially from health
research.  In spite of, indeed because of its applied mission in
promoting health, NIH has always given very strong emphasis to
the support of basic investigation.  It proved to be rather
difficult to devise far-reaching answers to cancer, when we didn't
have the foggiest notion what cancer was, and before that the
dynamics of normal cellular growth.

The most important pathfinder for cancer came from studies on
pneumonia, with the discovery by Avery, Macleod and McCarty that
DNA was the core of the genetic material -- and we latterly
understand that cancer is a lesion of the cell's DNA.

There are several lessons here:

1)  Physics and chemistry had their revolutionary upheavals even
before WW-2:  this is symbolized by the crowning event of the
war, the atom bomb.

[Discontinuities in physics: quantum mechanics, relativity
Nothing comparable in chemistry -- unceasing accumulation of
knowledge since 1880's (Kekule, Berzelius  ....)

2)  This came to biology in the postwar period: DNA has overturned
everything in biology and medical science, from its basic roots to
its widest applications.

3)  The most important discoveries came unbidden, unexpected
byproducts of other enquiries.

4)  NIH, NSF and so forth showed that research could be fertilized
with federal funds, and its pace greatly accelerated.  Always with
an uneasy alliance of academic/commercial/governmental interests,
with expected economic payoffs but some, variable recognition
that the best way there is often the long way 'round.  (The
obvious straight paths to anything really important have all been
exploited long since).

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BUT

many byproducts.

1)  Scholarship on the defensive -- reliance on instrumental
justification.   The culture of science has managed to survive,
but is under renewed assault: both the pressures and the temptations
of the fruits.

  That culture is a system of discovery that depends on relentless
exposure to nature and to one's colleagues; and for the most
radical leaps permission to follow the scientific finding, a
discovery versus the project.

2)  Counter-reactions from fundamentalist strains, uneasy that
scientific advance and technical power are moving too fast:

  shifting power to the technocrats from other priest-hoods
  placing unbearable burdens of responsibility for choice
	life-termination, reproduction, as matters of individual option
  erosion of simplistic faiths, and not very much to take its place. 

The universities should be the seat of critical examination of all
of these issues, starting with the engines of discovery.
Increasingly difficult to do when support for science moves from
the elicitation of creativity to contracts for performance.

And of course -- partly in wake of eagerness to grow under that
rain of fertilizer -- universities are too overextended to be able
to do much on their own initiative in maintaining that culture of
scientific scholarshp.  If you doubt it, ask any tenure-aspirant
in a science department, and what hope they have if they don't get
external funding.