Technology office ready to start up
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Vitamin B-12—Total Synthesis Listen to Dr. R. B. Woodward's first for mal description of this dramatic work— presented at Wesleyan University.
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C&EN Oct. 29, 1973
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Congress' brand new Office of Technol ogy Assessment (OTA) is about to get off the ground at last. Late this week, if all goes as planned, former Connecti cut Congressman and Gulf & Western senior vice president Emilio Q. Dadda rio—viewed as the Congressional father of OTA—will be named director of the new office. And in about the middle of November, OTA's bipartisan Congres sional board will meet again to select 10 public members for the OTA advi sory council—one of whom probably will be a top-level executive with a U.S. chemical company. All this takes place about 12 months after Congress passed a law setting up OTA. It wasn't until a few days ago, however, that Congress finally passed a bill giving OTA some money—$2 mil lion for the next eight months—the necessary wherewithall to do things, such as hiring Mr. Daddario at a $40,000 per year salary. And when Mr. Daddario gets around to hiring a staff for OTA, he will not lack job appli cants. So far, according to Senate sources, there are 90 to 100 job appli cations already in hand for each of the roughly 40 professional staff positions that likely will be filled during OTA's first year of operation. However, it's likely that in the early days of OTA operations, the office will operate with a skeleton in-house pro fessional staff supplemented by person nel on loan from other services. Legis lation setting up OTA gives the direc tor authority to request any federal agency to detail personnel to OTA. One reason for a small staff initially is office space. OTA planners so far have found only four small rooms that to gether can accommodate only 22 peo ple. The fledgling office will face other problems, too. At press time, there ap peared no clear-cut candidate for the deputy director's slot, which pays about $38,000. Rep. John W. Davis (D.-Ga.) and Rep. Charles A. Mosher (R.-Ohio) apparently still were at odds over which one would be vice chairman of OTA's Congressional board, which is chaired in this Congress by Sen. Ed ward M. Kennedy (D.-Mass.). Also, there's the difficulty of selecting the 10 public members for the OTA advisory council: getting the appropriate mix of "top drawer" people who will add, among other things, stature, balance, and public visibility to OTA activities. So far, only Dr. Jerome B. Wiesner, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former Presidential science adviser during the Kennedy Administration, has publicly indicated to Sen. Kennedy's office that he is willing to serve on the advisory council. However, he is not willing to serve as its chairman. No other potential candi dates for the advisory board have been
Electrodeposition of Coatings
A D V A N C E S IN C H E M I S T R Y SERIES No. 1 1 9
A symposium sponsored by the Divi sion of Organic Coatings and Plasties Chemistry of the American Chemical Society, with George E. F. Brewer, Chairman. Seventeen papers report major new developments and research in the area of electrodeposition of organic coat ings. This extensive collection discussess all aspects of this complex process including the advantages of better corrosion protection, lower cost, and virtual absence of pollution. Principal topics covered: • conversion and coatings; pretreating metals; surface changes; power supplies • new polymers, copolymers, and pigments; preparation of resins; cathodic electrodeposition • kinetics; dynamic simulation; throwing power • bath maintenance; design of merchandise; influence of solvents Each chapter offers material of perma nent reference value for the industrial chemist working with automotive and appliance primers, as well as generalpurpose one-coat systems. 2 4 3 pages with index. Cloth (1973) $13.45. Postpaid in U.S. and Canada, plus 4 0 cents elsewhere.
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made public, but C&EN has learned that it's virtually certain that a toplevel executive with a U.S. chemical company will be named. Perhaps the most difficult tasks facing Mr. Daddario and the OTA staff, particularly in the early days, include maintaining the appearance of being a nonpolitical operation and avoiding technology assessment blunders that would destroy public and Congressional confidence in the new office. Properly run, OTA holds the potential of becoming a very powerful arbiter of science and technology issues in Congress, with influential authority in key areas such as Congressional appropriations for federally funded science and technology projects. Among OTA's duties set by its Congressional charter are to identify existing or probable impacts of technological programs, to identify alternative technological methods of implementing specific programs, and to present findings of completed analyses to the appropriate legislative authorities. Finally, OTA could well play a key role in giving the nation's science and technology community a much needed boost in its visibility, importance, and interaction with Government.
NSF gets fresh input on bars to innovation The National Science Foundation has just unveiled a $198,720 report that not only tells what some in industry, government, finance, and labor view as barriers to innovation, but also what the Government ought to do about the barriers. Whether the fellows in charge of the Administration's R&D incentive program will "test" any or many of the remedies recommended to lower or remove barriers to industrial innovation remains to be seen. Indeed, some of the options recommended for testing have been kicking about in the federal establishment for years, but have never been acted on. The report—"Barriers to Innovation in Industry: Opportunities for Public Policy Changes"—attempts to provide NSF with some of the answers to the President's comment in his science and technology message 18 months ago that the Government ought to make "the environment for technological innovation a favorable one." The report was prepared for NSF's Research Applied to National Needs program by Arthur D. Little, Inc., and the Industrial Research Institute, whose membership includes senior R&D executives of more than 225 companies. To determine what those who have had "first hand experience with barriers to innovation" view as the significant barriers, ADL teams interviewed 120 upper- and middle-level executives in 24 corporations (17 large, 7 small) including at least one chemical and al-
lied products corporation. ADL teams also interviewed 82 leaders in government, finance, and labor. In short, it turns out that marketing uncertainties are viewed as the primary barriers to innovation rather than problems with government policy, technology, corporate organization, a lack of seed capital, and labor unions. According to the ADL report, the chief overall comments of those interviewed—"in the context of enhancing the industrial environment for innovation"—call for: • Designating a focal point in the federal executive branch to coordinate public policies related to technological innovation. A coordinating office for innovation policy would be set up in the White House with a role akin to that assigned to the Office of Energy Policy. • Clarifying public policy objectives for technological innovation in areas such as international trade, productivity, consumer satisfaction, job creation, and industrial competition. • Articulating and aggregrating market demand for products and services purchased with government funds, thereby creating market "pull (to complement technology 'push') in those areas where private market forces are insufficient to sustain innovation." Specific recommendations for action—viewed as "high-priority" public policy options by those interviewed— include urging that the Federal Government "establish a pilot clearinghouse for market information" and formulate performance criteria for products in order to clarify market demand and characteristics. The report also attaches high priority to exploring the "feasibility of providing special fiscal, regulatory, legislative incentives to stimulate trends toward formation of corporate new venture groups." To deal with barriers to innovation perceived as resulting from U.S. patent policy, the ADL study suggests that the Nixon Administration submit a patent reform bill to Congress and push for speedy passage of the bill. However, prior to the report being made public by NSF, the Administration submitted a patent reform bill, and there is some push by the White House to get the bill enacted. The ADL study also suggests that the Government "consider additional incentives for independent inventor/small business to lessen costs of pursuing patent applications." The Government's antitrust policy— at least that aspect of it dealing with multicorporate R&D—gets mixed views as a barrier to innovation. So, the ADL report recommends that the Government give high priority to assessing "rigorously the actual effects on the private sector's innovation potential of current and proposed antitrust provisions, and formulate policies consonant with keeping U.S. industry competitive at home and abroad."
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