[Senate Hearing 113-688]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 113-688
THE FEDERAL RESEARCH PORTFOLIO:
CAPITALIZING ON INVESTMENTS IN R&D
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON COMMERCE,
SCIENCE, AND TRANSPORTATION
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED THIRTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
JULY 17, 2014
__________
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Transportation
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SENATE COMMITTEE ON COMMERCE, SCIENCE, AND TRANSPORTATION
ONE HUNDRED THIRTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER IV, West Virginia, Chairman
BARBARA BOXER, California JOHN THUNE, South Dakota, Ranking
BILL NELSON, Florida ROGER F. WICKER, Mississippi
MARIA CANTWELL, Washington ROY BLUNT, Missouri
MARK PRYOR, Arkansas MARCO RUBIO, Florida
CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri KELLY AYOTTE, New Hampshire
AMY KLOBUCHAR, Minnesota DEAN HELLER, Nevada
MARK WARNER, Virginia DAN COATS, Indiana
MARK BEGICH, Alaska TIM SCOTT, South Carolina
RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut TED CRUZ, Texas
BRIAN SCHATZ, Hawaii DEB FISCHER, Nebraska
EDWARD MARKEY, Massachusetts RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin
CORY BOOKER, New Jersey
JOHN E. WALSH, Montana
Ellen L. Doneski, Staff Director
John Williams, General Counsel
David Schwietert, Republican Staff Director
Nick Rossi, Republican Deputy Staff Director
Rebecca Seidel, Republican General Counsel and Chief Investigator
C O N T E N T S
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Page
Hearing held on July 17, 2014.................................... 1
Statement of Senator Rockefeller................................. 1
Statement of Senator Thune....................................... 5
Statement of Senator Markey...................................... 40
Witnesses
Vinton G. Cerf, Vice President and FICEF Internet Evangelist,
Google; Member, National Science Board......................... 7
Prepared statement........................................... 9
Mariette DiChristina, Editor-in-Chief and Senior Vice President,
Scientific American............................................ 13
Prepared statement........................................... 15
Neal Lane, Senior Fellow in Science and Technology Policy, Baker
Institute for Public Policy, Malcolm Gillis University
Professor and Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Rice
University; Co-Chair, Committee on New Models for U.S. Science
and Technology Policy, American Academy of Arts & Sciences..... 18
Prepared statement........................................... 20
Stephen Fienberg, Maurice Falk University Professor of Statistics
and Social Science, Department of Statistics, The Machine
Learning Department, The Heinz College, and Cylab, Carnegie
Mellon University.............................................. 27
Prepared statement........................................... 29
Appendix
Letter from Darold Hamlin, President and Executive Director,
Emerging Technology Consortium to Hon. Jay Rockefeller and Hon.
John Thune..................................................... 51
Response to written questions submitted by Hon. Amy Klobuchar to
Dr. Vinton G. Cerf............................................. 53
Response to written questions submitted to Dr. Neal Lane by:
Hon. John D. Rockefeller IV.................................. 54
Hon. Amy Klobuchar........................................... 55
Hon. Edward Markey........................................... 55
Response to written questions submitted to Dr. Stephen Fienberg
by:
Hon. John D. Rockefeller IV.................................. 56
Hon. Amy Klobuchar............................................... 57
THE FEDERAL RESEARCH PORTFOLIO: CAPITALIZING ON INVESTMENTS IN R&D
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THURSDAY, JULY 17, 2014
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:36 p.m. in room
SR-253, Russell Senate Office Building, Senator John D.
Rockefeller IV, Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN ROCKEFELLER IV,
U.S. SENATOR FROM WEST VIRGINIA
The Chairman. As I've explained to one of you already, this
is sort of a bad afternoon and I don't give a hoot because, if
there was nobody here, I'd be even happier because then I'd get
you all to myself, and I'd keep you for 2 hours and we'd just
have an incredible conversation. But, everybody, by three
o'clock, virtually everybody is out of here, because they all
have to go through this miserable process of going back home
and going to fundraisers and doing political speeches and all
of this stuff, which John Thune doesn't have to do because he's
an icon in South Dakota.
[Laughter.]
Senator Thune. Yes, right.
The Chairman. Well, that's new. At least it's new.
And, you know, John, and Amy is going to be here. And I
think it'll just be us.
I think your general impression is accurate, that we get
nothing done in the Senate, but that doesn't mean that we
can't. And you have an example right here; these two people.
Now we're not the same people, we belong to different political
parties, we have different philosophies on some things but our
attitude, since we like each other----
[Laughter.]
Senator Thune. Yes. Yes.
I'm sorry, I missed the cue.
The Chairman. We look for ways to cooperate. Though, rather
than looking for ways to not cooperate, we cooperate to
cooperate. And, as a result, we're going to be able to hand up
a bill here very shortly, which I'm going to show you what
we've done. And we worked together. And that was a harder
stretch for him than for me because he's under more pressure
sometimes. I mean, Democrats can always be irresponsible;
right?
[Laughter.]
The Chairman. And then, his predecessor was a lady named
Kay Bailey Hutchison from Texas. And she was fabulous;
absolutely fabulous. And she was a classic moderate Republican;
right? A little bit of old school?
Senator Thune. She was a conservative, but yes.
[Laughter.]
The Chairman. Yes.
No, but I mean in her----
Senator Thune. Yes, demeanor.
The Chairman.--demeanor.
Senator Thune. In her demeanor. Yes, that's right.
Very nice.
The Chairman. Yes.
You know, I just came from the National Youth Science
Foundation Luncheon where there were 200 of the two smartest
people from every state in science, technology, engineering and
math were there. And they all got really boring speeches except
mine, which is absolutely terrific.
[Laughter.]
The Chairman. It just gives you such a sense of joy to know
that there are people out there like that.
And, John, I'm sure yours were just as good.
But, Kay Bailey--we had this America COMPETES Act, which
we're going to hold up the second version of it, third version
of it, that was saddled, a number of years ago, in the center
of the Senate aisle on a bipartisan basis by a unanimous
consent. It was a $45 billion bill. That's not something that
people ordinarily sign onto quickly. And there were five holds
on the Republican side. And Lamar Alexander and I had been
governors together, and his wife is on my wife's public
television board. And Kay Bailey Hutchison is just a really
good friend and I still send her flowers on Mother's Day.
None of this has anything to do with this hearing.
[Laughter.]
The Chairman. But, if you just be patient, it's almost
over.
And so, this is the way we did the America COMPETES bill; a
$45 billion bill.
Kay Bailey said, ``This is a little rich.''
I said, ``What if I take a billion off?''
You know when you say, ``What if I take a billion off?''
that sounds really good; right? It's a lot of money. So we did
that.
Then, she said ``Well there's this program,'' and some part
of it that I don't really like.
So I called up my committee staff head here and I said,
``Do we really need that?'' She said, ``No, actually we
don't.''
So I said, ``Kay Bailey, the billion is gone, the program
is gone, Lamar Alexander is obviously devoted to education,''
from his educational background, ``went and cleared all the
Republican holds.'' And we passed it by unanimous consent
without moving that one afternoon.
So things used to be like that. They can still come to be
like that. It won't be quick, but do not get discouraged. OK.
Senator Thune. Here, here.
The Chairman. I really appreciate your being here. We had a
great hearing yesterday, but this is going to be a better
hearing. There just won't be as many members here because
they're all home going to their public libraries to read
serious books; right?
Senator Thune. Yes.
The Chairman. I've been working on this whole area for a
long, long time. I'm really honored to be chair of this
committee and to work with John Thune, because we do have
jurisdiction over it, which is a complex word but it's the
oversight of NIST, NSF. You know all the places which don't get
enough attention. They get more attention for doing
cybersecurity but otherwise they don't. But they're incredible
important. But unless you decide they're important then you
feel free to go and cut. Now there's a lot of cutting going on
in Congress this day and that's something we're going through
and that's going to be difficult.
But there can be absolutely no question investing in
science, technology and innovation and educating our young
people is critical to our future. And that's what you say,
Vint, in your, Dr. Cerf, in your opening statement and I think
we should all be grateful that our country's leaders have had
wisdom and the patients to make over the years these
investments because they make a real difference in peoples'
lives. You do it for the cerebral excitement of it but you also
do it for the public good. I mean, that's just part of what you
do.
Investments never change things over night. Americans
always want things to be changed overnight, but when they do
things and you've been involved with them, they're game
changers. And funding for the agencies like the National
Science Foundation, NIST, just doesn't mean another scientist
in a lab somewhere; quite the contrary.
The money that we put into basic research in understanding
the world around us has a real world impact and it creates new
ways, one, to protect our loved ones by better identifying
dangerous counterfeit drugs; second, to secure our homeland by
being able to smell even small amounts of explosives; and
three, to interact with the world by providing seed funding and
new technologies for companies that transform the Internet,
communications, and mobile phones, and a whole lot of other
things.
That's why I've been so happy to support Federal funding.
John's going to get mad at me in a minute, but there have been
a bunch of Senators, before I got here from West Virginia, none
of them have ever voted for a foreign aid bill or a foreign
assistance bill. They considered that to be a waste of money,
money that could be spent on West Virginia or something else
and there has almost never been a foreign aid bill that I
haven't voted for. And that's just a change. I'm different in
that way and people have come to accept that. And it doesn't
make me popular, but it makes me do my job.
So that's why I support Federal funding for research and
development, R&D, for education in science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics; STEM. That's also why I've been a
huge champion, along with John, for the American COMPETES Act
of 2007 and 2010; we're going to hold up the next one in a few
minutes.
Over the past few months, I've received some amazing
numbers on the impact of programs addressed in that COMPETES
Act.
Back in 2001, I worked on legislation to create the Robert
Noyce Teacher Fellowship Program, which was strengthened in
2007, in that COMPETES Act. As of last year, the Noyce
Scholarship--see I love reading these things. The Noyce
Scholarship Program is expected to help produce over 12,000
math and science teachers in high-need areas.
Well, Senator Thune and I both come from high-needs areas;
from rural states with a lot of people who don't get to do what
people in more urban areas do.
In 2010, the COMPETES granted every Federal agency the
authority to award prizes for solutions to difficult problems.
Since then, the website Challenge.gov has hosted over 200
challenges with over 16,000 Americans participating. That's
good. That's not 160,000 but it's 16,000. That's good. Ongoing
challenges are working to better measure pollution; reduce
hospital readmission; to bring down the cost of solar energy;
and just tons of other areas.
If this country is going to build on these tremendous
results, we must continue to defend scientific research and to
make it a priority. Make it a priority. Given our government's
long and successful track record in supporting research and
development, I'd like to think that it doesn't need defending.
