Nixon v. the Scientists

Richard Nixon has never been able to count American scientists among his most enthusiastic supporters. In recent years, some of his own scientific consultants have publicly criticized him for his use of defoliants in Viet Nam, his support of the supersonic transport (SST) and his campaign for the Safeguard anti-ballistic-missile system. But the President does not seem to be listening. Administration policies, says the Federation of American Scientists, have left "the scientific community with an ever greater feeling of frustration."

Now, in a sweeping reorganization designed to save money and help streamline the cumbersome federal bureaucracy, Nixon has all but exiled Washington's scientific establishment. He decided to abolish the post of Presidential Science Adviser--an office created by President Dwight Eisenhower to help meet Russia's technological challenge. In addition, he may eliminate the White House Office of Science and Technology and the President's Science Advisory Committee. The 20 scientists of that committee provided technical expertise when they were asked for it, and occasional criticism even when they were not--as in the case of the SST. As a result, for the first time since the Russians launched Sputnik 1, the nation's scientists have no direct voice in the inner councils of the White House.

Communication between scientists and the White House was, in fact, less than satisfactory even before Nixon's recent budgeteering. The last Presidential Science Adviser, Edward E. David Jr., who resigned last month after 2 1/2 years of service, admits that he never saw the President more than twice in any single month. Furthermore, in promoting controversial schemes like the SST, Nixon has tended increasingly to bypass the White House science staff, preferring instead to work through his technology counselor, William Magruder. Thus Nixon's latest moves hardly come as a surprise to scientists. Says M.I.T. President Jerome Wiesner, who was President Kennedy's science adviser: "The reorganization simply recognizes the situation as it has existed throughout the Nixon Administration." More bluntly, Philip Abelson, editor of Science, the journal of the 130,000-member American Association for the Advancement of Science, calls it another sign of Nixon's continuing policy of downgrading science.

Under the new streamlined setup, the duties of science adviser will fall to H. Guyford Stever, director of the National Science Foundation. On policy matters, he will consult with Treasury Secretary George Shultz, the Administration's new economic czar; on money requests, he will go to Roy Ash, head of the Office of Management and Budget. An aeronautical engineer and former president of Carnegie-Mellon University who once was an M.I.T. faculty colleague of Shultz's, Stever is convinced that he will always get an adequate hearing from his new bosses. "I might have to jog a little farther to get to see these people," says Stever, who has not earned a reputation as a crusader, "but two blocks isn't too bad."

Perhaps not, but Georgia Congressman John Davis, a leading Democratic member of the House Science and Aeronautics Committee, shares the concern of scientists that "they are no longer represented at the President's elbow." Other critics predict a more immediate problem: a potential conflict between Stever's job as director of the federally funded N.S.F. and his new post as science adviser, in which he will give advice on the allocation of federal funds to scientifically oriented agencies.

Even greater anxiety has been raised among scientists by the Administration's budget requests for research and development. For fiscal 1974, Nixon is seeking only $ 17.4 billion--a modest boost of $320 million over estimated 1973 spending and too little to keep pace with inflation. Moreover, most of the increase will be absorbed by the extra funds that have been allocated to what some Government officials call Nixon's "sacred cows": the development of new sources of energy, including the breeder reactor (up $130 million); the Administration's war on cancer and heart disease ($92 million); reducing damage from earthquakes and other natural disasters ($18 million); drug control and rehabilitation ($2,000,000); and research into new methods of crime prevention and control ($12 million). At the same time, the Administration is cutting 22% off the Environmental Protection Agency's research funds, chopping another $400 million from NASA'S budget, and reducing by $42.8 million its support of the eight branches of the National Institutes of Health that are not involved in cancer or heart research. No less significant is drastic reduction in funding for fellowships to train young scientists.

Nixon's economizing is clearly a reflection of sharply changed attitudes toward science and technology; the public is no longer willing to accept an almost unlimited flow of tax dollars into such seemingly impractical schemes as a manned mission to Mars and the construction of giant new atom smashers. Instead, many Americans want scientists to turn their energies and ingenuity to the solution of pressing national problems--pollution, say, or the inadequacies of mass transit and the spread of drug addiction. Indeed, the same pressures have also come from some scientists themselves, especially the young radicals who have been staging the noisy "science for the people" demonstrations at professional gatherings. As a result, Nixon and some of his most bitter foes have suddenly become unlikely allies.

According to Bell Labs President William O. Baker, one of Nixon's unofficial science consultants, the President wants "to couple research to the actual delivery of knowledge." When no immediate payoff can be promised, there have been cutbacks even in areas that are politically acceptable. Explaining the big reduction in the $27 million budget of the Department of the Interior's Office of Saline Water, for instance, one skeptical scientist says: "About all they've discovered is that distilled water will be free of salt."

Young Edison. What worries scientists is the obvious dangers in any policy, however well intended, that aims at short-term practical and political benefits at the expense of more fundamental research. Nixon's war on cancer, for instance, would not have been possible without the vital groundwork laid by many molecular biologists who spent long, wearying hours in the lab unraveling the structure and workings of the DNA and RNA molecules. They did their work with no concern other than a desire to add to man's store of knowledge. To a large degree, the U.S. was able to muster the necessary technology to defeat the Nazis in World War II and, more recently, to beat the Russians to the moon because it was able to build on a vast foundation of basic research that had been done for decades in university and commercial labs. If this backlog is not replenished, the U.S. may be unable to meet some future scientific challenge.

One major trouble with the Administration's attitude is that it tends to ignore a harsh reality of modern science: the days are long past when a dedicated scientist like Michael Faraday or the young Thomas Edison, toiling alone or with a few associates in a simple lab, could hope to produce a fundamental breakthrough. Now most major discoveries require teams of highly trained researchers and such expensive equipment as electron microscopes, high-speed computers, atom smashers or radio telescopes In other words, without Government funds, pure science is bound to wither.

There is no question that the President must save money. But by cutting back basic research in so many key areas, is he sacrificing some unexpected future achievement of untold economic or social importance--a discovery comparable, say, to the transistor or the polio vaccine? Many scientists are certain he is. Harvard's George Kistiakowsky, who was one of Eisenhower's science advisers, calls the Nixon policy, especially the reduction in fellowships, "incredibly shortsighted." By stressing short-term, politically motivated payoffs over the broader quest for knowledge, he warns, Nixon is dangerously "using up our intellectual capital."

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