(b) Important programs in the energy field will fail unless adequate attention is paid to various materials research problems.

(c) Many of the problems resulting from the impact of man's technology on environmental quality will need for their solution new interdisciplinary combinations and programs in materials science and engineering.

(d) To ensure adequate availability of materials in the future, increased attention must be paid to 1. the technology of conservation, 2. the discovery and development of material and functional substitutions, 3. improving, and increasing the efficiency of, materials processing and manufacturing methods, 4. the development of sophisticated robotics, 5. a closer involvement of materials knowledge with product design, and 6. improving the performance of materials.

(e) There is a need for intensified research on applied research problems that are of broad relevance.

(f) Basic research studies should be broadened to include more effort at understanding the properties of the structurally and compositionally complex materials that are the base of most technology.

"Vital elements for responding to the above priorities in complex areas, and for insuring that science gets effectively coupled to engineering, are interdisciplinary research programs, properly supported, staffed, and equipped. Universities provide many opportunities for imaginative new ventures and, in some cases, centers for such exploration, but the capabilities of federal and industrial laboratories should also be mobilized.

"In the complex panoply of science and engineering with which we have been concerned ingredients for progress are the continued acquisition of knowledge, collaborations between scientists and engineers, between scientists of various disciplines, and between institutions. Materials provide a natural focus for collaborative researches, but it is people who have to work together. So, in the last analysis, the highest priorities in materials research are to ensure that we have adequate human resources with the highest talents and necessary attitudes."

One of the principal bottlenecks in the way of moving ahead with the COSMAT recommendations is the existing lack of a suitable unifying and coordinating agency in government which can provide the same kind of focus for materials issues and policy-making such as has already been achieved for energy and environmental quality. I would look to the proposed Council on Materials Management to serve that crucial function.

Sincerely yours,

MORRIS COHEN.

STATEMENT OF DR. J. H. WESTBROOK, MANAGER, MATERIALS INFORMATION SERVICES, GENERAL ELECTRIC CO., CHAIRMAN, STANDING COMMITTEE ON MATERIALS INFORMATION SYSTEMS, FEDERATION OF MATERIALS SOCIETIES

Dr. WESTBROOK. Good afternoon.

Senator TUNNEY. Good afternoon, Doctor.

Dr. WESTBROOK. I am a metallurgist employed by the General Electric Co. In my present assignment I am manager of materials information services with corporate research and development.

One of the major responsibilities of this group is the maintenance and expansion of the corporate materials information system. This compendium of engineering, processing and purchasing information covers about 12,000 different materials in some 50 volumes. It is, I believe, one of the largest and most comprehensive materials information systems existent today in the private sector.

I am also involved in materials information at the national level. The Federation of Materials Societies, an organization of 13 professional societies with strong interests in materials, has a standing committee on materials information of which I am the chairman. The Office of Technology Assessment has an Advisory Panel on Materials to guide its assessments in the materials area.

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One of the first subjects selected by the Panel for study by the OTA was that of national materials information needs. I was appointed chairman of a subcommittee of the Advisory Panel to oversee a study of materials information that is now underway.

In speaking to you today, however, the observations and opinions I will offer are mine personally and are not to be construed as representing the views of the General Electric Co., the Federation of Materials Societies, nor of the OTA. I will restrict my remarks to problems of materials information systems in the general sense.

There is little question of the primacy of materials information in any consideration of national concerns.

In a recent paper I wrote:

The possession of materials, the understanding of materials and the ability to use materials have been the determinants of every civilization the earth has ever known. If this be granted, then information on materials is an even more basie building block in a flourishing society. We need to know the amounts and the qualities of the material resources we possess or lack: we must record, catalog and retrieve the myriad facts, theories and observations that constitute our understanding of materials; and we must have sufficient handbooks, manuals, texts and tutorial works to guide our citizens in their use.

The importance of the subject has also been recognized by several recent national boards and conferences: The National Commission on Materials Policy (Boyd report), the COSMAT study, the OTA as noted above, and the series of Henniker Conferences (1970, 1972, 1974) on “National Issues in Materials Policy," sponsored by the Engineering Foundation.