But, you know, I'm wrong. It does; vigorous defending, which is
why this is important.
We know that our science agencies have suffered because of
long-term funding reductions. That's not just the work but the
morale, people's future plans. It's like any time you make
cuts, people start looking at their future in a different way
because they figure I can't be sure the government is going to
change, because nobody can predict the future that way. And, if
they do, it's usually gloomy.
It's very impossible to plan long-term research when you
can't even be sure of your next budget over the next couple of
months. Also, we've seen proposals that would let Congress
decide what research projects are worthwhile. Now this is
something which makes me very hot under the collar. Congress
has no business deciding what research projects are worthwhile.
I mean, you know, we've got scientists in the Congress and they
can be helpful. We've science committees and that kind of
thing. But, having served on this committee and worked with the
Senate Science and Technology Caucus, I know that scientists,
through grant competitions and peer review, are best able to
make those decisions. Congress wants to but you know what's
best, and your colleagues.
On his deathbed, and I love this story, John. In 1969,
Senator Thune, President Dwight Eisenhower told a friend that
in his experience, I've never read this before and I've never
heard this before, ``scientists were'', on his deathbed mind
you, ``were one of the few groups in Washington who seemed to
be there to help the country and not help themselves.''
Our House colleagues would substitute their own opinions
for those. The scientific community would be wise to remember
those words.
Today, I plan to--now comes my big moment. John, we're
going to hold this bill up together. See?
This is the 2014 America COMPETES bill, which I haven't yet
read. This is why I'm not going to give it to you.
[Laughter.]
The Chairman. This bill would make it clear that the United
States is committed to leading the world in science and
engineering. That means getting the kids excited about STEM,
funding a wide-range of research and making sure that the best
research results make it to the marketplace, which is all that
counts.
There are already so many examples of federally-funded
research making our Nation and our economy stronger. That's why
I'm very glad to see Dr. Vint Cerf here today. It really was
not Al Gore; it was Vint Cerf who, at DARPA, started the whole
Internet business. And Dr. Cerf will explain it took several
decades of incremental work by scientists. See that's what is
so important. Everybody wants a quick solution, a quick answer.
It doesn't work that way. And that's the difference with the
private sector. The private wants to get a result quickly or
relatively quickly. They'll hang in some of the big ones for a
while and put up risk money, but at some point they've got to
have a result.
The Federal scientists know that sometimes the risk of
failure is your best friend, because you learn from why you
failed and, rather than have your program canceled, you have to
have it defended because you learned from that and you go on to
do what you do.
Netscape, Yahoo!, Google, you know, all of those things
would be nowhere without all of you. And they pursue their
business ideas because of what you've done.
Our challenge is to make sure that the next Internet is
developed by the United States, not in a laboratory in China,
India, or Europe. And I'm not xenophobic that way. It's just I
want it that way. I mean, we used to have those magnificent
institutes in India; you have to be brilliant to get in and
brilliant to get out. They'd all come over here and they'd do
their graduate study and they'd stay here and they'd work here.
And now, increasingly, there and in other countries they don't.
They go back to their own countries. And I can't criticize
that, because their own countries need them too. But it was
just wonderful when they were all staying here and working and
starting up businesses and it was exhilarating. And Europe,
too.
So unless we choose to support science in the country, and
it is a choice, it's always a choice, I'm afraid that the next
world-changing innovation will not belong to us. And that's why
I'd like to invite all of my Senate colleagues to work with
Senator Thune and myself on a 2014 COMPETES reauthorization to
ensure that our country continues to lead. And that's the end
of me.
Senator Thune.
STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN THUNE,
U.S. SENATOR FROM SOUTH DAKOTA
Senator Thune. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you for holding this hearing to consider the Federal
role in scientific research and development and how best to
capitalize on Federal investments.
I join you in welcoming our witnesses to today's hearing,
which presents us with a good opportunity to discuss the impact
of the United States R&D enterprise on our economy and our
society overall. Among individual countries, the United States
is by far the largest investor in public and private R&D,
comprising 30 percent of the global research and development
total. Past and current budget realities, however, underscore
the importance of maximizing our Federal investments that so we
can get the biggest bang for our buck, and should encourage an
examination of ways to leverage even more private sector
resources to expand the reach of our R&D.
The America COMPETES Acts of 2007 and 2010 were designed to
set our science and technology R&D priorities and serve as the
authorizing vehicles for the National Science Foundation and
the National Institute of Standards and Technology under our
Committee's jurisdiction, as well as for the Department of
Energy's Office of Science.
I know you, Mr. Chairman, and former Ranking Member Kay
Bailey Hutchison worked together on the America COMPETES Acts
of 2007 and 2010, and I look forward to reviewing the
legislation that you just put forward and that your staff is in
the process of developing for discussion, and evaluating
opportunities for consensus as we go forward.
At some level, there is broad bipartisan consensus that the
Federal Government should play a significant role in promoting
scientific research, especially basic research. As Dr. Cerf
points out in his testimony, businesses can rarely support
sustained, long-term, high-risk research in the same way the
Government can; this is especially true when the benefits,
though potentially large, are diffuse. But, once we get beyond
the high-level agreement, the nuts and bolts of Federal funding
can get quite challenging.
As our colleagues on the House Science Committee have
noted, it is not hard to find examples of federally funded
research that sound more like the pet projects of eccentric
billionaires than matters worthy of limited taxpayer dollars.
Plus, even when we accept the scientific merits of R&D, there's
no shortage of worthwhile projects with more clear-cut ends
that compete with basic research for funding.
In this Committee, we've heard previous testimony about the
importance of funding research intended to stimulate advanced
manufacturing, improve forensic science, and bolster
cybersecurity. All of these are laudatory goals, but some may
be achieved through means other than direct Federal spending.
For example, I introduced an amendment to the tax extenders
legislation in May that would simplify and make permanent the
R&D tax credit. This tax credit encourages businesses to
continue investing in R&D and promotes jobs and manufacturing
throughout the country.
In my view, the Federal R&D enterprise is at its best when
it supports important basic research that is foundational to
discovery. For example, in my home state of South Dakota,
researchers a mile below the surface at the Sanford Underground
Research Facility, or SURF, in Lead, South Dakota have been
conducting a world-class experiment to detect dark matter.
While the applications of this research are yet to be fully
understood, such research contributes to our understanding of
how the universe works. I'm pleased to note that NSF and DOE
recently announced that they have jointly selected a portfolio
of projects for the second generation of dark matter, direct-
detection experiments that will include another new experiment
housed at SURF.
These existing and future dark matter experiments, which
present compelling goals and opportunities for U.S. leadership
in the physical sciences, include more than 100 collaborators
representing 17 universities around the world, including South
Dakota School of Mines & Technology and the University of South
Dakota, as well as national laboratories in the United States,
the U.K., and Portugal.
Federal support for fundamental research, such as that
underway at SURF and at universities across the country, can
provide the foundation for many new innovations. These
discoveries often provide useful applications far afield from
the original focus. Yet, to help recognize potential
applications, a recent National Academy of Sciences report
highlighted the need to improve the metrics and measures that
track and evaluate these publicly funded research programs and
their ultimate impacts on society.
Along these lines, I look forward to hearing from our
witnesses today about ways to better maximize the benefits of
federally funded research, as well as barriers that are
inhibiting innovation. I'm also interested to hear about any
challenges our witnesses in the private sector and university
community have faced in investing in long-term research, as
well as the obstacles they've confronted in attracting and
retaining foreign-born students and workers in STEM fields. I'd
also like to hear from the witnesses about what policies beyond
direct funding from Federal agencies, could help to unlock new
sources of R&D from the private sector.
I want to thank you all for your participation and for
taking time to share your insights with the Committee this
afternoon, and I look forward to your testimony.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. All right. Now it's your turn unless you'd
like us to talk more.
[Laughter.]
The Chairman. Dr. Cerf, you are going to be first. I've
already read your testimony but I'd like to hear it again.
STATEMENT OF VINTON G. CERF, VICE PRESIDENT AND FICEF INTERNET
EVANGELIST, GOOGLE; MEMBER, NATIONAL SCIENCE BOARD
Dr. Cerf. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and Ranking
Member Thune.
I must confess to you, after listening to both of your
opening remarks, I almost feel like I should stay silent
because, you know, you basically just gave my speech. But if
you can tolerate a few additional remarks, I would be honored
to continue.
There is no substitute for deep understanding of natural
and artificial phenomena, especially when our national and
global well-being depends on our ability to model and make
predictions regarding them.
Government support for basic and applied research is
crucial. Not only does it bring great civil and economic
benefits, but the government also has the unique capacity to
sustain this kind of effort. You are all well aware of the
fundamental scientific paradigm. Theories are developed to
explain observations or to speculate on how and why things
might work. Experiments are done to validate or refute the
predictions of the theory. And theories are revised based on
experimental results.
Basic and applied research go hand-in-hand. Basic research
tries to understand and applied research tries to do. And
often, one must pursue both in the effort to uncover new
knowledge.
The Internet is a great example of how successful applied
research projects develop. It took 10 years for the Internet to
reach operational status. It's still the subject of research
and further development as new and, often, unexpected
applications are invented every day.
Validation of basic research may take a long time. Results
are not always guaranteed. Consider the recent discovery of the
Higgs boson. Peter Higgs and his colleagues postulated the
existence of this fundamental particle around 1954, but it has
taken 50 years, I'm sorry, 1964, but it has taken 50 years to
achieve the experimental capacity to test the theory. Research
also requires humility. Every scientist must be prepared to
cast aside or revise a pet theory if measurement and
observation contradict it.
Failure is the handmaiden of wisdom in the scientific
world. Understanding the reason for failure is sometimes even
more important than positive results. It may pave the way for
deeper understanding. The freedom to accept the potential of
failure makes the difference between an incremental refinement
and a breakthrough. Einstein's special and general Theory of
Relativity shattered the complacency of the Newtonian model of
the Universe.
Research into the nature of the atom led to the development
of quantum field theory. Relativity and quantum field theory
have not been reconciled. And now we believe that the physics
of the very small are extremely relevant to the study of the
universe at large.
If we've learned anything over the course of the past 100
years, it is that we know less than we once thought we knew
about the world around us. For scientists, this only means that
discovery awaits at every turn.
Sustainable businesses are rarely in position to invest in
long-term research. The U.S. has benefited from underwriting
this kind of work as exemplified by the research programs of
DARPA, NSF, NIH and NIST; among many others. Consistent and
increasing support for basic and applied research and advanced
development has been the source of most advancements in science
and technology in the last 70 years and has played a large role
in making the American economy the envy of the world. In this
area, the Congressional committees, focused on scientific
research and development, have extremely important roles to
play.
