GFFICE MEMCRANDUM © STANFORD UNIVERSITY @ OFFICE MEMORANDUM e@ STANFORD UNIVERSITY @ OFFICE MEMORANDUM

Date:
1
To: Phil Handler NOV 24 1971
Prof. Joshua Lederberg
Department of Senetas
FROM

School of Medicine
Stantord University

Stanford, California 94305
SuaJect: Authenticity of Scientific Advice: role os(Nas_)

I know you are going through an agony over this. I wanted to call you today, but
finding you out, I send this memo to prepare for a phone discussion. Would you call me
back?

The detailed argumen ts can better be done over “x phone. My operational sugges-~
tion is that the NAS membership be encouraged to play a more responsible role in the
scrutiny of recommendations made by NAS committees, whose public reputation does rest
to a lage measure in the reputation of the membership of the whole academy.

Publication (following disinterested review) is of course the crucial process to
sustain the authenticity of experimental science. NAS committee reports are of course
published, but in a way that discourages pluralistic and responsible criticism frem the
membership, except in the most controversial and emotionally loaded situations. After a
report is announced in the press, it will takes days or weeks before a member will learn
of the text, perhaps receive it (at his own expense!) and then he has no convenient forum
in which to respond, unless te means to make (literally) a federal case of it.

My proposal: that a privilege and responsibility of NAS membership is to receive
gratis, and concurrently with any public release, the texts of any reports that invoke
the authority of the NAS. Members will be invited to respond with critical (which means
+ or -) comments which will be retained on file at the Academy, and available to any
inquirer for the cost of reproduction. By some now unspecified mechanism it may also be
decided to publish these comments as appendices to the principal report. The cost of
such an operation is not a legitimate c-iticism; it will be a small increment to the
existing budget, and in my view likely to result in a great improvement in tne quality
of reports and in their credibility. As NAS is dragged or self-propelled into mor e and
more controversial areas of inquiry, it becomes ever more important to sustain an example
of open dialogue as opposed to authoritarian dicta.. Models for such procedures are al-
ready well established in the federal bureaucracy (e.g. publication of proposed rezula-
tions in the Federal Register) as well as in the paradigms of the scientific process
-- Polanyi's "Republic of Science" if you like. Members might also act as communicators
(without prejudice + or -) of critical texts prepared by others,

One could also think of an analogue of the Federal Register, a Journal of the NAS
which would record texts in sometimes less than elegant formats in a way that might save
both time and(perhaps) money.

I look forward to going into this with you in more detail.

Sincerely,

 

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