Priestley Medal Address
American Science at the Crossroads George B. Kistiakowsky Perhaps on this festive occasion I may be forgiven presuming the role of a philosophical observer. I should like to comment here upon some of the current circumstances of American science and to speculate a bit on ways in which we who call ourselves scientists might participate more effectively in resolving the critical problems facing our people and our civilization. In this era of instant global communications and instant destruction, what we do relates to all peoples and all civilizations. The unity of science has long been a truism. It finds its truth in the unity of the real world to which it refers. Moreover, the relationships between science and the real world are rapidly becoming closer and more involved. It may be that this evolution has not been sufficiently apparent to us as we have worked in our laboratories and at our desks. At any rate, the social upheaval around us and the changing role of science in society make our involvement imperative. Since the end of World War II, for more than two decades, American science has experienced astoundingly rapid growth and has become ever more dependent on public financing, the Federal Government increasing its science budget during that period by about a hundredfold to something like $3 billion in 1968. A few years ago this rapid growth was rather suddenly —one might even say (and some did) rudely—terminated. The immediate cause was the stringency imposed on federal financing of domestic activities because of the unwillingness of President Johnson to ask for higher taxes to pay for the rising costs of the war he was escalating in Southeast Asia. In constant dollars, the basic-research budgets for academic and other nonprofit institutions began to decrease. This trend has continued to this day notwithstanding official statements to the contrary. It has been concealed by the Administration's policy to increase the basic research budget of the National Science Foundation but not 30
C&EN APRIL 24, 1972
enough to compensate for the drastic reductions of such budgets of federal agencies which were created to pursue practical missions. Federal contracts for industrial research and development—stemming mainly, of course, from DOD and NASA—began to decrease in the past few years even in terms of paper dollars. And with them decreased the federal support for the so-called independent research and development budgets of the industrial contractors of the Defense Department. At about the same time—and I don't know which is the cause and which the effect—really independent industries, such as chemical manufacture, began to trim their research budgets. It has been asserted that the growth of scientific specialization, increasing difficulties in scientific communications, and growing costs of unit research, all of which are concomitant with the growth of science as a whole, reduced the returns on investment in industrial research. And so we now observe not only contractions but outright liquidation of some research laboratories that seemed not so long ago to be successful permanent fixtures on our industrial research horizon. Harmful long-range consequences to our industries of these regressive policies are inevitable and grave. These fiscal trends are tragic for those who have lost jobs or cannot find jobs befitting their training and qualifications. They are not much less distressing for many young college
faculty members who cannot obtain federal or other fiscal support for research for which they are well qualified by training and ability. Although these are serious challenges to the continuing progress of American science, one must recognize that federal support still continues on a generous scale, permitting a large volume of excellent basic research, and our industrial research, of course, is far from dead. Improvements in the general economic state of the country and changes in the policies of the Federal Administration concerning basic research might relieve technological unemployment and restore meaningful progress to our scientific enterprise. However, other challenges to science have also become strong in recent years. The social values of the scientific enterprise as a whole are being questioned. Although these concerns are less tangible than the current fiscal tribulations, in the long run they may be more damaging to the continuing welfare of American science. They are closely related to more general doubts about the health and prospects of our society as a whole, but here I must limit myself to problems of science, however grave the general issues are. Some humanists have long ago begun to question the social value of science, failing to understand the distinction between the acquisition of knowledge about the world we live in, including ourselves, and science-based
technological innovations. A poem of Robert Frost, which he gave me a dozen years ago, suggests this feeling. The same theme has been stated less poetically but more elaborately in books and periodicals. In recent years these voices have grown into a loud chorus, and we of the scientific community would be foolish to disregard their challenges and criticisms. The answer to queries about the past effects of science is clear and strong. It is not only that, except for the advances of health sciences in the last century or two, most of us would not be alive today. It is also that, during the same period, science-based technology has reduced working hours by about half, and has nearly eliminated child labor while greatly raising living standards in advanced industrial societies. Perhaps the most important consequence of the progress of natural sciences has been the elimination of many fear-inducing and repressive superstitions. Science-based technological innovations have made possible many concomitant advances in education and communications. They account in large part for whatever progress there has been toward public understanding of the inequalities and injustices within our society and humane treatment of our fellow humans, however much still remains to be done in those directions. These are the long-range effects of scientific discoveries of a comparatively distant past; the current criticism focuses sharply on what is said to be the antisocial role of science in the recent postwar years. In our time, we have seen deep changes in the relationship between science and technology. Our nation—and it is not alone—has become so powerful economically and technologically that any-
