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Exxon's David Assesses Innovation Former science adviser to President Nixon looks for better coordination of private and public R&D, but believes that White House science advice is effective today even if it lacks independence Edward E. David Jr. is a familiar and uniquely placed figure in contemporary science and technology policy. Since June 1977, he has been president of Exxon Research & Engineering Co., where from a small office at the company's new headquarters in Clinton Township in New Jersey he oversees 1900 scientists and engineers. At age 58, David has done or directed frontier research and development in the two most revolutionary fields of science and technology—electronics and energy. His electronics background was gained through his 20 years as a communications scientist at Bell Eaboratories. It began merging with the science of energy during his three years as executive vice president of Gould Inc. And now, with Exxon, he deals with not only the chemistry and physics of combustion but the realities of the Earth sciences and engineering. The North Carolina native is also a member of that exclusive club of science advisers emeriti. Betzveen 1970 and early 1973 he was science adviser to President Richard Nixon. In that capacity he presided over a White House science policy apparatus that attained a voice so influential and outspoken that the Nixon White House was politically forced to dismantle it. In a recent interview with C&EN senior editor Wil Lepkowski, David scans the ups and downs in science and technology policies since the early 1970s. He looks back on some of the moods and character of science advice in the Nixon White House, and comments on what since has been his pet theme: policies for technological innovation in the U.S.
C&EN: How would you compare the Reagan White House with that of the previous three Presidents? David: This White House is really not any different from what anyone has experienced before. Most Presidents gather around them people that they know and trust. This was certainly true of the Carter Administration, and certainly of the Nixon Administration. Jerry Ford was a much broader-gauged person than most people give him credit for. He did not have the circle-the-wagons mentality of Nixon or Carter.
It was more difficult in the Carter Administration than it is today to get to the people who think deeply. In my day at the White House it was harder to get to the domestic side than the international side. The domestic side was a much darker kind of operation, harder to penetrate, darker in the sense that things were going on which I didn't understand, even before Watergate. What concerns me about the Washington scene today is not its reactionary philosophy, but the tendency to go in the opposite direction, the tendency to do December 5, 1983 C&EN
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News Focus something big and visible to attract political approval. It's true both in Congress and the Administration. You find the Administration proposing a space station. You find the Defense Department going into a major effort in supercomputers and exotic ballistic missile defense systems. You find that most of the increase in the National Science Foundation budget will be in special engineering and education initiatives. I'm always concerned when I see the government putting together big, massive, unitary programs. The best thing you can say for them in most cases is that they produce some important results. But the effective efficiency of them is bound to be low. It's not so much that I mind the money that will be expended, because scientists and engineers are experts at trying to find good uses for money. I'm concerned that they will soak up the human resources in the country for these things and there will be no manpower left for doing the industrial economic things which I think have to be done. C&EN: Innovation is an area you have taken a great deal of interest in since your days as science adviser. Before we get into national policies, can you put the subject in more concrete terms by describing the "innovation climate" and structure that exists at Exxon versus that which existed at, say, Bell Labs, where you spent 20 years? David: Bell Labs was, of course, much bigger, but outside of that there is still substantial difference. The chain between research and application is much shorter here. Our engineering people become involved at a very early stage with research. The coupling of research and engineering here is very, very high because it enables us in an early stage of research to direct it in such a way that it will produce an economic development in the long run. It also keeps the research from going off in oblique directions. And yet you leave enough leeway in the process that new things can be done and researchers can follow some of their hints and ideas. So I'd say the integration of our research with our engineering activities is very close here. I don't know whether it's closer than it is at Bell Laboratories today, but it's closer than when I was there. We had to make great efforts when we wanted to talk to our engineering counterparts. We did it in many cases, but somehow it wasn't a way of life the way it is here. There also was a difference in funding philosophy. Here we tend to get the other Exxon affiliates into our research activities at an early stage. They pay for a lot of the work, so they have a stake in what comes out and what's done here. That's a very important leverage point in the integration of that innovation chain I like to talk about. Money is a powerful thing. C&EN: How do you measure the productivity of the work done in your type of institution? David: Productivity is a hard thing to measure. But in terms of the benefits that come out of the work, you 10
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I'm always concerned when I see the government putting together big, massive, unitary programs
