explain how the physiological consequences of being fat actually promote and maintain the obesity and the disordered eating behavior. We understand how insulin influences hunger and how insulin treatment may help prolong the obesity associated with diabetes. We have been able to identify infants on the first day of birth who are at high risk for obesity and we can now clearly specify some of the major factors that appear critical in the prevention of obesity.

All of this research has been funded by the behavioral and neural sciences divsion of the National Science Foundation. I choose to receive funds from NSF because their peer review system is exacting and I find the feedback valuable.

I believe that the behavioral and social sciences can and will be in the vanguard of crucial, basic scientific discovery-not as pointable-to as nuclear fission perhaps, but ultimately as critical to the solution of many of the problems of our times. I urge you to support NSF in providing funds for this endeavor.

Mr. BROWN. Very eloquent testimony, Dr. Rodin. I think I have to ask the same question that we asked this morning. How do you, in your own mind, justify the Federal role in supporting your science? Is it a case where you would not be able to do your research if there weren't Federal funds available?

Is there no other source for it? It's not something that could be done within the purview of normal budgetary constraints of your institution? You understand that this kind of question is what we are asking about most Federal programs today-why the Federal financing.

I think we need your input on that.

Dr. RODIN. The amount of funding that it takes from project to project varies enormously. And so, I think that some of the earlier studies that I did where we were simply spending money to buy milkshakes and walnuts would not have required very much funds and Yale could have supported it.

I think that as our research technology evolves, as our laboratory enterprise grows larger, as we educate more graduate students to train them to also develop research activities that add to basic knowledge, we must request funds from the Federal Government. There simply is no other place that has the resources to support basic research.

I have tried to demonstrate to you in this testimony that there are areas that ultimately have great and important applicability to problems of public concern. Some of them were more obvious in the beginning than others and I suspect that maybe for the more immediately relevant ones, there would be other, smaller sources of funding.

But for the ones where the payoff, at least in the initial year, was not as obvious in terms of its application to social or economic problems, I think we must rely on the Federal Government to support the acquisition of basic knowledge with the hope that much of it will in fact pay off in the solution of these problems.

Mr. BROWN. You described your research on the matter of overweight people, which is of great personal concern to me. [Laughter.] What did you find out with regard to us, that we relied more heavily on cues in the environment or on internal physiological signals to determine how much we eat?

Dr. RODIN. On cues in the environment, but the reason is that the obesity itself, and the consequences of becoming fat, change your

metabolism in a way that influences your experience of hunger and disregulates your system so that you are no longer able to rely on internal signals. We have also demonstrated that most of the metabolic changes associated with obesity, which the medical community believed were causes, are in fact consequences.

Changes in thyroid level, sluggish metabolism, all of these occur as a consequence of obesity. And, they support the obesity once it develops. The tendency towards external responsiveness can be developed in newborn infants independent of their birth weight and has some relationship to the degree of overweight of their parents. We are currently investigating that area very heavily.

I could not do newborn infant research without Federal funding. Mr. BROWN. Why not?

Dr. RODIN. Two important reasons. First, the expense, which I have already discussed, and I would like not to continue to re-echo that. Second, I think that the Federal guidelines demand a good deal of accountability from investigators and that's terribly important in the scientific community, especially when one is studying newborn infants. It forces us to go through a great deal of self-examination and I find that thoroughly healthy. So I think that the interaction is more than needing you for funding. I feel the demand of accountability is welcome and healthy as long as it doesn't go in the wrong direction. Mr. BROWN. Mr. Scoville?

Mr. SCOVILLE. Yes, Mr. Chairman.

Dr. Rodin, following up that thought you had there, I think is the idea that the social scientists should do a better job of self-presentation. This scheme was brought up this morning in the hearing.

To your knowledge, is the Science Foundation doing anything now or is there anything that it could do to improve this process of selfpresentation to the public as you put it?

Dr. RODIN. I don't know what the Science Foundation is doing currently in this domain, but I think they certainly could, in terms of demanding that some sections of our grant proposals be written in a way that allows a better form of self-presentation.