thing discovered scientifically, be it a plant growth hormone or nuclear fusion or stimulated emission of radiation, can now be rapidly put to practical uses, for instance, as in a defoliant or a hydrogen bomb or a high-powered laser. Since technology is now science-based, we scientists cannot disclaim responsibility for technological innovations and for their influence on modes and qualities of life. Have the consequences of our efforts been socially desirable? This has become a deeply troubling question for many because scientific discoveries of recent decades have much too frequently been used to advance only military technology. Many scientists, myself included, have been actively involved in this process, failing to appreciate its social dangers. Military technology has become the key component of history's greatest arms race, a sinister race that has acquired a selfperpetuating existence, almost independent of political aims and conflicts. In 1940, as I recall from personal experiences, our military technology was well behind the civilian. Now the reverse is true if space is counted with military technology. In the course of this evolution an extraordinary situation has developed in which a civilian systems-development project, to be financed by the Federal Government, must be an order of magnitude less costly than any such project in defense or space, except perhaps in an election year. Thus, a few years ago the Director of Defense Research and Engineering deplored that, out of our total national—that is, government and private—research and development budget of some $26 billion, "only $13 to $14 billion" was allocated to military and related purposes. That means, of course, that less than
half remains for all other national R&D needs. I for one deplore this predominance of military spending. Our national security is not advanced by compulsive responses to the Pentagon's nightmares about ever greater military-technological advances by our adversaries. In the meantime, with so much of our innovative talent diverted and thus not contributing positively to national progress, the growing failure of the United States to lead the world in new industrial technologies is quite understandable. There has been much noisy, but occasionally sound, criticism of civilian applications of basic research, even in the domain of health sciences. The theme is that few of these applications further public well-being and many go to private gain and artificial expansion of consumption, with total disregard of our environment. There is also the growing skepticism of the scientific enterprise because of its continuing impacts through technological innovations on personal existence. People like ourselves who are contributing to the processes of innovation are emotionally better fitted to accept these fruits of their peers' work. But to our nonscientist fellow citizen the innovative processes must frequently appear as external aggressions and interference with his private life. These criticisms from outside the scientific community have stimulated a vigorous debate within it about the reality of the past guilt of science as a societal enterprise and about its future role. First should be noted those scientists who assess the current difficulties as only temporary. Optimistically they predict the return of science to the exalted status of a unique human enterprise, which was accorded it in the recent past and will be again
APRIL 24, 1972 C&EN
31
when the national economy has recovered and the Federal Government has got its budget in order again. Another significant group argues that scientists should dissociate themselves from all involvement, direct or indirect, in things military. Jacob Bronowski, for instance, is calling for the total disestablishment of science, not by rejection of public funds but by some politically most unusual event through which these public funds would become independent of the Government but still be available for use by scientists. Others, who do not go quite so far, condemn acceptance of research funds from the Defense Department as tainted money but approve acceptance of such funds from other sources in our federal budget. At least two distinguished voices— Werner Heisenberg's in Germany and Bentley Glass' here—have been raised to suggest that the natural sciences are reaching their terminal state because all really important discoveries have already been made. The practical implication of these remarks, if they are true, is that basic research is ceasing to be cost-effective. If so, the scientific establishment might as well face disestablishment, as happened to the class of landed gentry a century or so ago. Still others urge that we, who in their view have contributed so greatly to the pollution and spoilage of our environment through technological innovations, should now submerge our normal preoccupations and forge the leadership for the reversal of this process. The sketch that I have been drawing here of the besieged state of science and of the conflicting directions into which we are pressed to move is somewhat chaotic. It is enough so, at any rate, that an additional voice proposing a certain set of moves cannot add much to the confusion; so this is just what I now propose to do. First of all, let us dispose of the canard that progress of science is near its end. As a young student a half century ago, I read some then wellknown writings—by Mach and Poincaré, among others—whose theme as I recall it was that the edifice of basic science was near completion by the turn of the century. Of course, they wrote, because of seeming experimental inconsistencies, a great many minor findings were still awaiting further work. Some of those minor findings happened to be relativity, quantum mechanics, the atomic nucleus . . . need I continue? Nearly every branch of science now sees the knowledge of then to be no more than a foundation on which was built the splendid edifice 32 C&EN APRIL 24, 1972
