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Gibbons Integrates Science At The Top
around what he considers his key investments for the future. I've been pleased to be a part of this process—to protect science to the point that it has maintained its support while everything around it has been cut considerably more.
Presidential science adviser reflects on Clinton Administrationn policy changes
The R&D community nevertheless hasn't been too happy with any kind of sacrifice. The community has come to understand that we're now challenged to play the c zero sum game, which I means you'll be lucky to = get next year what you | got this year. The chal% lenge is to be creative B and do new things by £ virtue of increased productivity with the understanding that to do something new you have to stop doing something old. The community, over the course of the last three-and-a-half years, has come a very long way in understanding that challenge and responding to it. You see revolutions going on in the National Aeronautics & Space Administration, for example, in the way people are going about trying to be creative with far fewer increases in resources. There are other things of vital importance like the change in our nuclear testing policy and our new partnerships between government and the private sector where we use public resources to leverage private resources in areas of advanced research and development.
P
resident Clinton's science adviser, John H. Gibbons, has held his position from the moment Bill Clinton was sworn in as president. Since that time, Gibbons, who also wears the Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) director's hat, has presided over several fundamental changes in U.S. science and technology policy—from the decision to balance the federal budget by 2002 to the reconfiguration of the space program to efforts to coordinate science and technology programs across the federal agencies. The last three-and-a-halfyears have been a time of stress for science and technology and a time of enormous change in scientific and technological institutions. In this interview with C&EN Senior Correspondent Wil Lepkowski, Gibbons discusses some of the high points of his term as science adviser, what it is like to work for Clinton and Gore, how his position as science adviser has evolved, and some issues that continue to concern him. First, in general, what have your three-and-a-half years as President Clinton's science adviser been like? Internally, it's been very interesting working for Clinton and Gore. They brought to the White House a very well founded understanding of the ubiquitous role that science and technology play in achieving national goals. They totally understand the overarching goals of the country, whether it be the economy, environment, health, national security. They know that all these things are intimately tied up with the things science and technology have to offer. And that's something that makes my job a lot easier. OSTP isn't the same kind of place it was in earlier times, is it? In the past, OSTP was usually seen as an office isolated within the West Wing of the White House, tied to specific issues such as defense or science for its own sake. This president and vice president 26 OCTOBER 7, 1996 C&EN
brought to the White House a high degree of appreciation for science and technology right from the start, while I had the longer term job of getting this office fully integrated into the wider issues of security, the economy, and other things. So I was pleased that I was a member You can't attend every meeting in the of the National Security Council, the Do- executive office of the president Is mestic Policy Council, and the National there a hot button or hot e-mail Economic Council, and that my top peo- address you can use to reach the ple were jointly appointed to the staffs of president? those bodies. The president then created I can send him a note, which is the most the National Science & Technology Coun- effective way, because, as the vice presicil, which tries to integrate science and dent described him, he's a wonk. He technology into other areas in ways that reads rapidly and he absorbs information never happened before. very quickly. We talk on the telephone. The second part of this is that the He called me just before he went to Chipresident came in talking about fixing cago for the Democratic convention our runaway deficit. What we've seen about some ideas. And that was right out happen is that science and technology of the blue. So it just depends, the cirhave had to take their hits, too. And in cumstances change. You have a variety the course of that, the president has of these mechanisms, none of which you wanted to build some protective fences want to overuse.
volved in the Middleburg Forum, which is our own little council of foreign relations out there. And my wife is heavily involved in politics and environmental work out there. Sometimes the people there are afraid to ask me about science, but they are very interested in how government works and the personalities of the people in government. And I've tried to be as candid as I can about the working relationships here and how, at least in this Administration, a scientist is part and parcel of our mechanisms for getting things done.
