How Much Is Enough?

Is the U.S. Government spending enough money on scientific research? And is the money it does spend being spent wisely? Each year, the scientific community argues over the answers with increasing fervor, because each year the massive tools of modern research move farther out of the financial reach of universities or industry. Only the Government can foot the bill.

Few scientists complain that the men in Washington are not spending enough.

But those who have turned up to testify at the hearings held by the House Select Committee on Government Research largely agree that too little Government money is being spent on basic research, too much on projects aimed at space or military hardware. "Of course, the appliedresearch programs in nuclear physics, space and defense are important to the national purpose," says President Lee DuBridge of Caltech. "But precisely because these programs are large, the Government's support of basic research should be larger than now. It is now inadequate to keep the topnotch people in the universities provided with funds for research and equipment." The Federal Government, Dr. DuBridge argues, is spending about $15 billion a year on research and development, but only $400 to $500 million of the allotment goes to basic research in the universities. The rest of the money, says Dr. DuBridge, goes mostly into such impressive engineering projects as moon rockets. But all that work depends on discoveries made in the past, some of them generations ago. The pace of progress, warns Dr. DuBridge, will slow perceptibly unless theoretical scientists, with no hardware in mind, wrest fresh knowledge from nature.

Lively Excitement. At Cambridge, Mass., where Harvard and M.I.T. anchor the spreading scientific complex along Route 128, researchers realize that they have been showered with federal riches beyond their most hopeful dreams of 20 years ago. But they are quick to point out that some fields, such as oceanography, are neglected, and astronomy, which is in a stage of lively excitement, must beg for funds.

President Kennedy's science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, who is now dean of science at M.I.T., is convinced that U.S. prosperity rests on research and that research must have unfaltering federal support. "In the new era," says Wiesner, "we must support all the good research available. If we don't, our economic growth is going to falter." Harvard Professor George Kistiakowsky, who was Eisenhower's science adviser, repeats the theme: "All our wealth and affluence is based on the scientific research of the last century." Public support for science, he says, is needed to uncover new knowledge on which to base the affluence of the future.

Last to Go. "There are people in Congress," says a leading scientist, "who feel that basic research is useless, something that scientists do to amuse themselves. So there is a tendency in Congress to cut basic research funds. When a person is budgeting, the first thing he is likely to cut out is his savings account. Basic research is like that savings account; it should really be the last to go."

Congress, says Stanford Physicist Wolfgang Kurt Hermann Panofsky, will have to learn the difference between applied research (in which a man knows what he is looking for) and basic research (in which he does not). "When spending money on an applied device," he says, "you have to question the need for it. But when spending money on fundamental research that may change our whole way of looking at nature, the question of the need is premature."

Dr. Panofsky, who learned to deal in large figures as head of Stanford's $100 million linear accelerator, believes that lavish funds expended on high-energy physics, which pries into the inner nature of matter, and on cosmology, which tries to understand the universe, will pay higher eventual returns than any applied research. "We cannot afford to be ignorant," he says, "of the most fundamental type of structure on which everything else depends."

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