American Association for the Advancement of Science Symposium on "The War on Terrorism: What Does it Mean for Science?"

Last year I addressed an AAAS symposium on "The War on Terrorism: What Does it Mean for Science?" (December 18) I made some predictions then about the future of science in the current Bush administration, and remarked on the state of science, but the talk focused on the war against terrorism. This morning I would like to expand on these remarks in the context of the President's budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2003, released last week. Important things are happening in science no less than in world affairs, and the policies guiding the allocation of resources for science, engineering, and education are evolving too. It is my great privilege to serve science during this time of change, and this meeting where all the sciences come together is a good occasion to report my perceptions of these policies and the assumptions that underlie them. Let me restate some remarks I made last December that have been widely quoted:

"This administration is determined not to let terrorism deflect America from its trajectory of world leadership in science. Our nation's prowess in technology, especially information technology and instrumentation, have opened extraordinary new vistas in science. It has made it possible to visualize and manipulate matter on the atomic scale, leading to unprecedented understanding and control of the processes of life as well as of inanimate matter. Having produced the means for great strides in science, and in accompanying technologies for improved health care, economic competitiveness, and quality of life, it would be foolish to turn aside now from the course of discovery while we engage the monster of terrorism -- an evil force that denies the benefits of progress and the search for truth. Thus I expect that science in America and the world will forge ahead relatively unaffected by the war against terrorism. I expect the President's prior commitment to increase funding for health related research to be realized. I expect the tremendous momentum in the information sciences to roll forward. I expect the technologies of measurement and analysis -- atomic scale microscopy and manipulation, light sources, probes, detectors and analyzers -- to continue to win new ground on the frontiers of complexity as well as of scale. Science has its own intrinsic imperative and this nation will continue to pursue it."

The President's FY03 budget proposal provides some data points to test these expectations. It does add nearly $4 billion to the budget of the National Institutes of Health. It does favor research in computing and information technology, and it favors as well the collection of activities we are calling nanotechnology. I will mention some numbers in a moment, but there is no doubt that this budget expresses priorities. It provides substantial new funding for science, and it acknowledges that the nation's highest priorities -- the war against terrorism, homeland security, and economic revival -- are all served by investments in science, engineering, and education.

As a university president and national laboratory director, I wrestled with the reality of annual budgets, and I deplored the processes that left funding gaps in research programs that were demonstrably productive. I am well aware that improvements "on the average" are usually achieved by peaks of prosperity in a landscape that includes valleys of poverty. That is inevitable whenever opportunities exceed resources. It is desirable when the opportunities differ in their promise. Having a science policy at all implies that we have a systematic way of ordering the opportunities so finite resources can be invested to best effect.

As a scientist, I believe science policy should reflect what I referred to as the "intrinsic imperative of science." Let me explain. Galileo and Hooke launched the first generation of instruments for extending our senses to perceive the very large and the very small. They crafted their instruments at a time when powerful conceptual tools of theory and analysis also began to appear, exemplified by the work of Isaac Newton. During the centuries since that dawn of modern science, the frontiers of discovery have been defined by the limits of technology.

This is one of the imperatives of science -- that exploration at the frontier entails advances in technology -- and it is also a powerful and pragmatic argument for supporting basic science. Many of us were drawn to science by the urge to know. Society supports us because that urge is even more productive for the improvement of the human condition than are the immediate necessities that are often said to be the mother of invention. The spin-offs of basic science are fundamentally new technologies that never would have been discovered solely in response to the needs they ultimately address. Think of the laser, of nuclear fission, or even of molecular biology, whose origins derive from a whole array of technologies developed for other purposes.

Today the frontiers of the large and the small -- of astronomy and particle physics -- remain unconquered. But they have receded so far from the world of human action that the details of their phenomena are no longer very relevant to practical affairs. Not by accident, the instrumentation required to explore them has become expensive. Because we can no longer expect that society will benefit materially from the phenomena we discover in these remote hinterlands, the justification for funding these fields rests entirely on the usefulness of the technology needed for the quest, and on the joy we experience in simply knowing how nature works. (A joy, I am afraid, that is shared fully by a rapidly declining fraction of the population.)

I believe society will continue to support the exploration of the traditional frontiers of large and small, but it will do so with increasing insistence on careful planning, careful management, and the widest possible sharing of costs for the necessarily expensive equipment. Fortunately, these fields today do possess excellent planning processes, and for the most part the great accelerators and telescopes have been well built and well managed.

But the greatest opportunities in science today are not to be found at these remote frontiers. The inexorable ratcheting advance of technology and conceptual tools have brought science to a new and previously inaccessible frontier. It seems to me -- and I am not the first to point this out -- that we are in the early stage of a revolution in science nearly as profound as the one that occurred early in the last century with the birth of quantum mechanics.

The quantum technologies of the chemistry and physics of atoms, molecules, and materials developed rapidly through several generations during the Cold War. By 1991, when the Soviet Union finally dissolved, scientists were beginning to wield instruments that permitted the visualization of relatively large scale functional structures in terms of their constituent atoms. The importance of this development cannot be over-stated. The atom-by-atom understanding of functional matter requires not only exquisite instrumentation, but also the capacity to capture, store, and manipulate vast amounts of data. The result is an unprecedented ability to design and construct new materials with properties that are not found in nature.