It's really very hard to write a grant proposal that is acceptable to your peers and at the same time is something that's creditable and understandable to someone in the lay community. We have somehow presented the same document for both purposes and maybe the Science Foundation could ask a secondary kind of analysis of one's line of research in order to make it more accountable to the community that is supporting it.

That does not necessarily mean that one has to point out the immediate application or relevance of one's research. In fact, all grant proposals now have a significance section. So, we do think in that regard. What I mean is to make it more understandable and to define the parameters along which one should be interested in that research. I think that is very clear right now.

Mr. SCOVILLE. That's what I was referring to.

Dr. RODIN. Yes.

Mr. SCOVILLE. Thank you.

Mr. BROWN. You probably are not familiar with the General Accounting Office report which just came out recommending the improvement in communication with regard to grant titles and abstracts

and so on. I think this is an area in which we obviously can make some improvements. But, you have almost committed the cardinal sin in your own presentation when you use the language, we need to learn ways to re-educate the public.

If you read Dr. Atkinson's editorial in Science, he points out that social science is caught on the horns of this dilemma. Either they are engaged in basic research which obviously is not relevant to any practical thing, or they are engaged in some form of behavior modification which is anathema to the public.

You are suggesting that you are going to take the horn that says we are going to modify behavior.

Dr. RODIN. I disagree with my friend Dr. Atkinson in that regard. I don't think there is anything antagonistic about basic research and the application of knowledge. I said in my testimony that many of us are not the ones who are doing the application-which by the way is much more than behavior modification-but I'm not certain in all cases that that has to be true.

My own personal experience is now to use what I know from my obesity research for the general public. We are developing programs in local school systems. We are working with pregnant women providing recommendations based on our findings. I think that that's my own personal goal for accountability and I don't consider myself any less good a basic scientist. In fact, I'm enriched by the contact of that application.

Mr. BROWN. But if it is true that you see obvious and important applications of the research that you are doing, these will obviously have to do with you say in the case of obesity research, anyway, the improvement of human health. The question arises then as to why isn't this kind of research more appropriately funded in an agency whose mission is the improvement of human health?

Dr. RODIN. Yes. The National Science Foundation does not fund my applied research. They have funded the basic research that led to these issues, all of them being very basic. I don't think that they would pass a grant proposal at the moment where I was asking for money to develop health programs in the school systems.

In fact, we are able to do that through support of the local school systems who are grateful for the service. So, I do see those two as being funded differently. I just don't see them as being antagonistic to one another conceptually or strategically.

Certainly, you don't mean that NSF money funding basic knowledge shouldn't be leading to application. I mean that, in a sense, is the goal. It may not be possible for all research, nor should we ask it of all research, but we certainly can't eliminate research that may have that because NSF's mission is basic science.

Mr. BROWN. We don't want to get too far into that discussion. [Laughter.]

There was an interesting press report the last few days with regard to a lady who, as I recall the details of the story-I wasn't following it too closely-she repented of her sins and got religion and was able to lose 40 pounds immediately.

Do you consider that a researchable problem?

Dr. RODIN. Mr. Brown, that's a very leading question. I'm terribly interested in people who are able to lose weight and I love talking to

them at cocktail parties. I'm not sure that that's the kind of thing that I would mount a scientific study of.

Mr. BROWN. This is a bona fide matter of a religious conversion leading to a lady losing a substantial amount of weight. I don't want

Dr. RODIN. Maybe she spent all of her time in church and was less tempted by the refrigerator. [Laughter.]

Mr. BROWN. Well, can you take that situation and construe it as a researchable problem?

Dr. RODIN. Yes, I'm sure I could. I'm sure that we could develop a research problem about any issue regarding human behavior. The only question is to demand of ourselves and hopefully the community demands this of us too-to choose the more from the less important and the more promising from the less promising.

It's not something, unless I would have 20 such people, that I would begin to mount a research program on. I would not do it on one individual.

