STATEMENT OF DR. HARVEY BROOKS, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, AND DEAN OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED PHYSICS, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Dr. BROOKS. In the interest of saving time, I do not believe I will say very much about the formal statement which I would like to submit for the record, since most of the points I wanted to cover have been covered by other speakers this morning.

Rather, I would like to make a few specific remarks, both on what has been said by previous witnesses and also perhaps responsive to some of the questions that I have heard.

In the first place, I would like, as a member of the Board, to associate myself completely with Dr. Handler's testimony and with the specific recommendations he made concerning the legislation.

Second, I would like to make a brief remark in response to your question as to how the National Science Foundation goes about determining priorities for support as between different programs. This has already been pretty well sketched by Dr. Handler. But the point I want to emphasize is the key importance of the project proposal; that is, of initiative from the scientific community and from the institutions of the scientific community in determining what is actually done.

We may formulate a program and publicize it, but until somebody in the scientific community or some institution comes in with a concrete specific program of action, with the personnel delineated and so on, the National Science Foundation really is not in business.

I think this is partly what accounts for the time delays that Senator Pell was calling attention to. This does not mean, of course, that the Science Foundation is by any means a mere passive agent which waits for the community to come forward, since it can do and does do a great deal to stimulate and invite such proposals in areas which it considers to be important.

Nevertheless, the final commitment of funds and the final commitment to action depends on the receipt of concrete proposals from particular institutions within the scientific community.

We believe that this is the only fair way to operate, that in fact if you are going to start a new program, everybody ought to have a chance to participate and that, therefore, one should announce a program and the general guidelines for it, and then proceed to respond to the actual proposals that come forward from the community.

As for the question of priorities between fields of science, the input to this comes from many different sources.

You must remember that the whole staff of the Science Foundation is organized, partly at least, by scientific disciplines, and so for each discipline and subdiscipline, there is generally a program officer who is very knowledgable in his field. Many of these program officers are people who in fact come to NSF on leave of absence from universities for 2 or 3 years, so they come fresh from the laboratory, as it were, and are very familiar with what is going on in their field.

Secondly, of course, they are continually reviewing, and seeing the proposals that come in from the scientific community to the Foundation, getting opinions on these proposals from outside reviewers, and

so on. So they have a very good perspective and picture of what is going on at the frontiers of basic science in their fields of interest.

All of this input of proposal pressure, of initiatives and ideas from the scientific community, is continually flowing through the Foundation, through the staff of the Foundation, through the various advisory committees, and so on, and giving indications of what the growing points of science are. I would say, therefore, that the primary factor that goes into the allocation of funds is really the composite of the opinions of the scientific community, as represented by the proposals received and the opinions about them of many advisers.

Now, this has been supplemented in recent years by specifically commissioned studies in various scientific fields, made in fact outside the Science Foundation, generally in the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Handler referred previously to the Committee on Science and Public Policy of the National Academy of Sciences, of which Prof. George Kistiakowsky, of Harvard, was the founder and first chairman, and I am the current chairman.

This committee, which is partially supported in fact by a grant from the National Science Foundation Planning Division, has stimulated a series of studies of various scientific fields by knowledgeable groups representing those fields. So far there have been, I think, five such studies published, and there are three very ambitious studies underway currently in mathematics, in the life sciences-the latter chaired by Dr. Handler-and in the social and behavioral sciences sponsored jointly by the Social Science Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences.

The results of these studies are fed into the Government and into the National Science Foundation, and have a very strong influence on the policies and priorities for support-although obviously they cannot be the sole influence, since the support of science and the relative importance of different fields cannot be determined exclusively in terms of scientific considerations, but must involve other considerations of what problems are important from the standpoint of society and of the Government.

I think with those two general remarks, I will stand and let the rest of my remarks appear in the record.

(The prepared statement of Dr. Brooks follows:)

PREPARED STATEMENT OF DR. HARVEY BROOKS, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, AND DEAN OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED PHYSICS, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

I appreciate very much the opportunity to testify concerning this bill. I come before you really with several hats. I am a Member of the National Science Board, but I also currently serve as Chairman of the Committee on Science and Public Policy of the National Academy of Sciences, which has been responsible for the preparation of a series of reports surveying the opportunities and needs of the various scientific disciplines. I am responsible for a major division of a university which is dependent on the support of academic science by agencies of the federal government. I am also on the Board of Trustees of one major university and one liberal arts college, and I am a member of the Board of Trustees of one of the three major oceanographic institutions in the United States. In all of these capacities I have had the opportunity to see the problems of academic science support from the viewpoint of many different types of institutions, as well as from the viewpoint of the federal government. While I was a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee a few years ago I devoted much of my time and attention

to problems arising in the support of academic science and also problems of longrange planning for the support of science in the federal government as a whole. In my remarks I would like to emphasize three major points:

1. The importance of the role of the National Science Foundation in the support of basic and academic science in the United States.

