it has been found possible to put a distinctive, colored label into a particular cell in an insect embryo and then observe the subsequent locations of the chain of labelled nerve cells as they "bud off" from the "parent cell". This reveals a surprising amount about the series of events that control proper nervous system growth. Should a defect occur under these circumstances, it may be possible to determine where and why it happened. Since it is clear that cell growth and early developmental events follow similar rules, and depend upon genes in the same way in all animals, man can learn much from such studies.

Mr. BROWN. All right, Dr. Willows. I find this extremely stimulating and exciting. It certainly is ammunition to provide a defense for research in biological science, but you need to go one step further, so I am going to ask you a couple of questions here.

The bulk of research in all the biological sciences, up to at least today, I presume, has gone on at universities and has been supported as part of the educational process of universities; is that correct? Dr. WILLOWs. That is correct.

Mr. BROWN. The obvious question that a Congressman is going to ask is why can't we continue that route and confine the role of the Federal Government to general support for university education instead of finding additional ways of pumping money into this particular field of admittedly exciting and useful research?

What is there about the Foundation that says that it has to be the vehicle by which we support this research?

Dr. WILLOWS. My first suggestion is that it is the best possible investment of public money that one can imagine.

Mr. BROWN. How about this question.

Assuming that this the best possible investment of Federal money, we have many agencies distributing Federal money, including a very large one in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, called the National Institutes of Health.

Is there a peculiar role which distinguishes the NSF from what is to the lay person a more obvious role for the National Institutes of Health in the research work that they are doing?

Dr. WILLOWS. Yes, indeed there is.

Mr. BROWN. You understand, I know the answers to all these questions.

Dr. WILLOWs. I do, too.

At the end of my presentation, I mentioned the feeling that the Foundation's special role, in all of this, is to develop new tools and better ways of tackling basic research problems. This is something which is special to the Foundation. That is something that the NIH does less of, far less of.

You may be aware that many programs in the NIH are specifically targeted, and, in many cases, research which cannot be supported under the program guidelines that they are left to live with, come to the NSF. There have been a number of examples lately, individual sciences such as the visual sensory sciences field, which are worthy of research but which could not be supported at NIH because of their particular model system approach. They were subsequently given to the NSF for consideration because of its role in being responsible for generating new tools and better ways of tackling problems which are a little further down the line from direct medical application. That is one suggestion.

Mr. BROWN. If you wish to comment, feel free to, Dr. Atkinson. Dr. ATKINSON. Mr. Brown, I want to comment on Dr. Willows' presentation. He is a first-rate scientist, one of the rotators who come to work for NSF for a year or two, who are clearly involved in their science, and who are also still involved in the bureaucratic process of funding grants. The rotators are among the great assets of the Foundation, and I think his testimony demonstrates their valuable contribution.

Mr. BROWN. Dr. Ritter, do you want to ask a question?

Dr. RITTER. Yes.

You know, one of the conclusions you can draw from Dr. Willow's testimony is that that squid has a lot of nerve.

I guess I am fascinated and very very much interested in the use of language to communicate scientific and technological merit, purpose, achievement and I find it is a difficult arena.

I am personally very interested in the idea of comparing risk and trying to get it down to common terminology that all people can understand and I find that is my most difficult point. I am not interested in assessing risks, the absolute value of which is such and such times 10 to the minus 6, but just presenting information to people who are concerned, sometimes afraid.

I think this is where we are at and this has a real counterpart in the funding of the social sciences. I have tried to go through the GAO report while listening to your most fascinating presentation, and, you know, that title is part of the problem. If that title could have been, for example, "Better Understanding of Central Nervous System Functions in Humans by Studying the Main Nerve of a," whatever a squid is. What is it? It is a cephalopod. First of all, no one is going to know what a cephalopod is. It is going to sound like some of these terms in the physical sciences which people let drop because they can't understand it. But also, it is an effort made to get at the basic reason that the project was done.

The basic reason the project is done is to understand more about our own human behavior and our own central nervous system. Now, as I go through the GAO report, there is a very marked problem with that, in that NSF has project summaries and titles which are really trying to serve two purposes. One is to communicate to the scientific community, and I don't think we can avoid that. I think that is very important and that is really NSF's basic role, to develop the science. But it is also now being increasingly used by the general public and different institutions within the general public who are more interested in the whys and wherefores of their tax money being spent than they are in communicating the hard-nose scientific data and information to be gleaned from a project.

I think until that dicotomy is dealt with effectively, we are going to run into continued problems. Social sciences, as opposed to some of these more physical activities will always, as the GAO report has it, bring some difficulties because of the nature of the people's views, in social sciences. But in these situations we shouldn't have any problem at all and I think the chairman pointed this out with his concerns about the particular title. I think there are a lot of problems here, including better attention to what nonscientists are going to do with information and how it is communicated to your taxpaying public, which is supporting every single program. NSF has got to do a better job in that regard.

Dr. WILLOWS. I didn't hear a question in this but I think what you said is a clear suggestion of directions we ought to be going.