of modern knowledge. So let us not commit the sin of arrogance again; let us admit that we, the whole community of science, know very little compared with what we know not. Science was the endless frontier to Vannevar Bush a quarter century ago; it still is to us today. If the edifice of scientific knowledge has not become complete, scientific research remains as much an essential component of intellectual and cultural endeavor as are the arts and literature. This is self-evident to me, but it is equally clear that the massive American scientific enterprise—in its entirety now costing $3 to $4 billion annually—cannot politically justify its further growth on public funds solely because it is a privileged scholarly enterprise of cultural value. In each generation, of course, there will be many scientists approaching the stature of Darwin, Mendel, Mendeleyev, Fischer, Bohr, or Einstein, and they will rightly deserve that privilege. The rest of us, perhaps, are more appropriately categorized by a historian of science, Fournier d'Albe, who wrote a few years ago that "Science used to be an elegant pastime of gentlemen but has become a middle class profession." As members of that profession, we won't receive for long the generous public support that has been ours without explicit service to the public. Looking into the future, we can expect that our population will increase and our natural resources will be more depleted, that people will want better education and greater intellectual opportunities, as well as a cleaner and less spoiled natural environment for physical and spiritual recreation. Add to these massive challenges the necessity to help the underdeveloped nations overcome their poverty. This is an obligation that we cannot fail to meet, if only to avoid grave dangers to our entire national existence. We cannot deal with these problems and meet these obligations without either a large decrease in our standards of living or the development of new technologies for public use and benefit, based on scientific knowledge that is still to come. That is self-evident. The real challenge is to design attacks on specific problems involved and bring the resources of the scientific community to bear on them. To meet these challenges I urge far greater social and political involvement of scientists than heretofore. In the past the practitioners of science have tended to let others in the society decide how to apply their findings. The results, as I, in company with many others, have emphasized have not been uniformly good. To-
gether with those especially knowledgeable in problems of society we must now try to separate the good and the bad potentialities and then lend our weight to the good side. Such involvement would be quite inconsistent with disestablishment of science. In fact, the so-called pure or basic scientists, most of whom are in academic institutions, should accept government funds not only from such "pure" federal agencies as the National Science Foundation but with great discrimination also from those with practical missions, even though, as citizens and scientists, we may have strong objections to major aspects of these missions. The federal money all comes from the same sources and is made available by the same group of individuals—the members of Congress. What is really important is the kind of research one is expected to undertake and the freedom to publish it; the middleman through whose hands the money passes is secondary. If we, the scientific community, refuse to be involved, such research will still be done but in the secrecy of the industrial corporations that are the servants if not the stooges of the Pentagon. Similar considerations apply to participation in advisory bodies. The most dangerous possible development for our free society is the growth of a totally self-contained "military-industrial complex" that comprises all elements of the technological arms race, from the means for scientific discoveries through the development, manufacture, deployment, and readiness to use. In the measure that the complex becomes independent from the rest of our society, it becomes more difficult to control. By refusing to have anything to do with the military the scientific community will lose all understanding of evolving military technologies and ability to advance technically cogent and politically weighty arguments to keep them in the service of the nation. The matter of the military is only a small part of what concerns me, since the major contributions of scientists must be elsewhere. These have to do, as I have already suggested, with selection of new technologies that will advance the well-being of the members of our society, and with management of these technologies so as to minimize écologie damage and enrich our environment. This requires expressing ourselves in print and speaking publicly; it requires testifying before Congress and other legislative and regulatory bodies; and it requires doing all of this wisely. In these respects our record is far from perfect. Perhaps we might do
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better if the advocates of a cause first tried out their arguments on fellow sci entists a n d paid careful attention to criticisms. Such internal debates might be especially helpful in connec tion with new technologies likely to impact on the environment or to pose hazards as well as benefits. I am con cerned from past experience that ex tremes—either ruthless innovation or total blockage of innovation—may be grave disservices to society. The desirability of consultation with professional colleagues suggests that belonging to organizations that care fully develop their positions before presenting them to the general public might be helpful. There are many civic organizations, local, state, and national, that could benefit from stronger inputs by technologically well-informed individuals. How many do you belong to and actively con tribute your ideas to? For instance, the Federation of American Scientists, for its small membership, plays a ma jor role in challenging self-serving plans of the military-industrial com plex. An increase in its membership and resources would enable the fed eration to extend its sound political in terventions into other socio-technological areas. One can also usefully con sider personal involvement in more partisan political activities, b u t al though this may be the year, it is not the hour or place to delve into these matters. To sum it up, a scientist, unless he has a gift of genius in him, is not dis charging all his obligations to society by working at his bench or desk. Either the socio-political activities that I have tried to indicate or a deep in volvement in the educational process are needed to fulfill these obligations. Social and political choices about the uses and priorities of science and technology will be only as wise as those making the decisions. And ulti mately in our system these should b e the people themselves. Scientists have roles to play here in helping people ac quire wisdom about matters techno logical and to participate knowledgeably and effectively in the debates on the issues. If we do this, American science will also prosper and many exciting quan tum jumps will occur in scientific knowledge. Where these jumps will land I do not know, b u t I do have a hunch that at least some will take off from what to u s is chemistry today. Thus it has been a very felicitous event for m e to speak to you, my younger brethren chemists.
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