In the guest column ”The crisis-mongers of science” by Daniel Greenberg (Sept. 18), the thesis is that science is healthy and that crisis-mongers are all wet. Greenberg supports his preconceptions by statistical data that he reads in the opaque environment of Washington, D.C.
To support his conclusion that U.S. science is ”well financed and immensely productive,” he uses $78 billion as the non-defense U.S. expenditure, not telling you that about $60 billion of this is industrial development, having almost nothing to do with the science that we ”crisis-mongers” are so concerned about.
He doesn`t tell you that Japanese research and development divided by their gross national product is sitting at 3 percent, West Germany is at 2.8 percent and the U.S. is at 2 percent, and the trends are in the wrong direction. He doesn`t tell you that the U.S. spends 34 percent of its research and development budget on defense (1988) and 16 percent on research. For Japan the numbers are 4.8 percent and 76.2 percent and for Germany, 12.5 percent and 68 percent.
He points out that the U.S. has 949,000 scientists and engineers, double the number of Japanese. But he doesn`t tell you that the fraction of the work force that are scientists and engineers in non-defense research and development is higher in Japan. It is also higher in Europe.
His crushing argument is to quote a government bureaucrat assuring us that NASA is treating science well. Would you buy a used science policy from this guy?
In fact, we did survey the leading young scientists in some of our most prestigious universities, by any measure the winners in the quest for science funding. We found a response so despairing it sounded a loud and clear warning that all is not well in the research labs of the nation.
Yes, our science is strong; we continue to collect the bulk of Nobel Prizes and publish the largest number of papers, but indicators of deep trouble persist. The Nobel Prizes are overwhelmingly for work done more than 15 years ago. Much of our strength is derived from a strong base established decades ago and which gave us a vibrant science, a winning technology and a strong economic posture. But evidence of decline is everywhere.
Our great industrial laboratories are closed, purchased by the Japanese or declining. Our lead in high-technology exports is a memory; our schools have declined, and the numbers of Americans entering science fields continues to decrease. If not for immigrants, our graduate schools would be half empty. The funding of research as carried out in our universities is now only about 40 percent higher than it was in 1968 and the sophistication of apparatus essential to address the scientific frontiers of the 1990s requires at least a doubling of the academic research budget.
(Not to worry, this amounts to less than 0.7 percent of the federal budget.)
It is then just possible that we see early warnings of a crisis about which one should monger. Greenberg echoes the response of the Washington-wise who would much rather not see the bad news. Once upon a time we had a splendid educational infrastructure, but we ignored those early warnings and generated a ”Nation at Risk.” Where were the crisis-mongers when we needed them?