We're living through a renaissance of computing that will
transform our ability to understand global phenomena. New
disciplines, such as computational biology, computational
chemistry and computational physics, use increasingly detailed
and accurate models to make predictions that we can test in the
laboratory. The resulting breakthroughs could help people live
longer, healthier and more productive lives. As Richard Hamming
famously observed, ``The purpose of computing is insight not
numbers.''
The 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry went to three NSF
researchers for their computer models of molecular processes.
It's sometimes said that we're all born natural scientists but
that our educational system erodes this curiosity with poorly
constructed curricular content and style of presentation.
Computers and networks may have a role to play there as well.
Along with the Association for Computing Machinery, I
believe every student should have some exposure to programming.
I've been a strong proponent of the proposition that computer
science should be a required part of the K-12 curriculum,
treated on a par with the other STEM subjects.
The Maker Movement, accelerated by the development of 3D
printers and the Internet of things, is perhaps one of the most
important trends in modern culture. Stimulated by NIST, NSF and
the America COMPETES Act, advanced manufacturing and the Maker
Movement have the potential to recapture American initiative
and interest in a space that historically had moved offshore.
And, while absolutely not a panacea, massive online open
courses have a transformative potential for the education
system in their ability to deliver affordable, high-quality
content, at scale, and individualized learning in appropriate
education areas.
In conclusion, government support for basic and applied
research is crucial. I am proud and privileged to serve on
NSF's National Science Board. NSF's Scientific and Educational
program relies on widely solicited proposals, a well-tested
peer review system, dedicated and well-qualified program
managers, and strongly motivated and highly effective
leadership.
Successful government scientific endeavors depend upon a
partnership among the research community, research agency
leadership and staff, and the members of the House and Senate
who are equally committed to the research. Vannever Bush got it
exactly right. Science is an endless frontier. The more we
learn, the more we know we don't know, and the more we must
dedicate ourselves to learning and knowing more.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Cerf follows:]
Prepared Statement of Vinton G. Cerf, Vice President and FICEF Internet
Evangelist, Google; Member, National Science Board
Chairman Rockefeller, Ranking Member Thune, Members of the
Committee, distinguished panelists and guests, I am honored and pleased
to have this opportunity to participate in a hearing on a topic about
which I am passionate and committed: basic research. There is no
substitute for deep understanding of natural and artificial phenomena,
especially when our national and global well-being depend on our
ability to model and make predictions regarding them. It would be hard
to overstate the benefits that have been realized from investment by
the U.S. Government and American industry in research.
I am sure every member of this committee is well aware of the
fundamental scientific paradigm: Theories are developed to explain
observations or to speculate on how and why things might work.
Experiments are undertaken to validate or refute the predictions of the
theory. Theories are revised based on experimental results.
Basic and Applied Research
While the primary focus of attention in this panel is on basic
research, I feel compelled to observe that basic and applied research
go hand-in-hand, informing and stimulating each other in a never-ending
Yin and Yang of partnership. In some ways, applied research is a form
of validation because the success (or failure) of the application may
reinforce or contradict the theoretically predicted results and the
underlying theory. Basic research tries to understand and applied
research tries to do and often one must pursue both in the effort to
uncover new knowledge.
I would like to use the Internet as an example of applied research
to make several points. The Internet was first conceived by Bob Kahn in
late 1972. He and I worked together on the idea during 1973, publishing
the first paper on its design in May 1974. It was launched
operationally on January 1, 1983. Sponsored by the U.S. Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Internet drew strong
motivation from its earlier and highly successful ARPANET and later
Packet Radio and Packet Satellite projects. The Packet Satellite
project also drew, in part, on the results of another project called
ALOHAnet that had been sponsored by the U.S. Air Force Office of
Aerospace Research (SRMA).
First, successful applied research projects like the Internet may
take a long time to mature. It was ten years from the conception to the
deployment of the system and required persistent funding and advocacy
during and after that period, to say nothing of the research and
experimentation that preceded it.
Second, while primarily an engineering and applied research
project, the system did then and continues now to turn up new
theoretical and analytical challenges. We are still evolving theories
and models of the behavior of this complex, growing and evolving system
as we measure, observe and analyze its performance. The applications of
the Internet continue to drive research aimed at understanding and
improving its operation or in inventing something better.
Third, serendipity has played a significant role in the evolution
of the Internet's functionality and the applications it supports.
Networked electronic mail emerged as a major but unplanned application
on the ARPANET. The World Wide Web (WWW), initially conceived in 1989
to support sharing of research papers in particle physics at the Center
for European Nuclear Research (CERN), spread rapidly on the Internet
after the introduction of the MOSAIC browser by the National Center for
Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois in
Urbana-Champaign in late 1992 and the creation of the Netscape
Communications corporation in 1994. The WWW has become the most widely-
used application on the Internet. Though the WWW was conceived for a
particular application, its generality, and that of the underlying
Internet, has created the conditions for a cornucopia of new uses that
continue to be invented daily.
Research Takes Time
Validation of basic research may also take a long time. The notion
of the inflation of the early universe still awaits satisfactory
confirmation. Postulated by Alan Guth (among others) around 1974, this
year's recent results, from measurements taken by the BICEP2
experiment, suggest evidence that this theory is correct, but there is
significant debate about the interpretation of the measurements. While
the community awaits further corroborating or refuting experimental
validation of the measurements, it is important to recognize that the
means to gather potentially validating experimental data took 30 years
to reach maturity. A similar observation can be made for recent
discovery of a Higgs boson by the Large Hadron Collider team at CERN.
Peter Higgs and his colleagues postulated the existence of this
fundamental particle and its associated field around 1964 but it has
taken 50 years for the experimental capacity to test this theory to
reach the point where such tests could be undertaken.
It's Risky: There are No Guarantees
It is worth pausing for a moment to appreciate that research, by
its very nature, cannot always guarantee results. Moreover, sometimes
the results may come in the form of surprises. A canonical example is
the discovery by Alexander Fleming, in 1928, that penicillium mold
produces an antibiotic. He was reacting to an unexplained observation
in some petri dishes he happened to notice. It was not until 13 years
later in 1941 that the active compound we call penicillin was isolated.
The best scientists are the ones who are alert to anomalies and seek to
understand them. Nobel prizes don't go to scientists who ignore
anomalies. They go to the scientists who see unexpected results and
say, ``huh? That's funny!'' and try to find out what is behind an
unanticipated observation.
Humility is called for in this space. One hears the term ``Laws of
Physics'' as if punishment awaits anyone or anything that dares to
break them. And, yet, we know these so-called laws may be only
approximations of reality--limited by the accuracy of our measurement
tools and experimental capacity to validate their predictions. Every
scientist must be prepared to cast aside or revise a pet theory if
measurement and observation contradict it.
Perhaps more important is the ability to sustain high risk, high
payoff research. American industry can afford to take some risk but
sustainable businesses are rarely in a position to invest in very long-
term research. Venture capital, while historically willing to take
considerable risk, is looking for near-term payoffs. The ability to
take sustained, long-term risk for potential long-term benefit falls
largely to the government. The United States has benefited from
underwriting this kind of research, as exemplified by the research
programs of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the
National Institutes of Standards and Technology, among many other U.S.
Government supported research programs.
In this area, the U.S. Congress and the Committees focused on
scientific research and development have the greatest roles to play.
Consistent and increasing support for basic and applied research and
advanced development has been the source of most major advances in
science and technology in the past 70 years. The American economy has
been the envy of the world, in large part because of this consistent
cycle of long-term research and its application to near-term products
and services.
The Importance of Failure
Failure is the handmaiden of wisdom in the scientific world. When
we make predictions or build systems based on our theoretical models,
we must be prepared for and learn from our failures. Understanding the
reason for failure is sometimes even more important than positive
results since it may pave the way for far deeper understanding and more
precise models of reality. In the scientific enterprise, the freedom to
take risk and accept the potential of failure makes the difference
between merely incremental refinement and breakthroughs that open new
vistas of understanding.
In the late 1800s it was thought that the Newtonian model of the
universe was complete and that we merely needed to measure the physical
constants more accurately to be able to make unequivocal predictions.
In 1905, Einstein's four papers on the Photoelectric effect, Brownian
motion, special relativity and mass-energy equivalence (E=Mc\2\)
shattered the complacency of early 20th Century physics. He showed that
purely Newtonian notions were inadequate to explain measured
observations. He compounded his impact in 1915 with the publication of
his monumentally important field equations of general relativity.
Research into the nature of the atom led to the development of
quantum field theory beginning in the 1920s. Efforts to reconcile its
extremely counter-intuitive but extremely accurate predictions with
Einstein's geometric theory of space-time have not borne demonstrable
fruit. The irony of all this is that we now believe that the physics of
the very small are extremely relevant to the study of the universe at
large because the early universe at the moment of the so-called Big
Bang was so small and dense and hot that quantum models appear to have
dominated its behavior. Einstein's geometric theory simply breaks down
under these conditions and provides no predictions of testable use.
If we have learned anything over the course of the past hundred
years, it is that we know less than we once thought we knew about the
world around us. For scientists, this only means that the territory yet
to be explored is simply larger than ever and that discovery awaits us
at every turn.
The Role of Computing
Richard Hamming is a legendary numerical analyst. As he famously
observed: ``The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.''
Computers, computation, networking and information sharing have become
essential parts of the research landscape over the past 50 years. The
World Wide Web and the search engines that have evolved around it have
improved our ability to share and discover information and potential
research partners on a global scale. New disciplines have emerged such
as computational biology, computational chemistry and computational
physics. We use increasingly detailed and accurate models to make
predictions that we can test in the laboratory. The 2013 Nobel prize in
chemistry went to three researchers for their models of molecular
processes. From the Scientific American blog:
``. . . this year's prize in chemistry has been awarded to
Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel for their
development of ``multiscale methods for complex systems''. More
simply put, these three chemists have been recognized for their
development and application of methods to simulate the behavior
of molecules at various scales, from single molecules to
proteins.'' \1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/
2013/10/09/computational-chemistry-wins-2013-nobel-prize-in-chemistry/
There is a renaissance in the application of computing to research,
partly driven by the vast increase in computational power and memory
found in combinations of cloud and super computing. ``Big data'' has
become a mantra but it is fair to say that our ability to absorb,
analyze and visualize vast quantities of measured or computed data has
improved dramatically in the last few decades. We can use finer and
finer-grained models, improve accuracy and timeliness of predictions,
thanks to these capabilities. Computational biology may lead to
breakthroughs in our ability to understand genetics, epi-genetics, the
proteome and the importance of flora in our digestive systems. With
this knowledge, we will help people live longer, healthier and more
productive lives. Our ability to understand global phenomena will
benefit from this computational renaissance.