What was the subject of his call to you before he went to Chicago? He wanted some instances of where public investment and private investment combined to make definitive advances in jobs, environment, or our national well-being. We went over some examples. And you, of course, pulled them off the top of your head? Well, actually I didn't, to be honest. I said, "I'd rather call you back." So I called him back in about 20 minutes and when I called in to the operator I said I needed to return a call from the president, but that I would be happy to talk with one of the people that were there with him. She said, "No. He'd rather take your call himself." So, I enjoy this kind of comfortable relationship with the man. I know both him and Al Gore pretty well. I know how they think, and I believe I can faithfully represent their interests when I go out. These men, both of them, have not only enormous physical energy, but they have great intellectual curiosity and an ability to absorb information and have it reemerge in their own context. How did you get so comfortable with the president? Beginning when he was with the National Governors Association and I was with Congress' Office of Technology Assessment. And then later as we spent time together when he asked me to come out to Little Rock to talk with him before December 1992, and then just in the variety of times ever since—when I meet with him, when I'm briefing him on things, when he meets with me and others on various issues, when I watch him, for instance, strongly defend the science and technology budget when everything is under attack and he's having to make decisions right down the line. You've spent a lot of time going "outside the Beltway" to talk to people about the Administration's science and technology policy. What differences in perception do you find between views held in Washington and those held elsewhere? People in university research departments or in national labs tend to see their work, usually, in much more confined ways than we see their work in Washington. Many don't seem to have integrated their sense of priorities with some of the overarching priorities of, for example, the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles and the like. Typically when you get inside the
Beltway, you're forced to look more at the broader context of research, and that shapes your sense of priorities. That's why you have to keep moving back and forth, to make sure you're not getting an overly distorted view of the world. Many people haven't come to recognize that part of their responsibility as scientists is not only to do good science but also to help people understand what they are doing. There are a lot of folks who underappreciate their role of scientist as citizen. They need to make sure that those investing in them—namely the American people—have a clear understanding of what they are doing. This is much better done in biomedical research and the health sciences than in the physical sciences, and they generally enjoy much broader public support. When you get to things like particle physics, it's a lot more difficult to make the connection. When we don't make the connection, we stand to lose support. The idea of scientist as citizen has been an underattended need partly because we enjoyed that multidecade Cold War social contract that said: "Keep us secure and we'll keep funding you." So we are now in this interregnum where we haven't reidentified the drivers for the support of science.
In what specific areas have you been spending most of your time as headofOSTP? I've been working with the agencies so that they work as a more cohesive whole, trying to get past the stovepipes that so easily arise in any set of institutions. For example, the other day I went to a meeting at the National Academy of Sciences between U.S. and Japanese representatives on earthquake science, prediction, response, and cooperation. We have 17 agencies operating as a unit under the Federal Emergency Management Administration where we pull together all earthquake-related activities of these agencies into a single coherent whole. It's going to make a difference when the big one hits. The same sort of thing has happened with the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles—the so-called Clean Car Initiative. Here again, we have seven agencies working as one under the Department of Commerce, and the pull for all of this is the auto industry itself. They work out joint ventures and make tough decisions, like whether to stop doing something because it's better to do something else. Some people have suggested a Department of Science to do these kinds of things. But we're trying to do them in a way that avoids the need to reorganize departments and change congressional committees.