Let it first be understood that we now have a national materials information system and one that is working surprisingly well. It is imperfect, pluralistic, replete with redundancies, gaps and inaccuracies, but it is working. Why, then, the rising concern about materials information?

In my view, two of the contributing factors have been: (a) The sharp discontinuities in materials supply demand caused by explicit sociopolitical actions have made all segments of our society acutely aware of our dependence on materials, for example, the Arab oil embargo and recent legislation mandating automobile emission controls (in 1975, 70 percent of U.S. platinum consumption and more 409-grade stainless steel than all of 1973 U.S. consumption went into catalytic converters for this application alone), and (b) access to the national materials information system is now sought by elements of our society not professionally trained in materials, something it was not designed for.

Many groups, facing the above conditions, have responded with a clean sheet of naper approach, advocating a totally new, comprehensive, and monolithic materials information system, federally financed, controlled and located. It is by no means clear that such a solution world be acceptable or effective, let alone an optimum solution.

This latter view derives from several independent considerations: 12). No case has yet been made for an economy of scale in materials information systems; (2) it has not yet been established that even ideally complete and accurate knowledge of present and near-term supply demand statisties would permit accurate predictions of price Actuations and, hence, enable implementation of presumed) correc

tive actions; (3) existence of a monolithic Federal system may actually be a disincentive to eliciting the cooperation of the productive and consumptive sectors of a free enterprise society. The Government is not now, and perhaps never should be, a major factor as a consumer, investor or trader in materials. Furthermore, by the same token, the majority of materials information—be it properties, applications, or supply/demand statistics-is generated by private industry.

In my view, rather than to design a totally new system appropriate to a centrally controlled economy, we should be asking, "How many new Federal actions or agencies beneficially perturb the present materials information system-in particular, can means be found for promoting a beneficial interaction among public, private, Government and international systems?" Such an approach requires focus on the specific deficiencies of our present materials information system, viz:

(1) It is not simply lack of data, but rather problems of compatibility of data, promulgation of data, or organization of data for easy access and use that confound and impede the potential user.

(2) Existing information services are not well used either through lack of awareness on the part of the potential user or through specific deficiencies in individual services.

(3) Financial support from the Federal Government for information activities has always been difficult and is becoming increasingly so; witness the declining or static budgets of NSF's Office of Science Information Services and NBS's National Standard Reference Data program and the withdrawal of Air Force support from the immensely valuable binary metallic phase diagram compilation.

(4) The ability of private firms to cooperate in the exchange of technical data in ways which might benefit the national interest in respect to resource conservation is practically inhibited by adversary interpretations of the FTC Act and antitrust laws.

(5) More than collection, organization or dissemination of materials information, we need competent evaluation of that information. In general, this cannot be accomplished by economists, statisticians, information scientists or librarians, but only by professionally trained, practicing materials scientists and engineers.

The bills presently before the Congress dealing with materials information are addressed primarily to questions of supplies and shortages. I should, therefore, like to make a few remarks pertinent to this aspect of the subject.

First, many shortages are not, in fact, due to any absolute lack of material, either domestically or worldwide, but rather these "shortages" arise because of: (a) lack of material at the customary price; (b) lack of processing facilities. (This in turn may result from inadequate profits in the industry. To cite an example, I am informed that the profit of the entire ferroalloys industry in a given year is inadequate to build and construct a new ferroalloy furnace, one single furnace, at the present state of the art. Even in the absence of any absolute shortage of raw material like chromite, economics will require that necessary quantities of ferroalloy will have to be sourced from overseas rather than domestically.); (c) lack of a special grade of the material; (d) impact of a sudden technological or foreign political event; (e) actions by the U.S. Government (price controls, discrimina

tory freight rate structures, EPA or OSHA regulations, tariff policy, et cetera.); (f) "domino" effect of another short material for which the material in question is a prime substitute; (g) indirect effects, for example, a shortage of chromite for refractories affects steel and ferroalloy production. Realization of the influence of such factors warns against a simplistic approach to shortages from perusal of aggregated "bare number" statistics. In particular, any total "environmental assessment" undertaken to facilitate national planning must take into account existing or induced materials shortages of all kinds.