I would be remiss not to mention the Internet of Things that is
fast upon us. The networking of common devices that surround and
perfuse our society is rapidly becoming reality. From household
appliances to office equipment, from industrial manufacturing to
utilities, from transportation vehicles to personal monitoring
equipment, we will live in an increasingly networked world. We will be
surrounded by software. It is vital that we learn to design safety and
security into these systems and to understand and be able to predict
their aggregate behavior. This trend, too, illustrates the promise and
the peril of our modern world. Cyber-security and cyber-safety must
accompany our increasing use of computers, programmable devices and
networks if we are to receive net benefit from these developments.
Nano-Materials
Adjacent to and actually contributing to computational capacity we
find nano-technology of increasing importance and value. Materials not
found in nature have properties that defy intuition (e.g., invisibility
and superconductivity). Graphene: sheets of carbon molecules, arrayed
in one-atom-thick, hexagonal, ``chicken wire'' fashion, have unexpected
potential for replacing silicon in transistors, for filtering
impurities from water, for conducting heat and super-conducting
electricity. Carbon is becoming both the bete noir and the deus ex
machina of our civilization, depending on whether it is in the form of
carbon dioxide, hydrocarbon fuels, or carbon nanotubes!
In the Interest and Pursuit of Science and its Application
It is widely and correctly appreciated that science, technology,
engineering and mathematics (STEM) form the basis for improving upon
and making use of our understanding of how the phenomena of our world
work. While there is persistent controversy regarding the supply of
STEM-trained workers, there can be little doubt that there is an
increasing demand in the workforce for these skills.
As a recent president of the Association for Computing Machinery
(ACM) and a member of the Google staff, I have been a strong proponent
of the proposition that computer science should be a required part of
the K-12 curriculum. Every student should have some exposure to the
concept of programming, not only because it promotes logical thinking
but also because it is important for everyone to understand and
appreciate the potential weaknesses in all software-controlled systems.
Computer science should be treated on a par with biology, chemistry,
physics and mathematics in K-12 and undergraduate curricula, not simply
as an elective that bears no STEM credit.
The maker movement \2\ is perhaps one of the most important,
emerging phenomena in modern culture. The rediscovery of the joy and
satisfaction of making things is contributing to a rebirth of American
interest in small-scale manufacturing and pride of workmanship. The
development of so-called 3D printers has accelerated this phenomenon.
Coupled with research programs in advanced manufacturing, stimulated in
part by versions of the America COMPETES Act [P.L. 110-69 of 2007 and
P.L. 111-358 of 2010), advanced manufacturing and the maker movement
have the potential to recapture American initiative and interest in a
space that historically had moved off shore.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maker_culture
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Voluntary programs such as Dean Kamen's FIRST \3\ Robotics
competitions are representative of a wave of such initiatives that have
the potential to rekindle the natural STEM interests of America's
youth.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\3\ http://www.usfirst.org/ [``For Inspiration and Recognition of
Science and Technology'']
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is sometimes said that we are all born natural scientists but
that our educational system sometimes manages to erode this natural
curiosity with poorly constructed curricular content and style of
presentation. Computers and networks may have a role to play here as
well.
An early foray into Massive, Open, Online Classes (MOOCs) space was
undertaken by two of my Google colleagues, Sebastian Thrun and Peter
Norvig. They proposed to teach an online course in artificial
intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University. Expecting, at
most, 500 people to sign up, they were stunned to find 160,000 people
had applied to take the class. Critics pointed out that only 23,000
completed the course--but I defy you to provide an example of any
teacher of computer science who had taught that many students in the
course of a career let alone one class!
The early success of MOOCs has generated a justifiable excitement
and formation of for-profit and non-profit efforts in this space.
Serving classes of tens of thousands of students at a time, the
economics of MOOCs is dramatic and compelling. A class of 100,000
students, paying $10 each, generates $1M in revenue! Plainly, the
scaling is the key leveraging factor. While absolutely not a panacea,
the potential for delivering high quality content and individualized
learning in appropriate educational areas has a transformative
potential for an educational system that has not changed much in the
last 200 years.
Conclusion
In my opinion, support for basic and applied research is
fundamentally justifiable based not only on the civil and economic
benefits it has conferred but also on the ground-level understanding
that basic research is high risk but has a high potential payoff. Only
the Government has the capacity to sustain this kind of effort.
I am proud to serve on the National Science Board where I am
privileged to engage with colleagues on the Board and the National
Science Foundation staff. The scientific research enterprise manifests
there in the form of widely solicited proposals, a well-tested peer
review system, dedicated and well-qualified program managers and
strongly motivated and highly effective leadership.
Successful scientific endeavors at NSF rely on a partnership among
the research community, the National Science Foundation staff,
leadership and board, and the members of the House and Senate who are
equally committed to basic and applied research. Vannever Bush got it
exactly right in his landmark report: Science, The Endless Frontier
\4\. Science is an endless frontier. The more we learn, the more we
know we don't know, and the more we must dedicate ourselves to learning
and knowing more.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\4\ https://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm
The Chairman. Thank you, sir.
Ms. Mariette DiChristina is Editor-in-Chief--this blows me
away. You're the first woman to lead the 169-year-old
Scientific American publication, which is the longest
continuing publication in the United States of America. Am I
right?
STATEMENT OF MARIETTE DiCHRISTINA, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF AND SENIOR
VICE PRESIDENT, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
Ms. DiChristina. It is.
The Chairman. So you're on.
Ms. DiChristina. Thank you.
The Chairman. Don't forget to turn your----
Ms. DiChristina. For me to follow that--yes. It's not----
The Chairman. Yes. Good.
Ms. DiChristina. Thank you.
Thank you, Chairman Rockefeller, so much and Ranking Member
Thune and the Committee for the honor and privilege of
addressing you today about science.
The Chairman. Can you pull that a little bit closer?
Ms. DiChristina. A little closer?
The Chairman. Thank you.
Ms. DiChristina. How's this? Much better.
So yes, my name is Mariette DiChristina. I am the Editor-
in-Chief of Scientific American, which has chronicled the power
of U.S. research and innovation since 1845 when it was founded.
Scientific American also founded the first branch for the U.S.
patent agency in 1850. And among the visitors that came and
visited the editor's offices was Thomas Edison. Albert Einstein
wrote for Scientific American and so have more than 150 Noble
laureates and many winners of the National Medals of Science
and Technology.
It reaches more than 3.5 million viewers and readers in
print and more than 6 million online. And the readers include
leaders in business and policy, educators, students, and
science enthusiasts the world over. From this, I'm giving you a
professional observer's opinion about science.
Science is the engine of human prosperity. Economists have
said, and it's been quoted many places, that a third to half
U.S. economic growth has resulted from basic research since
World War II; the cars and trains that got us here today. Think
about it. The smart phones in our pockets, the energy that
lights this chamber in this room, the clothes we wear, the food
we eat: all of these things were developed and improved through
basic research. But before these applications existed,
researchers had to study the basic concepts that provided a
sound underpinning, and they did those studies not necessarily
knowing where they would lead.
I know Einstein, for instance, was not at all thinking
about the GPS in our smart phones when he formulated the Theory
of Relativity. But, in truth, knowing how space-time works
helps us fix those measurements from the GPS satellites. And
Elizabeth Blackburn told me that she was just curious about
what was at the end of chromosomes when she started studying
the DNA of pond scum in the 1970s. The NIH started funding her
research in 1978. And in 2009, she and two fellow NIH grantees,
Carol Greider and Jack Szostak, won a Nobel for their work in
understanding what's at the end of those chromosomes,
structures called telomeres which we now understand to play an
important role in human cancers and other diseases of aging.
Examples like Elizabeth Blackburn show us why providing
steady and sufficient support for basic research should be a
national priority. We need to take the long view on R&D for the
Nation's future just as we need to nurture our children over
their entire K-12 academic careers just so they can succeed in
an increasingly competitive global marketplace.
Research, like those children, takes time to do right.
Typical funding grants take 5 years, are 5 years long and it
takes time to run those experiments, gather the data, analyze
it properly, and confirm those findings. But our own track
record in the U.S. proves that steady Federal funding support
leads to success. U.S. Federal funding was key to nearly 90
percent of almost 100 top innovations from 1971 to 2006 as
identified by R&D Magazine.
Our nation's ability to handle today's most pressing
issues, from providing energy security, let's say to curing
illnesses, to living sustainably in a finite world will require
the innovations that come from basic research.
It also does provide a good return. And a particularly
strong example that people like to point out, the Human Genome
Project paid back $141 per every dollar invested in it during
the research period. In general, you should know that the
return for publicly funded R&D is somewhere between 30 and 100
percent. That's a pretty strong return.
And from my perspective also, from the public's behalf,
basic research can be really inspiring. Vint mentioned the
Maker Movement which is such a phenomenon that the U.S. Office
of Science and Technology Policy is actually holding Maker
Faire events.
But, even beyond that, let me give you another example. The
Zooniverse website, for instance, lets anybody catalogue
heavenly objects made from NASA photographs. It has more than a
million volunteers participating actively in science. Thousands
of Scientific American's own volunteers catalogued more than
100,000 whale songs in just 2 months, which is the work of
years in the lab.
Unfortunately, since the 1980s, R&D spending overall has
flattened out a bit and even declined in real dollars. But I
agree with you, Mr. Chairman, that we need patience and
endurance for this. Because of the length of time needed for
research also, the sequester cuts will effect progress for
years to come in forestalled and canceled work, and it will
disproportionately effect and discourage some of our younger
researchers.
Meanwhile, countries such as China because, as you said,
there is a choice to make, they're nipping at our heels.
Earlier this year, in fact, China's rate of GDP investment just
surpassed that of the 28 member-states of the European Union,
and could exceed that of the U.S. itself in a little over half
a decade, according to the 2014 Global R&D Forecast by Battelle
and R&D Magazine. Japan, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Israel and
Sweden already spend a greater percentage of their GDP on
research than the U.S., according to World Bank.
The strong educational pipeline, as you pointed out, is
also critical. Over the past 10 years, STEM jobs grew three
times as fast as non-STEM, says the U.S. Department of
Commerce. And our leading technology companies are often
challenged in filling the necessary openings.
Last and in conclusion for one more view, I thought I'd ask
a member of the next generation. I told my older daughter,
Selina, who plans to double major in computer science and
graphic design, yay, that I'd be speaking about this with you
today, and I asked her what she would say about science. She
said, ``That's easy, mom, it's the foundation of everything.''