You're describing, aren't you, the Do you relate to your community of function of the National Science & The Plains, Va., as a scientist-citizen? Technology Council? How has NSTC I sing in the church choir. I've preached evolved during the two years it's on Earth Day at the local church. I'm in- been in existence? OCTOBER 7, 1996 C&EN 27
government Well, NSTC has sort of been the yenta, the marriage broker as it were, that allows these things to happen. We've done things like the stockpile stewardship program for nuclear weapons, and we also played a heavy role in the merging of interests of the Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, and the Defense Department in education technology activities for kindergarten through 12th grade. We've done work on merging defense and civilian assets in earth-sensing programs. The president has signed a very comprehensive space policy directive that runs the gamut from the civil to the military. It was a tricky process in that it involved trade-off between defense and intelligence over how decisions are made to declassify surveillance technologies. Does the new space policy change the overall space goals for the U.S.? There are no changes in overall goals. But what it does is get beyond the previous 80-odd-page policy set under the Bush Administration. What this directive does is to completely revise it and replace it with a 17-page statement that covers both the civil and the military, the division of authority and responsibilities, and the merging of activities. We have very strong national security needs for space. Yet, at the same time, the commercialization of our space technology and assets is very important. Our former Cold War adversaries want to offer space launch capabilities of their own, and we are fostering the merger of their commercial interests with some of our commercial people. We are moving from a quota-based system to a much more open competitive system for offering launch services. Also, we have finally made decisions on how to get beyond the shuttle, which is a money eater of mammoth proportions. The decision to build the X-33 reusable launch vehicle this summer was one more facet of this long-term approach to getting lower cost entry into space and at the same time maintaining as best we can our work in advanced aeronautics and space sciences. What are the prospects for a manned mission to Mars? Not now. Too expensive and we don't know whether we need a man there or not, or whether he or she could make it back. But we are sending two superbly instrumented robotic missions to Mars within the next several months. It's part 28 OCTOBER 7, 1996 C&EN
of NASA's cheaper, faster way of miniaturizing stuff and therefore dropping its costs and timing. And we're going to have some discussions this fall about the implications of the Mars rock—of what it means in terms of geophysical prospecting and core drilling and sample selection and return. And the space station and other activities will further enable us to evaluate the utility of humans in space over a long duration. What did the discovery of possible life on Mars mean to you, then? There were two almost simultaneous events this summer that signified to me the craziness of the notion that we are at the end of science. The first was the Mars meteorite and the elegance of multidisciplinary methods of analysis of that rock. It is really beautiful to watch the way the different disciplines came together to provide the kind of data we now have on it. It even goes back all the way to the Viking landing, which sampled the martian atmosphere and was a key thing to tell us whether this meteorite was from Mars or not. Whether it was the same atmosphere 18 million years ago as it is now is the question, though. Almost simultaneous was the sequencing of the genes of bacteria found in the fumaroles of the deep ocean. These are fundamentally different forms of life. One-third of the genes were not found anywhere else before. We see not only how a different life form evolved in deep-sea biology, but also what we might be able to do in terms of potential waste processing and other biologically driven opportunities. So here we are, finding that we have to rewrite our text-
books in biology based on the things we are finding out this year. Here were two new windows opening up on our origins, which just further underscore the excitement of the times in science. What were your thoughts when the president decided to sign the welfare bill and got criticism for it from traditional Democrats? What could your role be in the face of charges that Clinton has abandoned the country's poor kids? Well, the last thing we're going to do is abandon our kids. I know the president wrestled hard with it, and he did feel an imperative to move ahead on welfare reform. But his commitment is very strong toward protecting our children. He wants to make these investments toward early-childhood development. He understands the new neuroscience discoveries concerning very early postnatal stimulation. Stimulation affects the way their neurons hook up and ultimately affects their level of intellectual capacity. We also found out how early music exposure can grossly affect people's ability to learn science and mathematics. He knows it. Hillary knows it. I've talked to both of them about it, and I think they believe that if we can use some of this science as well as some of this new information technology that's now available and make these investments in kids early on, that we're going to be able to overcome all these difficulties. That's independent of the welfare bill, but it's a part of it. In a related area, Henry Cisneros [Secretary of Housing & Urban Development] told me the other night, right here in this office, about how he wants to transform public housing districts essentially into campuses for learning and education so that the parents and the kids, as a condition for being there, are going to be taking courses and learning and therefore having a far better chance to become economically productive citizens. The president's whole notion is that the way you can move out of welfare is to equip people to work. And that comes through a variety of mechanisms, not only with kids, but also with their parents. Are you looking ahead to a second Clinton term? Other than trying to get through the first term, what
