GOVERNMENT
Hugh Loweth, Key Science Policy Official, Retires Office of Management & Budget official probably had more direct influence on science budgets and priorities than any other federal figure Wll Lepkowski, C&EN Washington
Washington's science policy community has just experienced a major jolt to its equilibrium. The shock comes from the sudden retirement earlier this month of the Office of Management & Budget's deputy associate director for energy and science, Hugh F. Loweth. Loweth, a slight, wispy figure with a cutting wit, was Mr. Science Dollars in Washington. Whatever the field—space, energy, general science, or industrial innovation— Loweth was the one person who most affected the budgets, priorities, and ways of thinking in those areas. In the words of one high official at the National Science Foundation, "If there is any one person in Washington who you can say made a difference, it would have to be Loweth." One note in the guest book at Loweth's departure party last month said simply, "A bad decision." The inscriber: NSF director Erich Bloch. "I didn't know Hugh personally," says Robert M. Rosenzweig, president of the Association of American Universities, "but by reputation he has been a key stabilizing element in science policy in government. He was the main source of memory in a government that doesn't have much. He was a supporter and thoughtful critic of science policy, and those are qualities that are going to be missed. In many respects he was more influ16
July 21, 1986 C&EN
ential than any science adviser. He'll be hard to replace." Understanding the influence of a Loweth requires some preliminary background. Science policy has most to do with getting the money to do research. Getting the money involves convincing the politically appointed director of the Office of Management & Budget that projects are worth funding. The director, who never knows much about science, depends on his staff to advise him.
NEWS ANALYSIS So in a real sense, Loweth was science adviser to the OMB director, and because he was a believer in science as an investment in the future, he was the community's best friend in Washington. For example, when some elements of the Reagan Administration wanted to eliminate social science research support at NSF, it was Loweth, not the science adviser's office, who rescued and gradually restored it. He did the same for science education. But most of all, it was Loweth's quiet inner diplomacy within OMB, not, as many believe, the work of former science adviser George A. Keyworth II, that helped convince former budget director David Stockman to raise the budget for basic research during the current Administration. "Stockman," says Loweth in his first on-the-record interview, "gave clear guidance to the OMB staff that government did have a role in supporting basic science." The question now, he says, is whether anyone at higher levels of government is really interested enough in basic research during these times of high anxiety in sci-
ence. "There's no clear supporter," he says, "although [current OMB director James C. Miller III] hasn't raised any questions about it yet." But the questions inevitably will come. Agencies are currently preparing their fiscal 1988 programs for submission for first review by OMB. And the force of cuts under the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings balanced budget act is certain to give science big problems. One crucial issue involves a big Presidential decision over whether to fund construction of the $8 billion Supercolliding Superconducting Cyclotron (SSC), the darling of the high-energy physics community. Loweth has spent months worrying about the issue because it threatens support of the rest of science. "The SSC," Loweth says, "may be the first major facility that raises the questions of whether we can afford to support science all across the board. I fear that the SSC would undermine existing machines and could be the first major project that would be attacked by other fields of science." What he is most skeptical about as he leaves is the continuing efforts by the scientific leadership to promote basic science for the sake of industrial development. "I have no concern about the contribution of basic science to long-term economic growth. But directing science investment because of potential payoff could be a mistake. I thought Keyworth was tending too much in that direction." Loweth's wit was always the talk of the science community. He understood better than anyone the play of politics in the science process. To him, the new accelerator that will be built near Norfolk, Va., was the "Warnertron," after Sen. John Warner, the Virginia Republican who