can quantify that. We have a rather elaborate system to evaluate the output of a lot of our laboratories. What we fundamentally do is economic analysis. We look at income, the yield on past investment, what we're getting out of them in terms of revenues, and what the revenues are likely to be in the future from the things that are going on today. And you can actually do a discounted value on those things and see whether we're paying for ourselves or not. All of that tells us that for every dollar we spend we get somewhere between three and five dollars back. C&EN: You recently gave a talk on the role of the computer and information. You said modern computing could be a force for either diversity or conformity. One might ask in reaction to that idea, where diversity becomes entropie, or chaotic, and thus unproductive. What is the creative dynamic between conformity and the threat of disorder that could result from too much diversity? David: A lot of people have had to deal with that problem. But we now have the capability of creating a balance both in hardware and software. Back in the sixties and seventies you had a virtual system with centralized computers and time-sharing. The whole concept of a community organized around resources of that sort came out of the multics effort at MIT, which we were a part of at Bell Labs. Multics was the sharing of a large memory and was basically a systems program which was sold by Honeywell. We're just now getting to the place where the vision of the multics activity can be put forward. And interestingly, it's gone in a direction where nobody thought it would; that is, toward a place where there would be lots of local computing capability on people's
desks, interconnected to where there's a possibility of shared information and shared central resources. So it's a sort of distributive computing system that, however, uses many of the ideas we saw early in the time-sharing systems. C&EN: How well do you think the government integrates its role in innovation with the industrial innovation chain you often talk about? David: The notion that you can have federal standalone research operations, something that was handed down to us from the fifties and sixties, is now an obsolete idea. The federal government has great problems in this regard. A large number of their in-house operations seem to be stand-alone types. And if you look at the national laboratories, they're doing a lot of things where their coupling into the places where those ideas and developments have to be applied is rather loose. That's very clearly seen by [White House science adviser] Jay Keyworth, and he's doing his best to overcome that. I think the federal government has a terrible problem in that regard and it's struggling to do something about it. But I don't know whether it can do very much about it. I think the role of the government is to support uneconomic R&D when there are other compelling reasons for doing the work. When industry won't do something because of the economics, then it certainly is appropriate for the government to do that. This includes a lot of things, such as federal investment in basic research and environmental research. I don't think you have to argue very much about it. It doesn't damn something to me when a project is uneconomical. Economics is only one measure of the utility of an activity. And it happens to be the measure industry has to use most often, if not exclusively. The government does not have to use that. There are many things on the political and social scene requiring action in the science area where the government should take a hand.
less you tried to do some psychometrics and bring things down to a reasonably understandable format. I think it's too bad social sciences have been politicized to the degree they have. But every social scientist and everyone who has ever thought about the field recognize that it's happening, it's going to continue to happen, and there's not much that can be done about it. But I think that the work in itself is very valuable and ought to be pursued. C&EN: This Administration's early reaction against support for social science research seemed to be incongruous, for doesn't work of that sort have tremendous economic and military implications? David: Of course, and I had a big hand in that at Bell Labs when I was there. Psychological research, preference research, measurement of human preferences, human factors—all those things fell into the areas of social sciences. C&EN: Do you feel that social science research ought to be more integrated with innovation research and policy? David: Yes. I think that one of the important missions that we should have as a society is that we should keep technology compatible with social structures in our society and not disrupt everything. You have to look at the social impact of what you're doing to either minimize it or maximize it, depending on what your objectives are. A similar thing is in making a computer user-friendly. You've got to know all about the user, his [or her] habits, needs, h o w he [or she] interacts with the hardware before you can even make a feint at doing that.
C&EN: How much support do you think the Defense Department ought to be giving science before the process becomes pernicious in terms of the militarization of knowledge? David: I think it ought to be supporting a lot more than it is. I think the Mansfield Amendment, part of the 1969 appropriations bill forbidding the Defense Department to fund any research unrelated to weapons needs, was a disaster. Even though it was only a one-year thing, the effects were long lasting. I think the Defense Department ought to be supporting fundamental research and some of the other agencies should, too. C&EN: What's your opinion of government support of social science research in the functioning of a technological society?
We should keep technology compatible
David: I think it's pretty important. Very often we get insights into social phenonema you wouldn't get un-
society and not disrupt everything
with social structures in our
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News Focus C&EN: Could you describe what it was like during the time Nixon decided to eliminate the science advisory mechanism back in 1972? I don't believe you have ever publicly described the atmosphere and events during that time. David: I think the motivations there were pretty simple and straightforward. Many people in the White House—senior people—felt that OST as it was constituted basically was and had been a lobby for scientific funding. C&EN: Who were those people?