And so it is. Science is a system for exploring and for
innovation. It can fuel our Nation's economic growth. It can
form a path for our young people in a competitive global
marketplace and it can inspire and fire our imaginations.
That's why basic research deserves a prominent place on the
national agenda and our steady commitment in investment.
Thanks very much.
[The prepared statement of Ms. DiChristina follows:]
Prepared Statement of Mariette DiChristina, Editor-in-Chief and Senior
Vice President, Scientific American
Thank you, honorable members of the Senate Subcommittee on
Commerce, Science and Transportation, for the privilege of addressing
you today about the importance of science and science education.
My name is Mariette DiChristina, and I'm the Editor-in-Chief and
Senior Vice President of Scientific American, the oldest continuously
published magazine in the United States. It was founded in 1845, during
the Industrial Revolution in the U.S. To foster innovation, Scientific
American started the first branch of the U.S. patent agency in 1850.
Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph, and Elias Howe, inventor of
the sewing machine, were among the scientists and inventors who visited
the offices. Thomas Edison showed the editors his phonograph. It asked
them: ``How do you like the talking box?'' Albert Einstein wrote an
article for Scientific American, as have more than 150 Nobel laureates
and many winners of the National Medals of Science and Technology given
by the White House.
Despite its name, it's not a magazine aimed at scientists, although
I'm pleased that some of them read it, too. Business leaders make up
more than 50 percent of its audience of more than 3.5 million in print
more than 6 million online--and nearly 20 percent are C-suite, looking
to science for ways to grow their businesses. Of the 200 titles
measured by MRI, it is number 6 for ``Influentials.'' Educators,
students, policy leaders and science enthusiasts read Scientific
American for innovation insights.
At the same time, Scientific American has always had an educational
mission to share the value and wonder of science. A subscription cost
$2 a year in 1845, but in the first issue the editors promised it would
be worth ``five times its cost in school instruction.'' The magazine
detailed the research and technologies that won World Wars I and II,
the great space race that landed U.S. men on the moon 45 years ago
yesterday, the rise of computer science and electronics that have today
transformed our lives in the modern world, among other things.
Science is the engine of human prosperity. Economists have said
that a third to a half of U.S. economic growth has resulted from basic
research since World War II. The cars and trains that got us to this
building, the smart phones we are all carrying, the energy we are using
to run the lights in this chamber, the clothes we are wearing, the food
we eat: All of these things were developed through the process that we
call science. And before the conveniences that we enjoy today existed,
researchers had to pioneer the basic concepts that provided a sound
foundation for those applications--and they did that pioneering not
necessarily knowing where it would lead. I know Einstein wasn't
thinking about the conveniences we enjoy from GPS in our smart phones
when he formulated his theory of relativity a hundred years ago, for
instance. But knowing how spacetime works helps make our measurement
from orbiting satellites accurate.
For all of these reasons, we need to make it a national priority to
provide steady and sufficient support for basic research in science,
and to STEM education and public outreach. We need to take the long
view on R&D investment for the Nation's continued future well-being,
just as we need to nurture, educate and inspire our children over their
K-12 careers so that they can succeed in an increasingly competitive
global marketplace.
Successful basic research takes careful work and patience. Typical
funding grants are five years long. It takes time to run the
experiments, gather the data, analyze it properly, and confirm the
findings. Conducting basic research properly also means following human
curiosity and exploring questions that may not have immediately obvious
answers or applications.
But our own U.S. track record of Federal investment shows that
there is an important relationship between steady investment in that
R&D and our success in innovation and economic growth. U.S. Federal
funding was key to nearly 90 percent of almost 100 top innovations from
1971 to 2006 identified by R&D Magazine, for example. Federal funding
at DOE led to such innovations as the optical recording technology that
lets us enjoy DVDs; the communications satellites that help us send
information around the world, modern water-purification systems and
supercomputers. NSF funding for a couple of students got us Google and
also new technologies used in industries including biotech, advanced
manufacturing and environmental resource management. DARPA's basic
research led to GPS, the Internet, and Siri on iPhones. It's so easy to
go on and on.
Our success in addressing many of the key issues that face the
Nation today, from ensuring our energy security to providing healthy
foods to medical advances to cure illnesses to our ability to live well
and sustainably in a finite world, will turn on the innovations that
arise from basic science research.
Basic research also provides a good direct return on investment. A
report by research firm Battelle Technology Partnership Practice, for
instance, estimates that between 1988 and 2010, Federal investment in
genomic research generated an economic impact of $796 billion compared
with $3.8 billion spent on the Genome Project between 1990-2003
amounted to $3.8 billion. That's an ROI of $141 for each dollar
invested.
So today we are benefitting from past R&D investments. But our
preeminence requires constant vigilance. The U.S. is still dominant in
global research but our investments have flattened and declined in real
dollars since the 1980s according to a report from the Congressional
Budget Office on R&D and Productivity Growth. Because of the length of
time needed for basic research, also, the Sequester cuts will affect
progress for years to come in forestalled and canceled work. Meanwhile,
countries such as China are fast nipping at our heels. China's rate of
GDP investment earlier this year surpassed that of the 28 member states
of the European Union, and it is on track to exceed that of the U.S.
itself in a little over half a decade, according to the 2014 Global R&D
Forecast by Battelle and R&D Magazine. Japan, Denmark, Finland,
Germany, Israel and Sweden already spend a greater percentage of their
GDP on R&D than the U.S., according to World Bank. Germany's strategy
to boost economic growth has been to increase investment, lifting its
own Federal expenditures by 21 percent since 2005. These investments
played an important role in Germany's 3.6 percent growth in 2010
compared with 2.9 percent growth rate in the U.S. during the same time
period.
The STEM pipeline in education is also critically important to that
economic well-being. Seventeen of 20 of the fastest growing jobs for
the next decade are in STEM-related fields, and our leading technology
companies are often challenged in trying to fill the necessary
openings.
So basic research helps benefit our well-being, the Nation's
economic growth, and the creation of jobs. It's also increasingly
inspiring to the public who can now engage with it directly thanks to
digital platforms. Although the headlines about celebrities don't show
it, we know well at Scientific American how basic research has captured
the public's imagination. Let's look the grass-roots level. We see two
groundswells in participation by hundreds of thousands of people in
enthusiasm around citizen science and the maker movement. Citizen
scientists are people like you and me who can help scientists conduct
basic research by making observations or in other ways. The Zooniverse
Website, for instance, lets anybody catalog heavenly objects from NASA
images. The Zooniverse has more than one million volunteer citizen
scientists! Scientific American's own Whale.FM citizen-science project,
which lets you match up snippets of whale songs, in two months
catalogued more than 100,000 such calls--equal to a couple of years of
work by lab researchers. Volunteers using the FoldIt protein-folding
online game recently solved a puzzle that eluded HIV researchers for 15
years. And the Maker movement is such a phenomenon that the U.S. Office
of Science & Technology Policy is holding Maker Faire events.
For one more viewpoint on the value of basic research, I thought
I'd turn to a member of the next generation. I told my older daughter,
Selina, who plans to double major in computer science and graphic
design, that I would be speaking about this topic. I asked her what she
would say about why science is important. How could I explain its
importance, I asked her?
``That's easy, mom,'' she said to me. ``It's the foundation of
everything.''
And so it is. Science is not a set of facts or received wisdom
that's been handed down. It's a system for innovation and advancement--
and humankind's best invention yet for pursuing the truth and an
understanding of how the world works. It can fuel our economic growth
as a nation, and form a path for our young people in a competitive
global marketplace. And science can fire our imagination.
It can bring out the best in our Nation and in us. That's why
basic-science research needs our steady commitment and investment.
Thank you for your kind attention.
References and Further Reading
``How the 2013 Budget Sequester Jeopardizes Science,'' Scientific
American: http://www.scientificamerican.com/report/sequester-science/
China tops Europe in R&D intensity, Nature: http://www.nature.com/
news/china-tops-europe-in-rd-intensity-1.14476
2014 Global R&D Funding Forecast: http://www.battelle.org/docs/tpp/
2014
_global_rd_funding_forecast.pdf?sfvrsn=4
The National Science Foundation: Background and Selected Policy
Issues: http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43585.pdf
Federal Research and Development Funding, FY 2015: http://fas.org/
sgp/crs/misc/R43580.pdf
The High Return on Investment for Publicly Funded Research http://
www
.americanprogress.org/issues/technology/report/2012/12/10/47481/the-
high-return-on-investment-for-publicly-funded-research/
Who Created the iPhone, Apple or the Government? http://
www.bloomberg
view.com/articles/2013-06-19/who-created-the-iphone-apple-or-the-
government-
Past winners of National Medals of Science & Technology: http://
blogs
.scientificamerican.com/observations/2013/02/02/president-obama-awards-
national-medals-of-science-and-technology-at-the-white-house/
There Should Be Grandeur: Basic Science in the Shadow of the
Sequester: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/02/27/
there-should-be-grandeur-basic
-science-in-the-shadow-of-the-sequester/
NIH Early Stage Investigator Policies: http://grants.nih.gov/
grants/new
_investigators/
Congressional Budget Office: R&D and Productivity Growth (fig 2, p
5): http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/64xx/
doc6482/06-17-r-d.pdf
National Human Genome Research Institute. Calculating the Economic
Impact of the Human Genome Project: http://www.genome.gov/27544383
World Bank figures on R&D spending as percentage of GDP: http://
data
.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS/countries/1W?display=default
NASA inventions (including Invisible braces, scratch-resistant
lenses, memory foam, ear thermometer, shoe insoles, long-distance
telecomm, adjustable smoke detector, safety grooving on pavement,
cordless tools, water filters.): http://www
.discovery.com/tv-shows/curiosity/topics/ten-nasa-inventions.htm
``When the Market Dips, Germany Invests in Research,'' The
Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/
academicDestinationArticle/Germany-s-R-D-Investment/59/
The Chairman. Thank you very, very much.
And now we have Dr. Neal Lane. And I'm accustomed to you
being in government not being a senior fellow somewhere. But,
in any event, you're at the Technology Policy, Baker Institute
for Public Policy; Malcolm Gillis University Professor and
Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University; Co-Chair
of Committee on Models for U.S. Science and Technology Policy,
American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Houston, Texas. So
you're definitely geographic.
And we welcome you and we welcome your testimony.
STATEMENT OF NEAL LANE, SENIOR FELLOW IN SCIENCE
AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY, BAKER INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC
POLICY, MALCOLM GILLIS UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR
AND PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY, RICE
UNIVERSITY; CO-CHAIR, COMMITTEE ON NEW MODELS FOR
U.S. SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY, AMERICAN
ACADEMY OF ARTS & SCIENCES
Dr. Lane. Thank you very much, Chairman Rockefeller,
Ranking Member Thune. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for
holding this hearing, allowing me to join this distinguished
panel.