applied political pressure to get it for his state. Loweth didn't think it was really needed, but politics won out. His wit frequently targeted practicality. Recently, some NSF staffers were complaining to him that academic researchers weren't getting promoted because the foundation was being forced to hold up their funding after their research proposals were approved. He sympathized and said that if money was tight and approval was so important for promotion, the foundation should help their cause by awarding researchers plaques in lieu of money as certification of their talents. Recently he was asked to comment on a dubious Administration initiative promoted by Keyworth, NASA, the Defense Department, and the aerospace community. It was the Trans Atmospheric Vehicle, now known as the Aerospace Plane, designed to fly at eight times the speed of sound and loft passengers to the Far East in two hours. "The 'g' forces," Loweth said stoically, "would be more than your grandmother would want to take." Loweth arrived at OMB—then called the Bureau of the Budget—in 1951 as a budget examiner. NSF had just been formed. In 1956 the NSF examiner left his job and Loweth took his place. One of his first assignments was to oversee an interagency project called the International Geophysical Year, a program to study global geophysical phenomena and as such the first modernday effort at international cooperation in science. "I had my first experience with scientific power politics during the IGY," he recalls. "Members of the American IGY team would go abroad and arrange new projects with foreign scientists. They would come back and say we had to approve funding for those projects for foreign policy reasons, since as U.S. representatives they had already made commitments." Over the years, Loweth built up a staff of 17 under him, almost all technically trained. "The people we look for have a background of science or engineering. One of the contributions I think I made is showing it is possible to have people
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Loweth: science only an ingredient
with good science backgrounds who were also superb analysts, and could raise a higher level of questions than could people not trained in technical fields." Loweth's biggest problem with OSTP during the Keyworth years was the growing trend of pork barreling, or slipping research projects into the national budget without merit reviews. The practice has reached epidemic proportions and is worrying the scientific establishment. Loweth fingers Keyworth for starting it all through promotion in 1982 of a materials venture at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California using the laboratory's synchrotron light source. Without consulting w i t h OMB or w i t h t h e materials research community, Keyworth arranged for approval through the Department of Energy. But the materials scientists raised such a ruckus that the project was scaled back. Over the years he has seen one science adviser after another come and go. His favorites were Jerome Wiesner, President Kennedy's science adviser, and Frank Press, science adviser to Jimmy Carter. Wiesner, he says, was the science adviser with the best connections to the White House. Press ran an Office of Science & Technology Policy that worked smoothly with Loweth's OMB staff. "We need a science adviser who
goes back to dealing with objective advice on scientific issues, like acid rain, rather than becoming a spokesman for Administration programs that otherwise ought to be spoken for by agency heads or the White House generally," he comments. He says it is too simplistic to credit a science adviser for increases in science budgets. "There have been people all the way down the pike who have been supporters of science in the background. These people have really made the difference for science. I don't mean characters like me. I mean political types who have had to make the decisions. In the Ford Administration we had a budget director who was a lawyer, James Lynn. He believed the research budget should rise in proportion to the gross national product and he made the case. In the dark days of the Nixon Administration, when poor Edward E. David [Nixon's science adviser] was trying to run for cover, it was George Shultz [Nixon's OMB director and current Secretary of State] w h o quietly protected basic science." Loweth recalls that as a crucial period in NSF history. The White House was especially hostile to the foundation and threatened to cut its budget drastically in retaliation against academic scientists who opposed the Vietnam war. Times were extremely tense. The result was invention one night in Shultz's office of an applied science program called Research Applied to National Needs. "Shultz saw RANN as a way to protect NSF from being viewed as bankrolling academic scientists to do their own thing." William D. Mc Elroy, then NSF director, responded enthusiastically because he himself had established a small program, Interdisciplinary Research Applied to Problems of Society. But the National Science Board, then headed by National Academy of Sciences president Philip Handler, opposed it. Nevertheless, RANN went ahead and NSF survived its biggest threat. Mc Elroy was Loweth's favorite NSF director. "He was the first to really run the place. He tried to manage the foundation from a big picture standpoint. He brought in his own gun boys to help do it. I July 21, 1986 C&EN
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Government told him, 'the biggest compliment I can give you is that you neither look nor act like a scientist/ He was a tough cookie and he didn't kowtow to the board. "The biggest problem in dealing with science policy," Loweth says, "is that science is only an ingredient, a small piece of the action. That is why people worry when OSTP is made part of domestic policy. Now it's more international. And there are political and economic factors as well as technical issues involved. There just aren't many pure science issues." William O. Baker, the former president of Bell Laboratories and key participant in science policy issues through several Administrations, says Loweth's retirement will be a big loss to the scientific community. "There is no one left in OMB