There was generally a feeling that OST was not supporting the Administration's effort but was mainly a lobby
C&EN: Didn't the first debates on innovation and technology policy also take place during your time at the White House? David: We wrote a Presidential message on innovation which said a lot of the things people are saying today. The innovation process was pretty well understood in a broad sense by a few people at the time. We had some of those at what then was called the Office of Science & Technology. The reason we had a good group is that we had people who were just first rate. And I'm talking about the people on the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). These were the top scientists, engineers, and social scientists at the time, for example, Herb Simon, Jim Coleman, Dick Garwin. C&EN: Garwin was no favorite with Nixon back then, and with his criticism of this Administration's strategic nuclear defense policy he apparently isn't in high favor with the Reagan team either, is he? David: People can say what they want about Dick Garwin, but I can tell you this. If you want to understand basically something about complex issues, he's an important person to talk to. He doesn't always come out on the same side of conclusions as I do, but I think Dick is an important national resource. He should have been on PSAC, and people should have listened to him. I think that sometimes Dick at that time didn't recognize the separation of powers and began to do some crossover activities that got people upset. But even today in some places as hard-nosed as the Pentagon, Dick Garwin's advice is very highly sought, and should be. 12
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David: H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman; George Shultz certainly felt that way. I don't know about Henry [Kissinger]. Henry probably felt that way, too. But there was generally a feeling among them that OST was not supporting the Administration's efforts but was mainly a lobby. And that was the thing that caused it to disestablish. There was another element, too. Some of the members of PSAC had lobbied on the Hill against Administration programs. And people felt that this was not a legitimate thing for them to have done, that they were taking information they had gotten through their White House connections and were using it against the Administration. George Shultz and some others were willing to have me serve in some other capacity, specifically as head of the Atomic Energy Commission. In the end, I looked things over pretty carefully and decided I ought to get back to the private sector since I didn't want to make a career out of government. It turns out to be one of the best decisions I ever made in my life—and most timely, because it was just before the Watergate ceiling fell in. So the decision I made in December 1972 helped me avoid getting trapped in the Watergate White House. It was pretty clear very shortly after I left that nothing was going to be possible until that situation had gotten clear. C&EN: Wasn't it around that time that Nixon fired his whole White House staff and gave a talk in which he described himself as a necessarily stern father of a country composed of unruly children? David: I heard that talk and was present at the one he gave before the White House staff. He said most of you guys are spent volcanoes; you've done what you can do, so it's time to get out. I walked out with Peter Flanagan and he remarked, "You know, Ed, I think I could get fired up again." I'm sure I could have stayed on as head of AEC. But they were disestablishing AEC, and I felt I had one horse shot out from under me and wasn't anxious to try it again. But the real reason was that I felt it was time to get back to the private sector. C&EN: How did they explain the decision to you? David: I went over to the helicopter pad at the Pentagon and was flown up to Camp David. I was met by
armed guards who put me in a station wagon that took me to one of the cottages. They told me to wait there alone in one of the rooms. It was unreal, Kafkaesque. It was very clear that people weren't paying much attention or were trying to get you to focus on something else and create an environment or an atmosphere in which they could prevail on you to get done what they wanted to do. There was a military atmosphere when you arrived at the place and that, combined with the waiting period and the isolation, put you in a frame of mind in which you might do things you wouldn't have done under different circumstances. I found it stressful, but I always followed a rule not to make quick decisions about important things. I think it was a perfectly legitimate offer. C&EN: So over the past decade you've seen the cycle of science policy advice swing over to where it is today. Is the present setup adequate in your estimation? Is the White House science office effective?
People were trying to create an environment in which they could prevail on you to get done what they wanted to do
David: I would say that the answer is clearly, "yes." You can take exception to directions or other things, but I think you'd have to say that it's greatly to the advantage of the country that you have an effective science adviser there, operating within the constraints that were set out, who is providing a level of technical expertise. I think that's very, very good. I would like to see eventually the President himself have an advisory apparatus, a PSAC, but I think that's a long time in coming. I was a member of the preelection task force and this was discussed at great length. I was about the only person who thought that that should be done. It was in the task force's final report only because a couple of us managed to slip it in. Art Bueche (cochairman of the task force, now deceased) was against it. I'm not even sure Bill Baker wasn't against it. PSAC in its previous incarnations created a lot of enemies. And, you must admit, that as a group the level of arrogance was high, and this came through pretty clearly to the people who weren't in agreement. People felt very strongly that PSAC had been used to advocate scientific and technical programs for political reasons. The industrial people then usually felt frozen out. PSAC was focused strongly on Cambridge and to some extent the West Coast universities. So it had lots of faults. On the other hand, if you establish it in some reasonable form, you won't have those faults any longer. Overall, PSAC was a strong net positive factor in the scene. If you go back to the reports they produced, they provided a level of leadership for both the Administration and the technical community that was most appropriate at the time. C&EN: Science advice implies a concern for the future. One future problem involves carbon dioxide, one of the main by-products of the business you're in. Do you think we're faced simply with having to adapt to atmospheric changes and rises in ocean levels due
to the sheer impossibility of ending fossil fuel combustion? David: Most people think we're going to have to adapt to that because there's no way of keeping CO2 from building up somewhat further. I think the real issue is what the climatic effects will be. We've been working with Lamont Laboratories to look into that, and we actually have some theoretical and experimental work that we've done here. We take the problem seriously. We think it could be serious. But I think we have well into the 21st century before there's any really serious effect. C&EN: But what if we have only 10 to 15 years before we can slow it down once it starts —that after that period, whatever we do will make no difference? David: I realize that the recent Environmental Protection Agency report said that even if we do heroic things, they won't have any heroic effects. I rather like the National Research Council's report in which it feels there is time, that cataclysmic events are so problematic that you don't really know whether they'll happen or not, but chances are that they'll not. The work we've done here involved looking at the effects of evaporation of the ocean surface, and we've found that the effects aren't as large as they were supposed to be, which goes in the opposite direction from what we'd like to see. But research turns out the way it turns out. We've also done some measurements aboard our tankers on the transport of CO2 across the ocean air/ocean interface and the equipment for that has been turned over to Lamont, which has continued the experiments on its own ships. That will tell us a lot about the buildup of C 0 2 in the environment. D December 5, 1983 C&EN
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