2. The importance of the National Science Board as a spokesman for the scientific community and the desirability of its maintaining a degree of independence and initiative.

3. The potential and desirable role of the National Science Foundation in the support of applied research.

Role of the National Science Foundation

During the postwar era the United States developed its scientific establishment as a more or less incidental by-product of the cold war. Successive supporting agencies with new technological or applied-science missions stepped forward in support of basic research-and, incidentally, graduate education-related to their missions. The National Science Foundation appeared on the scene early, but only became a significant factor in the support of academic research after about 1959. It was the first agency that really took responsibility, with a mandate from the Congress, for the health of American science and graduate science education as a whole, the only agency that worried about institutions, people, educational curricula, and the training of teachers as first-priority problems in their own right. It was also the only agency that took responsibility for the development of science primarily with respect to its intrinsic intellectual values-always with the understanding that by developing a strong scientific enterprise in all its aspects, all the more mission-oriented research and development activities would also be strengthened and a resource created for the future. Over the years the federal government, from having supported scientific projects here and there in order to enhance or accelerate what was already going on, has now become the major patron of science and of scientific education beyond the bachelor's level. The entire enterprise stands or falls by what the federal government does, and furthermore, the lead time or cycle time is much longer than for most federal activities. Deficiencies in support today cannot easily be rectified five years from now.

The National Science Foundation is increasingly the balance wheel in the pluralistic system of science support, especially important in a time when the country is reassessing its priorities and redeploying its technical resources. In such times of change it is particularly essential that there be a strong agency having an overview of scientific research and of scientific education, and with responsibility to think mainly in these terms. I have a conviction that our pluralistic system of support is a good one, that the National Science Foundation should not become the exclusive supporter of research and graduate education in science. Mission-oriented basic research often turns up new areas of investigation and new intellectual challenges, interesting for their own sake, that would not have appeared without the stimulus of a definite public need. Mission-oriented support also stimulates and enriches the agencies that provide the support and keeps them in touch with the advancing frontiers of science. But the National Science Foundation must have enough resources under its own control to explore new areas of scientific opportunity independently of short-term shifts in perceived public needs, in the confidence that such exploration according to the dictates of the internal logic of science will ultimately enable us to deal more effectively with all our national problems. Thus, as I see it, the Foundation will play a gradually increasing role in the total picture of science support. The very fact that it is not under compulsion to respond to every national emergency or immediate social need gives it the opportunity to look beyond the present to the future needs of the country.

One of the important features of the present bill, in my mind, is that it raises the social sciences to a status of equal partnership with the physical and life sciences, rather than relegating them to the position of "other sciences." This is in recognition of the fact that many of the problems with which the country will be faced in the last quarter of the 20th century involve a simultaneous and intertwined application of social and natural science knowledge, and that the development of the social sciences themselves will draw increasingly on techniques, concepts, and instruments developed in the natural sciences.

Role of the National Science Board

As the National Science Foundation has grown, there has been a shift in the role of the National Science Board. In the early days the Board approved every action of the Foundation's Director and staff, but as the number of individual grants has multiplied it has shifted to a policy-making role, delegating more and

more of its grant-making powers to the Director. This is as it should be, but it now needs more explicit recognition in the legislation. The Board should concentrate more and more on its central role in the making of policy for the National Science Foundation, and in providing the rationale and the recommendations for policy in support of basic research and science education for the government as a whole, taking into account the actions of all the other agencies and of the private sector. The part-time nature of the Board-its membership including working scientists, university administrators, and industrial officials familiar with the applications of science ensures a much richer input to policy than could be achieved through a purely intragovernmental administration, no matter how competent. Also, the Board stands as a representative of the scientific community and a spokesman for basic science and education within the administration. It represents additional assurance to the scientific community that the long-range scope of science will not be sacrificed to short-term transient goals of the moment, or to public fashions or political expediency. The Board is a part of the administration, but it has, and should continue to have, a degree of independence to speak out for the long-term interests of the nation's scientific enterprise. I hope the proposed legislation will strengthen this independence and enhance the role of the Board in initiating science policy and proposing new programs. In this respect, I subscribe to everything that Dr. Handler has said in his testimony. Applied Science

