NOBEL LAUREATE SAYS POOR FUNDING PERILS US SCIENCE
Author: By Richard Saltus, Globe Staff
Date: Tuesday, January 8, 1991
Page: 11
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN
Insufficient federal funding is hampering top-level research and
threatening to topple the United States from its leadership in science, a
Nobel laureate said yesterday. He urged a doubling of government support to
about $20 billion a year.
Physicist Leon Lederman, in a report issued by the country's largest
general scientific association, said the funding crisis has created a
''troubled mood" so widespread that it "raises questions about the very future
of science" in America.
"The nation's scientists are sending a warning. Academic research in the
United States is in serious trouble," said Lederman, a University of Chicago
physicist and president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science.
The gloomy assessment of the state of US science was made in an unusual
public appeal for increased funding. Although government-supporte d research
has fared better than many other federal budget items, Lederman and others say
$10 billion is not enough to maintain America's leading position in the world.
Lederman, a 1988 Nobel prize-winner, released excerpts from 250 letters he
said he received in response to an informal survey of academic scientists
about their "quality of life." The overall tone of the response, he said in a
report released yesterday in Washington, was one of "deep concern,
discouragement, frustration, and even despair and resignation."
Although the number of scientists has doubled and the cost of research has
skyrocketed since 1968, federal funding through the National Science
Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy is
only 20 percent higher, in constant dollars, than it was then, Lederman said.
Not only is research money inadequate, he said, but the nation's laboratories
and equipment need an estimated $10 billion in renovation.
As a result, he said, researchers responding to his survey made such
statements as: "I am finding it harder and harder to recommend this career to
the many bright undergraduate students who regularly seek my advice." And, "We
are tending to do 'safer' projects, avoiding the high risk, but high payoff
projects. In the present climate we cannot afford to have experiments not
work."
While recognizing that the public may view scientists as a privileged elite
and might well regard his appeal as self-serving, Lederman said he took the
risk of speaking out because of deep worry over the nation's future if its
scientific effort falters.
Science, he said, is crucial to creating new industries that will better
the lives of millions; to improving the health of Americans; to guiding policy
decisions on environmental problems, and developing new sources of energy. But
rather than invest heavily in US science, the government has left budgets
virtually flat while those in Japan and parts of Western Europe have grown,
Lederman said.
Daniel Kleppner, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
said in a telephone interview that budget shortfalls have forced him and
others to drop or delay promising research, while scientists in other
countries have forged ahead.
One experiment he proposed that ultimately could lead to improved high-
precision instruments such as atomic clocks that measure the smallest
intervals of time was delayed for two years for lack of money to buy a laser
system. Meanwhile, a competitor in Holland requested and received a $350,000
laser "on the spot" and went ahead with similar research.
"There's a sense of exploration being lost," Kleppner said. "We are under
the gun to produce rapid results" and consequently more speculative -- but
potentially groundbreaking -- science has to be abandoned.
Lederman's report concluded with recommendations that the present $10
billion level of government funding be doubled, and thereafter grow at a rate
of 8 to 10 percent per year.
He noted that Congress faces a variety of immediate and costly crises --
the savings and loan bailout, the Persian Gulf standoff, the federal deficit
-- but said that the crisis in science funding will have severe long- term
consequences if not urgently rectified.
In addition to the infusion of money, Lederman's report called for
establishment of a commission of experts from the White House and Congress, as
well as the academic and financial communities and industry to plot a strategy
to "make US science whole again."
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