Harold Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health, is among those who have warned of the consequences of such imbalance in the federal science and technology portfolio. Fields as diverse as electrical engineering, nuclear physics, and materials science contribute to advances in medicine. The difficulty lies in establishing proper funding levels and priorities for federal research support.

The annual debate over the level of federal support for science and technology is indicative of the lack of a consensus policy about those funding levels and research priorities. The absence of such a policy is not universally viewed as negative. For example, proposals for a centralized science funding and coordinating body have been opposed even by the research community. It is argued that the current system, with funding dispersed over a variety of agencies, encourages the competitive interplay of ideas vital in nascent areas of research.

For much of our history, government took a largely hands-off approach to science and technology. World War II marked a shift in attitude, as science and technology expenditures increased markedly, the Manhattan Project being the most famous example. At war's end, Vannevar Bush, director of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development, outlined a science policy framework in his report, Science: The Endless Frontier. The National Science Foundation, chartered in 1950, is the most tangible result of Bush's vision for government support of basic research at universities and research institutes.

Bush believed that the resulting scientific knowledge would naturally be applied to practical problems in government and industry. In 1998, the House Science Committee issued a science policy document, Unlocking Our Future: Toward a New National Science Policy, written by Rep. Vernon Ehlers (R-Mich.), who described a more complex view of the relationship between basic and applied research.

Ehlers warned of a widening gap between basic research and applied research and development. As the national R&D effort becomes increasingly centered on industry, marketability and near-term payoffs will likely be emphasized over longer-term, exploratory work.

According to NSF figures, national R&D funding (from all sources) in constant dollars has increased fairly steadily in the last half-century, reaching $227 billion in 1998. However, the federal share of R&D had fallen from 67 percent in 1964 to under 30 percent in 1998. The sustainability of this trend in the global economy is questionable.

The figures show a growing imbalance in federal support for medical research and for engineering and physical science research. Between 1985 and 1997, federal support for research in medical sciences increased 64 percent in constant dollars; by contrast, funding for engineering research increased just 10 percent over that period, while physical science funding decreased by 5 percent.

Various efforts are under way in Congress to increase federal research expenditures, and to address the increasing bias toward the medical sciences. For example, there is a developing consensus in favor of doubling the NSF and Department of Energy science budgets over the next five years, to match the ongoing effort to double the NIH budget between 1998 and 2003.

Stable government funding is essential not only for the continued flow of scientific discoveries and technical breakthroughs, but to ensure that we maintain a viable science and technology research workforce. Our colleges and universities rely heavily on federal support in educating the next generation of research engineers and scientists.

Government also influences the direction of science and technology through regulatory action. Restrictive fuel economy and emissions standards for cars stimulate industry research into alternative power sources, such as fuel cells and hybrid gasoline-electric engines. Work in medicine will be greatly affected by the current debate over limits on stem cell and human cloning research.

The ability of government to affect the direction of the science and technology enterprise through both basic research funding and regulatory action is great. The government's funding resources are limited and its regulatory power is large, so decisions about how much to spend, and what to spend it on, require careful consideration. Use-inspired research, also called Jeffersonian research, has been gaining acceptance. Under that framework, support for research is directly motivated by the hope of eventual societal benefits, not merely by scientific curiosity.

Implementing such a framework would require the concurrence of policy makers and the public as to national goals, and necessitate structural changes in the policy and research communities and their interaction. The economic importance of science and technology guarantees that this issue will continue to gain prominence.

Lester Su is an ASME Congressional Fellow.

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