we're trying to do now is continue to push ahead on the things we are doing. Last week, I spent two days working on the relationship we are building with the states and with the private sector on environmental technologies, where you use innovation to lower the cost of environmental protection but also to develop an industry that is vital and growing and will hopefully have a larger market share of the global environmental technology industry. At the same time we'll be turning our heads in the next month or so to trying to define a legacy for the next president. The second thing is to continue to work hard on the fiscal 1998 budget, to work toward balancing it while protecting programs in the discretionary parts. Discretionary programs will be going from one-sixth of our total budget to oneseventh of the total. How do we define and protect the investments in there, investments that are going to enable the future? As one Texan told me, he was worried that we might have a balanced budget but be flat broke by the time we get there in terms of momentum of investment that creates new opportunities. The '98 budget is going to be where a lot of it comes together. After four years, you've worked through the fat and you're into bone and muscle. So the surgery has to become that much more delicate. Many federal programs are obviously going to be shucked off to the states, aren't they? A lot of them already are. I think we need to look at governance, not just the federal but the whole national system of governance. For instance, I'm very pleased that we've reduced the federal government by nearly 250,000 people since 1993. At the same time, though, state and local governments have increased. What we need to think about is our total investment in governance and how well it is working. We've learned a lot of lessons at the federal level, partly from the private sector that went through a big shakeout in the '80s. It seems to me that it's our role to try to help the states learn from our experience. Almost two years ago, you promised a new science and technology relationship between the federal government and the states. What has happened to that promise? It hasn't stalled out, but it's sort of sputtering along as we try to really nail down
more specifically the things to be and what to do about it was the next quesworked on. I just spent half a day with tion. It was decided, of course, that Al Nevada Gov. Bob Miller. He's the new Gore would chair an investigatory comchairman of the National Governors As- mission to figure out what we should be sociation and he's quite enthusiastic doing. I took two of my people here and about our pushing ahead on these pro- volunteered them to that group, one of grams. We're identifying the specific ar- whom is an expert in terrorism and the eas where it makes the greatest sense to other an expert in global positioning satelbe working together, whether it be regu- lites and other modern technologies applilatory reform or environmental technolo- cable to air safety and air traffic control. gies or education and a lot of areas They're still working with the group. It was an example of shifting our resources where we have mutual responsibilities. The states are very interested in around to where they are most needed. greater access to federal information sources, research results, and other Is there any need for an integrated things that they surely should have ac- federal R&D program in countertercess to because they're the ones who rorism? have to use that information more than We've been wrestling with that. That's anybody else. So I hope we can cut why one of my people was on that comdown on the stovepipe between the mission, to look at the physical methods federal and state governments in a way for detection and screening to see what that will enable them to carry out their the opportunities are for improvements jobs more effectively. and how much ought to be left to the private sector versus more fundamental things. We went back to the old OTA study on taggants and explosives and ascertained that very little had happened for the tags but a lot had happened in terms of gaseous detection.
So what is the timetable? My gut feeling is that 1997 is the time that it will really begin to take priority. It's hard for me to try to predict what form it will take. But it's likely to take form in a whole lot of incremental changes in the linkages between our agencies and their counterparts at the state level, between our planning process for research and what happens at the state level. Education and industrial development don't happen in Washington, but in localities. So if the states can influence the way we develop policies, research programs, and the like that are better tuned to their perceived needs out there, I think we will be better off.
What about the intelligence aspect of a counterterrorism R&D program, such as how would one detect terrorists? That's a role for the social sciences, and it's important. We've been strongly supporting maintenance of support for the social sciences in NSF and other places. Typically, conservatives think of science as hard science and sort of denigrate social science. But this is another example of the critical role well-trained social scientists, integrated with the natural scientists and engineers, have to play. Everything from terrorism to global change.
In that context, why hasn't NSF's Human Capital Initiative been pushed as a policy thrust in the way some physical and biological sciences have been pushed? I think because there's not as much perceived quick and easy connectivity between what they do and what happens. I would hope that the social science community would be a little more aggressively What was OSTP's response to the interested in applying their wisdom to crash of TWA flight 800. Did you some of these current social issues. They have to be willing to get out beyond their have a role in its aftermath? It was an enormous tragedy and the enor- own disciplinary focus and be part of a mity of trying to figure out what happened much messier, broader thing. M OCTOBER 7, 1996 C&EN 29