I very much appreciate your comment about Senator
Hutchison. I had the great pleasure of working with the Senator
over the years; she's such a great, strong supporter of
science, engineering, research in this country. She even
started an academy for medicine, engineering, science and
technology in Texas.
The Chairman. She did that?
Dr. Lane. She put that academy in place----
The Chairman. Interesting.
Dr. Lane.--and continues to support those activities, but
she supports science across the country, of course, because she
recognizes how important it is to the nation's future.
I would like to tell you a little bit about this project
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a study group that I
have the privilege to co-chair with Mr. Norm Augustine, a
former CEO, retired CEO of Lockheed Martin and I think a person
well-known to this committee. I want to emphasize my remarks
are my own. They don't necessarily represent Rice or the
Academy or the study group.
We have a bipartisan committee of leaders from all sectors
exploring how to ensure America's leadership in science,
engineering and technology, and the long-term sustainability of
the research enterprise will be accomplished. We started with
three premises. First, that a strong U.S. economy is vital to
the welfare and prosperity of the American people.
Second, that in today's accelerating, high-tech, knowledge-
based technology, staying competitive requires innovation and
the rapid infusion of new knowledge and technologies coming out
of R&D investments.
And third, that while the applied research and development
are undeniably important, it's often that the path-breaking
discoveries come out of basic research where one has no idea
going in what the ultimate impact might be, and of course much
of that basic research is funded by the Federal Government.
Ironically though, at a time when the rest of the world,
particularly China and other Asian countries have adopted our
model which has worked so well, we in the U.S. seem to have
lost our passion to compete. Recent data showed that the U.S.
has slipped to tenth place among OECD nations and overall R&D
investment as a fraction of GDP. And it continues to fall short
of the 3 percent goal that several presidents have put forward.
China is projected to outspend the U.S. in R&D in less than 10
years in absolute terms and as a fraction of GDP, and my
colleagues tell me--and this is most important in my view--many
of my colleagues tell me that now the most important scientific
papers in their fields, published in the most prestigious
journals, are coming out of China.
Industries make clear, as Dr. Cerf has indicated, that the
Federal Government will have to be the primary funder of basic
research since companies cannot justify to their stockholders
that Federal support for basic research is now below the level
as a percentage of GDP as it was in 1990. The good news, I
believe, is that Federal research investments have long been
viewed by presidents and members of Congress from both parties
as vital to the national interest.
Indeed, during the approximately 20-year period, 1975 to
about 1992, Federal funding for basic research grew in
inflation-adjusted dollars by over 4 percent per year; it's a
remarkable sort of steady growth curve. But that was a time
when all kinds of things were happening: we had a period of
deep inflation; we had oil embargoes; we had back and forth
between the leadership in both political parties. Nonetheless,
Republicans and Democrats were able to agree that basic
research should be a high priority for the nation.
If that growth curve had continued to today, the Federal
funding of basic research would be over 33 percent higher than
it is right now. Our committee's report, though, will focus on
two overarching challenges, or objectives.
In order to ensure that the American people receive the
maximum benefits from the Federal investments and research,
we'll recommend three actions. First, increasing research
productivity by streamlining unnecessarily burdensome Federal
regulations and agency practices, also changing some university
practices. Second, reaffirming the importance of Federal
investments in research in all fields and the use of expert
peer review managed by the agencies to select the very best
people and ideas among competing ones. And third, increasing
the flow of research discoveries to applications by encouraging
universities to form stronger collaborations with industry.
The second objective complements the first. In order to
secure America's leadership in science and engineering
research, especially basic research by providing sustainable
Federal investments, we will recommend establishing appropriate
goals for sustainable growth in Federal basic research funding
and making changes in the Federal budget process to allow long-
term planning especially with regard to the capital cost of
larger research facilities.
In addition, we will offer recommendations to all sectors
to develop more robust research partnerships and drive American
innovation throughout the twenty-first century. That is likely
to require a level of cooperation and coordination that we have
not seen in many decades, if ever, in this country.
The American Academy intends to release its report in early
fall. I look forward to further discussions with the Committee.
Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Thune, thank you so much for
inviting me to participate in today's important hearing.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Lane follows:]
Prepared Statement of Neal Lane, Malcolm Gillis University Professor,
Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University; Senior Fellow,
Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy, On behalf of The
American Academy of Arts & Sciences Committee on New Models for U.S.
Science and Technology Policy
Chairman Rockefeller, Ranking Member Thune, and Members of the
Committee: I am honored to be invited here today to discuss the Federal
Government's investments in research. I am the Malcolm Gillis
University Professor and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rice
University, and also hold an appointment as the Senior Fellow in
Science and Technology Policy at Rice University's Baker Institute for
Public Policy. Prior to returning to Rice University, I served in the
Federal Government during the Clinton Administration as Assistant to
the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White
House Office of Science and Technology Policy, from August 1998 to
January 2001, and as Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF)
and member (ex officio) of the National Science Board, from October
1993 to August 1998.
I am also honored to be a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences and to appear on its behalf today. Founded in 1780 by John
Adams and other scholar-patriots to encourage dialogue among leaders of
science, the arts, business and public affairs, the American Academy of
Arts & Sciences is an independent policy research institute that
engaged in the study of complex problems vital to our Nation's future.
Through its projects and studies, and publications like its recent
ARISE I and ARISE II (Advancing Research in Science and Engineering)
reports, the Academy pursues practical policy responses to pressing
national and global problems.
I am particularly honored to co-chair, with Norman R. Augustine,
retired CEO and Chairman of Lockheed Martin Corporation, the American
Academy's Committee on New Models for U.S. Science and Technology. This
group has been working over the past year to develop recommendations of
policy actions that we believe will help ensure the long-term
sustainability of the U.S. science and engineering research enterprise.
While my testimony today generally reflects the group's conclusions, I
should state at the outset that my remarks represent my own views and
not necessarily those of the study group, the American Academy, or Rice
University.
The Role of Research in Sustaining Economic Prosperity
In a 1988 radio address to the nation, President Ronald Reagan said
that ``although basic research does not begin with a particular
practical goal, when you look at the results over the years, it ends up
being one of the most practical things government does . . . Major
industries, including television, communications, and computer
industries, couldn't be where they are today without developments that
began with this basic research.'' Many presidents--Democrats and
Republicans--have emphasized the importance of science, engineering and
technology to the Nation's leadership in the world, the strength of its
economy, and the welfare and prosperity of its people. And I want to
emphasize that research, in this context, refers to all fields--the
physical and life sciences (including medical research, mathematics,
computer science, and engineering) and the social and behavioral
sciences.
As President Reagan and other presidents have realized, virtually
every new technology is traceable to a research discovery or series of
discoveries, often made by individuals having no idea of how their
research might help create jobs and benefit millions of people in other
ways years or even decades in the future. To expect continued
technological advancement, a strong economy, job growth and other
public benefits without investing in research is akin to operating an
automobile factory without a receiving dock for raw materials.
In short, new knowledge and technologies, which are the products of
research, are the lifeblood of today's accelerating high-tech,
knowledge-based economy. If the U.S. is to remain a leader in this new
economy, it will have to ensure that it has a skilled workforce
particularly in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics)
areas, and a robust science and engineering research enterprise that
matches the challenge. It should be clear that both education and
science and engineering research play a critical role in the economic
and personal wellbeing of Americans in this ``Land of Opportunity.''
This is what we used to call the ``American Dream.'' The American
Dream is a national ethos whose foundation is rooted in opportunity:
the opportunity for a quality job and career, a quality life, a quality
education, and the opportunity for our children to achieve more and
have a better life. It imbues the Nation with a spirit of hard-work and
determination--if you study hard, work hard and play by the rules, you
can have a good life. Late last year, we lost to cancer a great
American and champion of science, engineering and education, Charles
(Chuck) Vest, who grew up in West Virginia and became President of MIT
and, more recently, served as President of the National Academy of
Engineering. Chuck often spoke about having lived the American Dream.
Growing up in the oil fields of Oklahoma, I have also lived the
American Dream, and so did many of my generation. But we don't hear
much about it anymore. America's expectations--and the hopes and dreams
of Americans--seem less ambitious today, and that should scare us.
Without opportunity, the American Dream fades, and with it a key part
of our identity as a nation.
Ensuring opportunity for all Americans will require significant
improvements in education and learning, especially in STEM areas, as
well as a strong economy. With regard to economy, research has
demonstrated a strong correlation between job growth and Gross Domestic
Product (GDP)--creating jobs on a large scale requires growing the
Nation's GDP. Numerous studies, including Robert Solow's Nobel Prize-
winning research, have shown that the predominant driver of GDP growth
over the past half-century has been scientific and technological
advancement. It seems likely, given the current accelerating pace of
progress in science, engineering and technology, that this observation
will continue to hold for the decades ahead.
Yet too often the role of research, particularly basic research, in
the Nation's scientific and technological advancement has been
undervalued. Hunter Rawlings, the president of the American Association
of Universities, has observed that the fundamental technologies that
underlie today's remarkable consumer electronics, including GPS, multi-
touch screens, LCD displays, lithium-ion batteries, and cellular
networks, were all derived from research supported by the Federal
Government and conducted in universities and government laboratories.
Of course, America has led in these areas because it has a diversity of
companies--large and small--which have been willing to take risks, try
new innovative practices, invest in their own R&D needs, and take
chances on new technologies. America also has an investment community
willing to help fund these efforts and regulations to insure fair
competition in the marketplace. But basic research, much of which is
government-funded, is necessary to cultivate an ecosystem rich enough
in new knowledge and ideas to enable these breakthrough achievements.
The power of America's economic system and the role its
universities, industry and government have played in its effectiveness
have not gone unnoticed by other countries competing in the global job
market. In fact, they seek not only to copy it but to improve upon it.
The influential National Academies' report Rising Above the Gathering
Storm and its updates \1\,\2\ make the case that instead of
racing to meet the challenge, America instead is permitting this highly
successful system of discovery and innovation, that has served this
Nation well since the end of WWII, to atrophy. This is not a formula
for success in a highly competitive world that is advancing at an
accelerating rate.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering,
and Institute of Medicine. Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing
and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future. (Washington,
D.C.: The National Academies Press, 2007).
\2\ National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering,
and Institute of Medicine. Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited:
Rapidly Approaching Category 5. (Washington, D.C.: The National
Academies Press, 2010).