Second, from a national point of view, it is as important to monitor demand as it is supply. Yet, the demand side of the materials equation is much more difficult to quantify, understand, modify, and predict due to the extreme diversity and disaggregation of end-use components of the U.S. economy.

Finally, the significance of adequate and readily available engineering property data in a shortage situation is not generally recognized. Told that stainless steel is unavailable because of a chromium shortage, a manufacturer does not typically invest in prospecting for new sources for chromite or in an R. & D. program for chrome-free stainless, but rather he asks, "What materials may I substitute for stainless steel and what are their properties?" or "How may I apply a polymeric coating to plain carbon or low-alloy steel that will give me nearequivalent performance?”

Inasmuch as I believe I am the only representative of private industry to appear in these hearings, it may be of interest to present what I believe to be the desires of private industry for Federal assistance in materials information, or at least that portion of private industry that is a consumer of materials:

As I see it, there are three circumstances that would prompt the need for such assistance:

(1) In materials selection and substitution or in designing with materials, existing handbooks are not sufficiently detailed, comprehensive and current nor is vendor information sufficiently reliable without verification by test or service experience for application purposes. Hence, there come into being various private materials information systems such as that of General Electric to which I alluded in my opening remarks. There is a great duplication of effort here, for most of the materials covered by different consuming firms are common articles of commerce; only a few percent at most are proprietary products and only in rare instances are properties contained in the file which have not been released for public distribution. While this redundancy of effort cannot and should not be entirely eliminated, it should be substantially reduced; yet, there are no positive incentives for cooperative action and significant barriers do exist which mitigate against it, for example, antitrust legislation.

(2) Considerable interest has been expressed recently in a mechinereadable (that is computerized) data bank of materials properties, truly comprehensive in scope. Such a system is technically feasible and would be analogous in character to the computer-accessible bibliographic files that have recently become available. It doesn't appear likely that any single private firm may wish to invest the large amount of capital that would be necessary to create such a system even though user costs, once in operation, would be quite acceptable.

(3) Government regulations such as with EPA and OSHA require a knowledge of materials properties and compositions not readily available from the technical literature or from the vendors. Where regulations are enacted with regard to specific materials, it seems the Government has an obligation to provide the necessary information for compliance via TOXLINE or analogous information services. In summary, the materials information problem at the national level is a complex multifaceted issue and is not reducible to simple supply/demand statistics. It would be my view that improvement of the existing national materials information system should be encouraged, not its replacement. The improvements should take such forms as will eliminate the imperfections and gaps I have outlined, should seek to serve the materials consumers in the areas noted, and should recognize materials interactions with policies and rules promulgated by Federal agencies.

In closing gentlemen, I thank you for your attention and trust that some of the observations and cautions I have offered will be helpful to you in preparing that new legislation the Nation needs in coping with materials information problems.

Senator TUNNEY. Thank you very much, Mr. Westbrook, for your

statement.

I noted that you didn't make a specific recommendation on the bills. Do you have any feeling about the draft bills before the committee? Have you had a chance to look at them?

Dr. WESTBROOK. Yes; I did.

I was particularly impressed with the supplement to S. 1415 prepared early in November, and I think this is filling, in several respects, unmet needs, not only what we have been discussing all morning, the need for a coordination, monitoring activity to look at the whole Government involvement in materials, but also in envisioning for the Department of Commerce a role of its own in materials R. & D. that would be distinct from, but coordinated with, that of the various mission agencies, Defense, HEW and so on.

This is very much to the point and will fill what is now a gap. Senator TUNNEY. One of the things that disturbs me is that we have at the present time developed over a course of many decades a tremendous number of governmental interventions into the materials cycle, impacting both supply and demand. We use various methods to achieve that intervention; tax policy is, of course, the most common.

We have grant programs, Government contracting, et cetera. The thing that I am worried about on a philosophical level is that with these governmental interventions deemed to a considerable extent unplanned and unprogramed to take care of a very specific problem and with no adjustment mechanism to determine at some point down the line whether or not that intervention will still justify, we have created a situation in my view where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing in Government, and as a result, you have got various agencies acting in a countervailing fashion one against the other, and industry naturally is seeking a profit. That is the free enterprise system.

It is caught in the maelstrom, not knowing which way to turn. I am not now talking about the multinationals, although I think it is