Mr. RITTER. This information that you are giving us here is essentially, after the fact and you are talking to, basically the convinced. You are now on the defensive and justifying why we picked up the

squid to do these experiments on and spend $50,000 to $60,000 to look at this squid.

I think you have just got to pay more attention to the way and to the taxpaying public who is interested in the why, and somehow understand that that dual purpose of informing the scientific field and the taxpaying public, at the same time, is going to need to be served with some, perhaps, greater oversight and sophistication.

Dr. ATKINSON. Mr. Ritter, your scientific colleagues may debate the issue with you, but we certainly agree with you. The history of this issue predates the Foundation's efforts to be more careful in its communications. But even now, there are reporters who receive $500 for any story of this type that they can publish. These reporters are searching through all sorts of materials to find a salable story. An example described by Dr. Willows this morning, was much ridiculed. Why would the Foundation support research on the learning of a slug? Why don't we study the learning of something significant? Why the learning of a slug?

No matter what titles NSF uses, no matter what abstracts, some people will be able to generate a story.

Mr. RITTER. I think you are right, and all I am saying is that I am as sure as I am sitting here today that the scientific community has just begun to communicate its purposes, its efforts and its achievements to the lay public. I think we can do a far more sophisticated job in that context.

Dr. ATKINSON. I agree, Mr. Ritter. I was impressed during the House floor debate last year when a Congressman said, "Look, we are not interested in the sex life of lower organisms. We all believe that work to be important." I think that education on this issue, as illustrated by that example, can be effective.

Mr. RITTER. Yes; as the title comes out, it looks closely at the sexlife, as opposed to the purpose of the biological control of a certain test which relates to people's food. I think you are going to have a recurring of this even though it may be better understood today than it was 5 years ago, in Congress. People who read certain media and then watch their local representatives on a particular vote, they will not fade into the woodwork unless the public information as well as the information here in Congress is more sophisticated.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. BROWN. Thank you.

Dr. Willows, just quickly, to wrap it up, yours is the kind of research that you will find will come up to you from a first rate researcher say, in a university which, in the normal course of events, would not be able to fund as a part of its research program. Am I correct? Dr. WILLOWs. That is correct.

Mr. BROWN. And you will look at it and it will be examined through the peer review process for excellence of research and you will look at it from an administrative point of view, from the standpoint of is it more properly funded by the NSF or would it not be more within the purview of another agency, I suppose, like NIH or the Defense Department, or whatever.

Dr. WILLOWS. That happens often. A proposal may come in that has a clear clinical motivation and we will get on the phone immedi

ately and request, demand, in fact, if it comes to it, that the proposal be withdrawn from the NSF and submitted elsewhere.

However, it is nevertheless true, there are proposals which are appropriate to both agencies.

Mr. BROWN. Well, we understand that, I think, but basically the point I am trying to get at is that we are funding research here which is fundamentally very basic in nature, that is, it doesn't have an immediate application to some useful public function. It is beyond the scope that would normally be funded in the normal educational activities of the institution or researcher and it does not clearly fall within the mission of another agency. So that the Foundation becomes the logical body or one of the most logical bodies to do the funding. Dr. WILLOWS. That is correct and therein, I am sure you recognize, is a catch-22. The foundation has been faulted for failing to do research which has direct, immediate consequences, whereas it is clear from the enabling legislation that the foundation's role particularly prohibits doing clinical research which has immediate consequences. That fact is sometimes not mentioned.

Mr. BROWN. One last question, Dr. Willows. What is the range of variation in that number that you have for human brain cells?

Dr. WILLOWS. It is enormous. I have seen figures quoted from 10 billion to 60 billion. I chose one at the higher end of the scale. It is true, however, that we are all losing them, as we age, at a disappointingly high rate.

Mr. BROWN. Ten to sixty?

Dr. WILLOWS. Ten to sixty billion nerve cells.

Mr. BROWN. I had seen figures that ran to a couple orders of magnitude higher than that.

Dr. WILLOWS. Sometimes the figures that are quoted are indicating the connections between nerve cells. If you include the connections that are made between nerve cells, then it goes even higher. It gets to be literally an astronomical figure.

Mr. BROWN. Thank you very much for your testimony, Dr. Willows. We have three more, if I am correct, witnesses from the foundation. Dr. CLARK. The second presentation will consider a complex level of behavior and even more complex specialty.

Dr. Paul Chapin, program director for linguistics, will describe how previous research has shown high applicability and exciting research. This area, like neuroscience, is an area of rapid growth. Mr. Chairman, this is Dr. Chapin.

STATEMENT OF DR. PAUL CHAPIN, PROGRAM DIRECTOR FOR LINGUISTICS, NSF

Dr. CHAPIN. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I would like to preface my remarks with a little history. Beginning around 1950, a number of scientists became interested in the acoustical analysis of sounds of speech. They concentrated their study on the frequency and intensity of the overtones present in speech sounds, not because this research problem had any foreseeable practical importance, but because these overtones seemed to correlate in an interesting way with the abstract descriptions of speech sounds by linguists. In