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The Role of the Federal Government
If science, engineering and technology are key drivers of economic
growth, as the evidence strongly indicates, one metric of the adequacy
of a nation's commitment to the future of its citizens is its total
investment in R&D as a fraction of GDP, relative to competitor nations.
The total U.S. investment (\1/3\ public and \2/3\ private \3\) in R&D
continues to fall short of the national goal adopted by several U.S.
presidents of 3 percent of GDP, even as America's economic competitors
move aggressively to increase their own investments. The U.S. has
fallen to 10th place among OECD countries (Figure 1). For example,
China's R&D investment is growing at an average annual rate of 8
percent above inflation, and is on a path to overtake the U.S. in just
8 years. America is failing to make the R&D investments that are
necessary to remain a global leader in industry and commerce.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\3\ Although industry funds 2/3 of total U.S. R&D, it is worth
noting that the vast majority of this funding (95 percent) is devoted
to applied research and development. Over half of all basic research is
funded by the Federal Government (55 percent of total national basic
research funding).
Figure 1. The U.S. is failing to keep pace with competitors'
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
investments in R&D.
Among OECD nations, the U.S. ranks 10th in national R&D investment
as a percentage of GDP, or R&D intensity. As China's R&D intensity (red
line) rapidly grows at an average of 8 percent per year in pursuit of
the globally-recognized 3 percent GDP goal, U.S. investments (blue
line) have pulled back. At this pace, China will surpass the U.S. by
this measure in about eight years.
Data Source: OECD, Main Science and Technology Indicators, 2013,
Gross Domestic Expenditures on R&D as a percentage of GDP. Available
at: http://stats.oecd.org/.
These disturbing trends have created a gap between what America is
investing and what it should be investing to reclaim our global
competitiveness and ensure a strong future economy. This has been
described as running an ``innovation deficit'' \4\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\4\ See http://www.innovationdeficit.org/.
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To be sure, most of America's innovation and high-quality jobs are
created in private industry. But companies depend on a continuous
stream of new scientific discoveries and early-stage technologies that
flow from the Federal Government's investments in research,
particularly basic research, carried out at research universities and
national laboratories. Companies working closely with academic and
government researchers benefit most from timely translation of research
results into marketable applications and from early access to talented
scientists and engineers trained largely at American universities.
Some may ask why America shouldn't just let other nations pay for
the research and then simply apply the resulting discoveries to grow
markets and create jobs within our own borders. That approach may have
worked for other nations in the past, but it is not a winning strategy
for the future. Given the pace at which technological innovation is
accelerating today, being second to market is now considered by many
executives to be tantamount to failure. Craig Barrett, the retired CEO
of Intel, has noted that 90 percent of the revenues that firm receives
at the end of its Fiscal Year are derived from products that did not
even exist at the beginning of that year.\5\ Such a system would not
work without a rich base of knowledge and discoveries and strong links
to industry.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\5\ N.R. Augustine, Is America Falling Off the Flat Earth?
(Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press, 2007).
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Some have expressed the hope that the decline in the Federal
investment in research could be compensated by increased investments in
other sectors. This hope is almost certainly in vain: companies are
increasingly concentrated on applied research and development, arguing
that they cannot justify spending money on basic research which could
benefit other companies, public research universities are in no
position to substantially increase research investments due to
declining state support; and philanthropic organizations and
individuals, while an important and growing source of support for
American science, still contribute a small portion of the national
research investment. Foundations spend about $2 billion annually on
basic research.\6\ While this is a substantial contribution, it
represents less than 3 percent of total national spending on basic
research.\7\
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\6\ Based upon estimates from the Foundation Center: ``Distribution
of Foundation Grants by Subject Categories, circa 2011'' in the
categories of ``Medical Research'' and ``Science and Technology''. See
http://foundationcenter.org/findfunders/statistics/pdf/04_fund_sub/
2011/10_11.pdf.
\7\ Fiona Murray, ``Evaluating the Role of Science Philanthropy in
American Research Universities,'' Innovation Policy and the Economy, 13
(2013):1-40.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
This leaves the Federal Government as the primary supporter of
fundamental research for the foreseeable future. Thus, the recent
decline in the Federal investment in basic research has left the U.S.
in danger of being overtaken by other nations that are rapidly
advancing in science, engineering and technology.
Two goals must be met in order to reverse this trend. First, we
must ensure that the American people receive maximum benefits from
Federal investments in research, in part by strengthening partnerships
across governments, universities, and industry and business. Second, we
must develop a sustainable approach to research funding.
These two goals have guided the work of the American Academy
committee that I have the privilege to co-chair with Norman R.
Augustine. I will briefly discuss what our 23 eminent colleagues, who
include Nobel laureates, corporate executives, university presidents
and deans, and other leaders in science and engineering,\8\ have
determined must be done in the near future to achieve these goals.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\8\ www.amacad.org/newmodels
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ensuring that the American People Receive Maximum Benefits from
Federal Investments in Research
As I have argued earlier, Federal research investments are vital to
America's leadership in SE&T. But many current policies and practices
in government, industry and universities hinder the most effective use
of those investments. Given the accelerating pace of technological
advancement in many parts of the world, particularly in Asia, a rapid
response is needed. Policy changes in all sectors are necessary to
accelerate the discovery of new knowledge and the translation of new
insights and tools into technological innovation to ensure that the
American people enjoy the benefits of their investment in research.
First, we must streamline those regulations and practices governing
federally-funded research that add to universities' administrative
overhead while yielding questionable benefits. No more cost-effective
step could be taken to increase the productivity of America's
researchers, particularly those based at universities. Unquestionably,
the Federal Government has an obligation to ensure that the money it
provides to universities to support research on their campuses is used
for the intended purposes and that research practices are held to high
standards of performance--thus, regulations and administrative policies
are necessary. However, many regulations and business practices are
ineffective, vary from agency to agency across the Federal Government,
and constitute unnecessary and costly burdens to researchers and their
institutions that have the unintended consequences of reducing research
productivity and forcing the institutions to use their own funds to
cover the portion of research administrative costs not funded by the
agencies. The full set of relevant regulations and practices should be
examined with the objective of maximizing the effectiveness of the
Federal research investment.\9\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\9\ See, for example, the March 2014 National Science Board report,
Reducing Investigators' Administrative Workload for Federally Funded
Research.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Second, all parties must work together to uphold America's
unparalleled system of expert peer review. Competitive expert peer
review is the best way to assure excellence. Hence, peer review should
remain the mechanism used by Federal agencies to make research award
decisions, and review processes and criteria should be left to the
discretion of the agencies themselves. In the case of basic research,
scientific merit, based on the opinions of experts in the field, should
remain the primary consideration for awarding support. This system has
been used, successfully, for well over half a century. No better system
has been devised, particularly for basic research where the likely
outcome cannot be predicted.
Third, the public benefits of Federal research investments can be
more readily realized by establishing a more robust national
government-university-industry research partnership. Other countries
recognize this need and are taking active steps to put such national
research partnerships in place. Yet in the U.S., the accumulation of
decades of policies and practices in each sector, as well as shifting
priorities of the states and unpredictable Federal research funding
levels, are allowing our Nation to slip steadily behind.
The Bayh-Dole Act (Patent and Trademark Law Amendment Act), signed
into law in 1980, allows universities, small businesses and not-for-
profit organizations to pursue ownership of an invention arising from
federally funded research, subject to a number of conditions. This
landmark legislation has been highly effective in getting IP into the
hands of companies that can develop products from the technology and
move them to market, and has enabled a small number of universities to
derive substantial income from licensing. However, the majority of
universities have found that the cost of maintaining a technology
transfer office, filing for patents, and negotiating IP licensing
exceeds the income generated from licensing. Licensing negotiations
with companies can also pose a high barrier to collaboration, often
delaying or preventing the transfer of technologies to a company and,
potentially, a market. These realities have spurred many universities
to reconsider the value of IP ownership. Some universities are
experimenting with new policies to enhance the transfer of IP to the
market and are implementing novel technology transfer practices in line
with this policy. More universities should pioneer such experiments,
the outcomes of which should be evaluated to derive best practices. And
as universities choose to adopt more flexible approaches to handling
IP, companies should explore forming stronger research partnerships
with universities for mutual benefit.
University and corporate leadership and cooperation will be the key
to advancing these reforms; and the professional science and
engineering societies will continue to play an important role by
keeping their members informed about best practices. The Federal
Government should encourage universities to explore steps in this
direction, including experimenting with innovative models for
technology transfer, enhancing early exposure of students (including
doctoral students) to a broad range of non-research career options, and
increasing the interactions of university researchers with industry.
The result can be a richer, more innovative research environment
that benefits all participants. The opportunity for strengthening the
university-industry partnership has never been better.
Making the R&E (Research and Experimentation) tax credit permanent,
as recommended by the National Academies, the American Academy, the
Business Roundtable, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and
Technology (PCAST), and many others, would provide an incentive for
industry to invest in long-term research, including collaborative
research with universities. Not doing so significantly reduces the
potential benefits that federally supported academic research can
provide to American taxpayers. That fact should override any arguments
for the status quo.
Another recommendation that has been made by many other
organizations, including PCAST \10\ and the National
Academies,\11\,\12\ is to increase the number of H-1B visas
and reshape policies affecting foreign-born researchers. Graduate
students from around the globe seek an advanced education at American
research universities, not only for the quality of training they
receive but to advance their careers. For these reasons and others,
most of these talented international students and researchers would
stay in the U.S. if given the opportunity. However, international
competition for talented scientists and engineers has grown fierce. If
we fail to both attract and retain the best and brightest scientists
and engineers, we risk not only steering American entrepreneurs
overseas in their search for highly skilled workers, but further
exacerbating the current shortage of educated workers that fuel
American R&D and high-tech manufacturing sectors.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\10\ President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology,
Transformation and Opportunity: The Future of the U.S. Research
Enterprise, 2012.
\11\ National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering,
and Institute of Medicine. Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing
and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future. (Washington,
D.C.: The National Academies Press, 2007).
\12\ National Research Council. Research Universities and the
Future of America: Ten Breakthrough Actions Vital to Our Nation's
Prosperity and Security. (Washington, D.C.: The National Academies
Press, 2012).
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Securing America's Leadership in Science and Engineering Research--
Especially Basic Research--by Providing Sustainable Federal Investments
Reestablishing America's competitiveness as a nation will require
that federally funded research, particularly basic research, become a
higher priority than has been the case in over two decades. In
emphasizing basic research, I am not suggesting that the Federal role
in supporting applied research and development are unimportant--such
activities support the missions of many Federal agencies. But basic
research is often where the breakthroughs occur that change paradigms
and revolutionize technologies. The research efforts that led to the
invention of the transistor and laser were not the result of trying to
design a better vacuum tube or light bulb.