Mr. BROWN. The healthiest people in my district are all Seventh Day Adventists who don't smoke cigars or drink whiskey or eat meat. It's such an interesting phenomenon that considerable research is being funded on the consideration of comparative health habits of this population versus the general population.

The motivation for their health practices is obviously religious motivation. It's embedded in the tenets of their faith.

Dr. RODIN. The scientific question, of course, as you indicated, is probably in the behavior that is produced by the religious beliefs. As a scientific question, we must investigate whether those behaviors in fact lead to better health, or whether religious belief independent of those behaviors lead to better health.

I think that may be a testable question.

Mr. BROWN. Dr. Rodin, I think we will proceed to Dr. Lane and see if he can present us with some more interesting areas for controversy. You may proceed with your statement.

Dr. LANE. Mr. Chairman, I certainly don't want to disappoint you, but it seems to me that research on language and thought, on judging, remembering, and problem solving must be about the least controversial kind of research there could be.

Mr. BROWN. I differ with you. Some of the most controversial people on your faculty are linguists.

Dr. LANE. But not linguists qua linguists.

Mr. BROWN. In the minds of the public, there is no distinction between the two. If they are linguists and identified as such, it's assumed that linguistics is controversial.

Dr. LANE. Such problems of attitude change and belief I leave to my distinguished colleague here. [Laughter.]

Mr. BROWN. Go ahead, Dr. Lane.

Dr. LANE. The specialty within the behavioral and neural sciences that I have been asked to address is one that, perhaps as well as any other, focuses clearly and directly on the central question, it seems to me, of informed inquiry since the beginning of mankind and that is the question, what is the nature of man?

One has to pause for a moment to even assemble all the arguments that have been guiding us for scores of centuries in our intense desire to find out more aobut the kind of being that we are.

What do we gain from inquiry into language and thought, into the nature of the human mind? Well, we gain better education for our children. We gain better therapy for the handicapped. We gain better ability to communicate with other people around the world, with our aliles, our enemies and nonalined peoples.

We gain better treatment for minorities. It staggers me and dismays me that there are representatives who are unclear about these gains and who, indeed, are prepared to vote against programs that are teaching us the nature of the learning process, that are teaching us the nature of human thought, that are explaining the process of problem solving. I certainly would not want to be the Representative that voted against research on language development which holds the key to better education for our children and better therapy for the many thousands of children who suffer from developmental disabilities.

I wouldn't want to be the Representative who voted against studies of reading. I wouldn't want to be the Representative who voted against the diffusion of the American sign language of the deaf or against studies of how that language affects the learning process in handicapped children since some 5 million Americans have a hearinghandicapped child or relative. I would not want to be the Representative who voted against preparing a dictionary or a grammar of languages in the Soviet Union or in Southeast Asia or in Africa, only to find that our country has a vital and immediate need for people versed in those languages.

Yet, when I compared this list that I just recited against the list of projects funded by the linguistics program at NSF in fiscal 1979, I found that three-fourths of the projects come under one of those headings. I would be delighted to defend any of the remaining fourth.

I could make a similar case for the project list that I examined for the memory and cognition program. We can learn ways to enhance remembering, we can learn ways to teach problem solving. We can make laborious human tasks feasible for computers, and what it costs is a little money, really, a very little money.

I'm talking about less than a penny out of the pocket of every wage earner in the United States. I believe that if we asked the man in the street, do you want your Represenative to vote in support of research that will improve education or minority rights or communication with our allies and enemies, and so on down the list, we would say, certainly I do. I want to hasten to say that the discussion today has focused on the social significance of these kinds of research and I feel that that's a little bit incomplete to say the least, insincere, in some measure, since there are many other motives that giude me and I believe my colleagues in the pursuit of knowledge, and perhaps the paramount motive of all is the sheer desire to know.

If you ask, can a free society indulge such an instinct in a few of its members, I say yes, we can. În fact, it's a measure of the quality of our life that we do. As we support our artists, our musicians, and our writers, so we should support those people who are seeking to understand, even if they cannot now say why they are seeking to understand, what their understanding might mean in terms of dollars out for dollars in.