I come finally to the question of applied science. The proposed legislation gives the National Science Foundation the authority to move into applied science when and if desirable. This is perhaps the most controversial proposal in the present legislation. There are many in the scientific community who fear that the National Science Foundation will become the dumping ground for every applied program that other agencies are reluctant to undertake, and that eventually applied research, which is much more expensive than basic research, will drive out basic research altogether, and that then there will be no agency left in government that supports research projects primarily because of their intellectual importance— that is, their importance to the whole interlocking structure of our knowledge and understanding of nature. This is a real danger. On the other hand, there is no sharp line in practice between basic and applied research, and this distinction is constantly changing with time. What appeared to be basic research yesterday becomes highly applied tomorrow. Furthermore, there has been concernlegitimate, I think that emphasizing the distinction between basic and applied research, in support, has reinforced an unhealthy attitude toward applied science among some graduate students and some professors in universities, particularly in engineering. I believe the National Science Foundation should support scientific research, that is, research that has scientific significance or practical significance (often both) extending well beyond immediate problems. A test of good research is general significance, whether this be in terms of conceptual understanding or in terms of widely applicable techniques or design methods. The university scientist or engineer-particularly the latter-should be free to carry his work occasionally to the point of feasibility demonstration on a small scale without losing support because it is no longer basic enough. On the other hand, this should not be a license for mere empirical puttering or for carrying out routine and repetitive measurements, necessary as such measurements may be in some kinds of applied work. However, this type of applied work should be left to other agencies, where it can be much better coupled to defined practical objectives. It is not generally appropriate for universities or for the National Science Foundation.

Understanding, that is, theoretical understanding, the creation and testing of conceptual or abstract models of reality against the real world, is the objective of science. In the past, understanding has always led ultimately to the ability to predict, and often to control. As the consequences of technology become ever more ramified, or indirect but also more far-reaching, understanding becomes more essential than ever before. We can no longer afford to develop or introduce technology without deep understanding of what we are doing. It is not sufficient that something works, or to prove that it works. We must know why it works and what its effects are in the environment. The kind of understanding necessary to predict and control technology-including biological and social technology-can come only from scientific research in which understanding replaces the mere assembling of facts. It is in this spirit that I think the new and broadened mission proposed for the National Science Foundation is important. I do not think that the National Science Foundation should support industrial-type research id toward the development of specific products and processes, nor should * applied research that is well supported by other agencies. On the of ay well

contribute supplementary support to projects in academic institutions supported by other agencies in order to facilitate deeper exploration or further generalization of results transcending the missions of the supporting agencies or its interpretation thereof. The National Science Foundation should support, for the most part, the kind of applied research that may be related to basic technology or basic technological capabilities, or that is related to the wider environmental or social effects of industrial technology. This is the kind of research that is undertaken prior to the clear identification of practical missions.

Indeed, it seems to me that the past role of the National Science Foundation in the field of weather modification is a good example of the kind of role it might fill in other applied research areas on a highly selective basis. When the National Science Foundation was first assigned this mission, there was great uncertainty as to whether weather modification could be undertaken at all, and much of the necessary fundamental knowledge of precipitation processes, cloud physics, and atmospheric circulation was lacking. Only when this knowledge was at hand was it possible to speak realistically of large-scale experiments in weather modification, or of operational programs. At this point it became desirable to consider other mechanisms for carrying on the technology of weather modification, leaving the National Science Foundation to continue with the more fundamental and generalizable parts of the program.

I see the National Science Foundation currently filling a similar role in the field of the development of scientific-information systems. This is also applied research. The Foundation's role has been to support demonstration and prototype experiments as well as to cultivate a broad research program. In a certain sense, one might say that the purpose of applied research in the National Science Foundation should be to point out new technical opportunities and new technical missions, which would then be taken over by other agencies. It should be a generator of opportunities rather than a responder to requirements.

Senator KENNEDY of Massachusetts. Thank you very much, Dr. Brooks.

Would you explore a little bit the importance of the Foundation supporting applied research?

Dr. BROOKS. Yes. I think this has been to some extent already covered in both Dr. Haworth's and Dr. Handler's remarks, and I subscribe very closely to what they have said, both in respect to the dangers of the Science Foundation getting too deeply involved in applied research, and as to the importance of being able to carry basic research far enough so that in fact people in the university, particularly in the more applied sciences, do not feel constrained by the limitation of support to what is defined as basic science.

There is no sharp line in practice in fact between basic and applied research. And this line is constantly changing. What appeared to be basic research yesterday suddenly becomes highly applied research

tomorrow.

I believe fundamentally that the National Science Foundation should support scientific research that is research which has scientific significance or practical significance or indeed both extending well beyond the immediate problem at hand. The test of good research is general significance, whether this be in terms of conceptual understanding or whether it be in terms of widely applicable techniques, or design methods.

A university scientist or engineer, and particularly the latter, should be free to carry his work occasionally to the point of feasibility demonstration without losing support, because it is no longer basic enough.

Senator KENNEDY of Massachusetts. Could you give some illustration of that point-perhaps in the field of water pollution or air pollution or transportation?

Dr. BROOKS. Yes. I think the criterion that should be followed is that the Foundation should be able to support research in an area