The revolution I am describing is one in which the notion that everything is made of atoms finally becomes operational. For the first time we have tools that give an edge to this sweeping reductionist vision. We can actually see how the machinery of life functions, atom-by-atom. We can actually build atomic scale structures that interact with biological or inorganic systems and alter their functions. We can design new tiny objects "from scratch" that have unprecedented optical, mechanical, electrical, chemical, or biological properties that address needs of human society. I need not give specific examples here because this conference is filled with them. Their images are ubiquitous in newspapers and magazines, and the application of our knowledge of them appear not only in technical journals, but also in the Wall Street journal.

This revolution is caused by two developments: one is the set of instruments such as electron microscopy, synchrotron x-ray sources, lasers, scanning microscopy, and nuclear magnetic resonance devices; the other is the availability of powerful computing and information technology. Together these have brought science finally within reach of a new frontier, the frontier of complexity. Many fields of science converge at this frontier because most of the objects of science are made of atoms. Although complex phenomena occur in nuclear and particle physics -- think of the intricate tracery of collisions imaged by the great detectors of modern particle accelerators -- and in astrophysics, nothing in these fields approaches the complexity of living organisms. And yet we are now beginning to unravel the structures of life, atom-by-atom using sensitive machinery under the capacious purview of powerful computing.

Let me return now to the realm of science policy. The picture of science I have portrayed -- and I am aware that it is only part of science, but an important part -- has immediate implications and challenges for science policy.

First, there is the need to fund the enabling machinery for exploring the frontier of complexity. Some of this machinery is expensive, such as the great x-ray sources operated by the Department of Energy, or the Spallation Neutron Source. Even the computing power required at the frontier is expensive and not yet widely available to investigators. The continuing priority given in the President's budget to information technology is therefore well justified. Not only does information technology directly enhance the economy through commercial products, it is also of fundamental importance for the extraordinary new control of matter at the atomic level. The reason, of course, is that any physical or biological system large enough to perform a function of human interest is going to be made of a colossal number of atoms. The computing power is needed to keep track of all the types and positions of the atoms, estimate how they will move under various conditions, and produce a visual representation of all these images that the human mind can grasp.

Second is the desirability of funding research in the fields that benefit from the atomic level visualization and control of functional matter. They fall into the two categories of organic and inorganic. We call them biotechnology and nanotechnology. I like to think of biotechnology as organic nanotechnology. If the term "nanotechnology" seems vague and ill-defined, then think of the phenomena it describes as the inorganic counterpart of biotechnology, a term that is no better defined, but has the merit of having been in longer use. Both areas receive priority in the President's budget.

Many people have asked me whether I think the huge investments advocated in the budget for medical research will distort or unbalance the pattern of funding for science. Those concerned refer to a balance that must be re-established between the life sciences and the physical sciences. I think on the contrary that the opening of the frontier of complexity creates far more opportunities in the life sciences, and that given the new atomic-level capabilities the life sciences may still be underfunded relative to the physical sciences. But I do agree that new opportunities exist also for inorganic functional materials, and these need to be exploited. And of course the enabling instrumentation is largely a product of physical science and engineering research, and these too deserve continuing priority.

Third, there is the very serious problem of the inadequacy of resources to exploit all the new opportunities that now lie before us along the vast frontier of complexity. The richness of possibility is immense, and we simply cannot afford to explore it all at once. Choices must be made. Not only must we choose among the new opportunities in bio- and nano- technology, but we must also choose between these and expanding investments at the traditional frontiers of large and small -- or more generally between the issue-oriented sciences that clearly address societal needs, and the discovery-oriented sciences whose consequences are more a matter of conjecture. We need both, but how much of either?

The need for choice, and for wise allocation of resources to seize the most advantage for society from our leadership in these fields, is a strong motivation for better planning and management of the nation's science enterprise. The President's budget makes much of management, and proposes many measures that are not designed particularly to save money so much as to optimize its impact. I am referring to proposals to transfer programs among agencies, to reward agencies and programs that can document the success of their projects, to find ways of making clear and explicit the basis for investment in one program rather than another. Even the horror expressed in the budget narrative at the long-standing but rapidly growing practice of congressional earmarks for science projects is consistent with the idea that the growth in opportunity requires better decision making.

I support these science management initiatives because I believe they are essential to reassure the public -- our ultimate sponsors -- that the ever increasing investment in science is being made wisely. This is particularly true for the physical sciences whose long run of support during the Cold War was linked, correctly or not, to national security concerns. Although the relevance of physics to national security is no less now than then, the end of the Cold War brought with it a reassessment of the rationale for funding physical science, especially at the national laboratories. This reassessment has left society more skeptical about the national security argument, and agencies that support this work, particularly the Department of Energy, are working hard to clarify missions and provide strong rationales for their work. The President's budget features a management pilot program at DOE that takes advantage of the wide range of research conducted in this agency.

At the dawn of the new millennium, public expectations of science are high, and public support for science is strong. Science policy needs to reflect the actual state of science, and its capacity for addressing the needs of society. One requires continual contact with the scientists who lead the work, the other depends upon the processes of government to frame key social issues. The Office of Science and Technology Policy stands at the strategic intersection of science and government. I am grateful for this opportunity to give my perspective on this critical juncture.