Double science funds, Nobel laureate urges - Leon M. Lederman, American Association for the Advancement of Science report

Science News, Jan 12, 1991 by Ron Cowen

Double science funds, Nobel laureate urges

Ten billion dolalrs can buy a lot of science

And in order to restore the vigor of campus-based research, that's what the federal government needs to add to its academic science budget, asserts Nobel laureate Leon M. Lederman in a new report prepared for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Lederman's call for the hefty increase--which woul nearly double the current funding levels--comes just months after a congressional mandate capping the growth of most nondefense items in the 1992 and 1993 budgets at levels that barely keep pace with inflation (SN: 12/15/90, p.378).

But the University of Chicago physicist says his mail survey of some 250 campus researchers compelled him to make the recommendation. He described the survey this week at a briefing in Washington, D.C., and in the Jan. 11 SCIENCE.

Lederman's survey, conducted last summer, focused on the availablity of academic research funds. He queried both senior and newly established professors of chemistry, physics and biology at 50 universities, including the 30 institutions receiving the largest share of federal research funds. Lederman acknowledges the limited scope of the survey and admits it could have served largely as a forum for researchers to air long-standing complaints about funding. But he says letters from survey participants expressed "a depth of despair and discouragement that I have not experienced in my 40 years of science."

"Our senior faculty are demoralized, and our junior faculty are jumping ship," wrote biologist Alan F. Horwitz of the University of Illinois in Urbana. "Undergraduate and graduate students sense the despair and are turning away from science at a time when we need them most."

Physicist James C. Thompson of the University of Texas in Austin echoed the gloom: "My current plans are to quit.... As funds for research disappear, I lose the ability to support students and operate a laboratory."

This sense of crisis may seem ironic, Lederman notes, when one considers that basic-research funding has increased faster since the mid-1980s than any other nondefense spending. But he argues that several factors have conspired to put the fiscal squeeze on faculty scientists.

While the number of U.S. university researchers has doubled since 1968, federal funds for basic and applied campus research, when adjusted for inflation, reflect an increase of only 20 percent during that period, he says. (Using another inflation index, Presidential Science Adviser D. Allan Bromley calculates a 60 percent increase.) The rising cost of equipment and the increasing complexity of research pursuits contribute to the money crunch, Lederman says.

He suggests two ways to create new revenue for federal research spending: issuing government bonds designated for research, and taxing high-tech consumer products. But when a reporter at this week's briefing asked Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.) about the likelihood of Congress approving such a tax, scientists, policymakers and journalists erupted in cynical laughter. A deadpan Gore said he would "reflect on the matter." Citing the tendency of foreign companies to beat the United States to the punch in capitalizing on U.S. basic research, Gore warned that many Americans remain skeptical that a science funding increase would bolster the nation's economy.

David Goldston, a staff member of the House Subcommittee on Science, Research and Technology, criticized Lederman's report for its singleminded focus on funding. "The science community has to examine how things are done [within its own community]," he asserts, "and not just say that the system should go on the way it has been going on, 'only we need more money.' That is not going to get a sympathetic hearing."

Goldston suggests instead that researchers seek more grants for young scientists, provide the government with more guidance on which projects to fund, and accept that the 1960s "golden age of funding" won't return.