either experienced or inclined to tie into science policy in a time when OSTP has all but folded," Baker says. "He brought young people in with abilities, but with him gone there may be nobody to bring them along. Loweth tied together disembodied institutions, agencies. He served science policy when there was no OSTP. He represented the strongest elements in coupling the scientific and technological programs nationally with the budget and the research process." But the Association of American Universities's Rosenzweig takes a more historically philosophical view. People do come and go. "We lost Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington, too," he comments, "and we managed to survive. So I guess we'll have to survive without Loweth." •
Scientific debate over SDI intensifies The battle to capture the hearts and minds of scientists in the cause of the Administration's program to explore the possibility of rendering nuclear weapons, in President Reagan's words, "impotent and obsolete," is showing no signs of abating. Petitions both for and against the program, officially known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), continue to circulate within the scientific community. They continue to be signed. And there is a proliferation of polls that purport to identify what scientists really think of the idea of trying to develop a weapons system to defend the population of the U.S. and its allies against ballistic nuclear missiles. What all the furor really means and what impact it may have are impossible to fully define at this time. The SDI program continues to grow very rapidly. It is already the Department of Defense's largest single R&D effort. The department is requesting $4.8 billion for it for fiscal 1987. DOD will get less, probably about $3.8 billion. But even that will represent about a 35% increase over the $2.8 billion for fiscal 1986. In addition, the proposed 1987 budget for the Department of Energy contains about $600 million for SDI-related activities. 18
July 21, 1986 C&EN
But one thing is very clear. The SDI program has generated more public response from the scientific community than has any other defense-related issue since the great debate over antiballistic missile de-
News Analysis fense of the 1960s. As before, the new debate is being spearheaded by physicists. But chemists, too, are showing considerable interest and visibility. The most direct challenge to SDI has come from a pledge of nonparticipation that has been circulated quite widely throughout academic research departments. It calls on those who sign to neither solicit nor accept SDI funds to support their research. According to the petition's organizers, 3700 science and engineering professors and senior researchers have signed the boycott so far, including 57% of the combined faculties of the top 20 physics departments in the country. The petition has been less widely distributed among chemistry departments. But data presented by the organizers indicate that 48% of the
combined faculties of 21 major chemistry departments have signed. At 10 of those departments at least half of the faculty signed. Distinguished chemists who support the pledge include Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann of Cornell University, 1987 Priestley Medalist John D. Roberts of California Institute of Technology, Harry B. Gray also of Caltech, and Kurt M. Mislow of Princeton University. This petition has been a grassroots effort, triggered by physicists at Cornell University and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It claims that the SDI program is "ill-conceived and dangerous" and that it "represents not an advance toward genuine security, but rather a major step backwards." And the petition expresses concern that "the likelihood that SDI funding will restrict academic freedom and blur the distinction between classified and unclassified research is greater than for other sources of funding." Some of those who have a more kindly view of SDI are trying to counter the considerable publicity generated by the boycott by forming an organization of their own. It is called the Science & Engineering Committee for a Secure World. One of its purposes is to "correct the growing public misconception that virtually all scientists and engineers oppose SDI." It has been founded by a group of 80 scientists and engineers including seven identified as chemists or chemical engineers. The committee's chairman is Frederick Seitz, former president of the National Academy of Sciences. Other distinguished members include Alvin Weinberg, former director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and Harold Agnew, former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. In an obvious swipe at those who have signed the boycott, the initial statement of the new group says that "as professionals trained in scientific methodology, we believe that the feasibility of a promising scientific or technical proposal should not be judged in advance of proper research, experimentation, and testing. Therefore, we believe that SDI should not be hastily, unscientifi-