During the 18 years from 1975 to 1992, the Federal investment in
basic research grew at an average annual inflation-adjusted rate of
over 4 percent, despite serious challenges including the 1973 oil
embargo, the Great Inflation of 1979-1982, and the final tumultuous
years of the Cold War. Leaders in both parties, in the White House and
Congress, were able to agree that investments in research should be a
particularly high priority for Federal support. In recent years,
however, the Nation's research funding has stagnated. As a function of
U.S. economic output, Federal support for basic research is actually
lower than it was twenty years ago.
While I recognize the difficulty of significantly growing Federal
research funding in a period of fiscal constraint, it would be
difficult to overstate the urgency of once again putting research
funding on a sustainable growth path. Investments in basic research are
just that: investments. America's economic ascendency in the 20th
century was due in large part--perhaps even primarily--to its
investments in science and engineering research. Basic research lies
behind every new product brought to market, every new medical device or
drug, every new defense and space technology, and many innovative
business practices. Given the accelerating pace of technological
advancement in many parts of the world, particularly in Asia, it
follows that the U.S. must accelerate both discovery of new scientific
knowledge and translation of that knowledge to useful purpose.
Simply put, if the U.S. is to remain a leader in providing these
benefits, the Federal Government must make the necessary investments.
Failure to act now may put us in a position from which we cannot
recover, given the fast pace of global scientific advancement.
Conclusion
The American Academy report, to be released in early fall, will
outline a series of specific actions that could be taken immediately to
achieve the goals I have described. I look forward to sharing our ideas
with this Committee. Real progress will depend on the extent to which
the public and private sectors can cooperate effectively in support of
a coherent national roadmap to strengthen the U.S. research enterprise,
and to drive American innovation throughout the 21st century. As the
President observed in this year's State of the Union address, ``We know
that the Nation that goes all-in on innovation today will own the
global economy tomorrow. This is an edge America cannot surrender.''
I look forward to your questions. Thank you again for the
invitation to appear today.
______
Biography
Neal F. Lane
Malcolm Gillis University Professor
Senior Fellow, Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Rice University
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/ neal/index.htm
http://www.bakerinstitute.org/personnel/fellows-scholars/nlane
(E-mail: neal@rice.edu)
Dr. Neal Lane is the Malcolm Gillis University Professor and Professor
of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He also
holds an appointment as Senior Fellow in Science and Technology Policy
at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy.
Prior to returning to Rice University, Dr. Lane served in the
Federal Government during the Clinton Administration as Assistant to
the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White
House Office of Science and Technology Policy, from August 1998 to
January 2001, and as Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF)
and member (ex officio) of the National Science Board, from October
1993 to August 1998.
Before becoming the NSF Director, Dr. Lane was Provost and
Professor of Physics at Rice University in Houston, Texas, a position
he had held since 1986. He first came to Rice in 1966, when he joined
the Department of Physics as an assistant professor. In 1972, he became
Professor of Physics and Space Physics and Astronomy. He left Rice from
mid-1984 to 1986 to serve as Chancellor of the University of Colorado
at Colorado Springs. In addition, from 1979 to 1980, while on leave
from Rice, he worked at the NSF as Director of the Division of Physics.
Widely regarded as a distinguished scientist and educator, Dr.
Lane's many writings and presentations include topics in theoretical
atomic and molecular physics and science and technology policy. Early
in his career he received the W. Alton Jones Graduate Fellowship and
held an NSF Doctoral Fellowship (University of Oklahoma), an NSF Post-
Doctoral Fellowship (while in residence at Queen's University, Belfast,
Northern Ireland) and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (at Rice
University and on research leave at Oxford University). He earned Phi
Beta Kappa honors in 1960 and was inducted into Sigma Xi National
Research Society in 1964, serving as its national president in 1993. He
served as Visiting Fellow at the Joint Institute for Laboratory
Astrophysics in 1965-66 and 1975-76. While a Professor at Rice, he was
two-time recipient of the University's George R. Brown Prize for
Superior Teaching.
Through his work with scientific and professional organizations and
his participation on review and advisory committees for Federal and
state agencies, Dr. Lane has contributed to public service throughout
his career. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences (member of its governing
council), the American Association for Advancement of Science, and the
Association for Women in Science. He serves on several boards and
advisory committees.
Dr. Lane has received numerous prizes, awards, including the AAAS
Philip Hauge Abelson Award, AAAS William D. Carey Award, American
Society of Mechanical Engineers President's Award, American Chemical
Society Public Service Award, American Astronomical Society/American
Mathematical Society/American Physical Society Public Service Award,
NASA Distinguished Service Award, Council of Science Societies
Presidents Support of Science Award, Distinguished Alumni Award of the
University of Oklahoma, and over a dozen honorary degrees. In 2009, Dr.
Lane received the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal,
the American Institute of Physics K.T. Compton Medal for Leadership in
Physics, and the Association of Rice Alumni Gold Medal for service to
Rice University.
Born in Oklahoma City in 1938, Dr. Lane earned his B.S., M.S., and
Ph.D. (1964) degrees in physics from the University of Oklahoma. His
thesis advisor was Chun C. Lin (now at the University of Wisconsin--
Madison). He is married to Joni Sue (Williams) Lane and has two
children, Christy Saydjari and John Lane, and four grandchildren, Allia
and Alex Saydjari, and Matthew and Jessica Lane.
The Chairman. Thank you, sir, very much.
Dr. Stephen Fienberg, the Maurice Falk University Professor
of Statistics and Social--you're a neighbor; right? To West
Virginia University?
Dr. Fienberg. Indeed, sir.
The Chairman. And, in fact, we collaborate; do we not?
Carnegie Mellon is in that, University of Pittsburgh. I
mean there's a nice collaboration.
Anyway, Professor of Statistics and Social Science,
Department of Statistics, the Machine Learning Department, the
Heinz College of, I can't pronounce it, Cylab, Carnegie Mellon
University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Can I just say that, as I'm looking at the four of you, I'm
very much missing Chuck Vest. He came before this committee
many times. Sometimes uninvited. He just invited himself----
[Laughter.]
The Chairman.--because he wanted us to understand all of
the things that you're talking about. And he was absolutely
militant about it. He was head of MIT for 13 years; the
Department of Engineering for a long time. You know, he is just
an absolutely marvelous human being and I miss him very much.
Just listening----
Dr. Fienberg. So do we all.
The Chairman.--all of you.
Please, sir.
STATEMENT OF STEPHEN FIENBERG, MAURICE FALK
UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR OF STATISTICS AND SOCIAL
SCIENCE, DEPARTMENT OF STATISTICS, THE MACHINE
LEARNING DEPARTMENT, THE HEINZ COLLEGE,
AND CYLAB, CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY
Dr. Fienberg. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and Ranking
Member, Senator Thune.
I was a member of the National Academy's committee on
assessing the value of research in advancing national goals,
and that was established with funds from NSF pursuant to the
American COMPETES Act. Today, I'll share with you highlights
from our report Furthering America's Research Enterprise which
we have shared with you and the staff of the Committee. I, too,
miss Chuck Vest. He was a dear friend and he worked hard with
the Committee to help us focus on our task.
The question before us is: How can we effectively and
efficiently enhance the benefits of scientific research and
keep the Nation at the forefront of global competition for new
technologies and innovations? In seeking answers, Congress and
in particular this committee asked the academies to study
measures of the impacts of research on society.
Some measures of research outputs give useful indications
of how well the system is performing. But they can't depict the
complex interconnected systems of research in innovation and
the highly non-linear pathways that lead from research to
technologies and other innovations. We found that the current
measures are inadequate to guide national decisions about what
research investments will expand the benefits of science.
Moreover, we noted that the U.S. lacks in institutionalized
capacity for systematically evaluating the Nation's research
enterprise, taken as a whole, in assessing its performance
developing policy options for federally-funded research.
Nevertheless, our committee concluded that the American
research enterprise is indeed capable of producing increased
benefits for U.S. society. To reap those benefits, however, we
need to understand what's made our research enterprise so
extraordinarily productive. It is because it reflects the
character of American free enterprise. It's decentralized,
pluralistic, competitive and meritocratic. And finally, it's
entrepreneurial; encouraging risk taking.
To increase the benefits of research, the Federal
Government must focus less on commercialization of research
discoveries and certainly not on predicting the scientific
fields that would lead to it that is predicting the winners.
Rather, just as for business, government must focus on policies
that promote the conditions for the research enterprise to
thrive, what we, in our report, label as three crucial pillars.
The first is a talented interconnected workforce developed
through education and research training. Talent also comes from
highly skilled immigrants, partnerships, support of research
environments and worldwide scientific networks.
Adequate and dependable resources constitute the second
pillar. Stable, flexible and predictable Federal funding
encourages talented students to pursue scientific careers. It
keeps established researchers engaged. It attracts and retains
foreign talent. And it inspires the pursuit of riskier and more
innovative research.
The third pillar is world-class basic research in all areas
of science. Basic research pursued primarily to increase
understanding and not necessarily toward a technological goal,
provides the foundation of discovery and knowledge for
economically significant innovations in the future.
These pillars interact. In the Department of Statistics at
Carnegie Mellon, we employ and train our Ph.D. students with
Federal and other support for basic research. But that support
also creates a research environment in which we engage,
stimulate and train many undergraduates and Masters Students.
Those students represent the future of our scientific
workforce.
World class basic research in all major areas of science is
important because truly transformative scientific discoveries
increasingly depend on research in a variety of fields. The
development of the Google Page-Rank algorithm illustrates this
especially well. In its 1997 patent application for the
algorithm, it acknowledged support from NSF. It drew heavily on
multiple discoveries spending nearly 45 years of social and
information science research, and it included decades-old
research on methods to determine social status and to study
social networks.
We do indeed need to improve our measures of research
activities, including outputs and technology transfer. But
greater benefit will come from measures that guide the pillars
of the research enterprise. If we cultivate talent, provide
adequate and dependable resources, and invest in the diversity
of basic research, fresh discoveries will continue to power our
economy, and to enrich our lives in unpredictable and
unimaginable ways.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Fienberg follows:]
Prepared Statement of Stephen E. Fienberg, Maurice Falk University
Professor of Statistics and Social Science, Carnegie Mellon
University, Pittsburgh, PA and Member, Committee on Assessing the Value
of Research in Advancing National Goals, Division on Behavioral and
Social Sciences and Education, National Research Council, The National
Academies
Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee. My name
is Stephen Fienberg. I am Maurice Falk University Professor of
Statistics and Social Science at the Carnegie Mellon University with
appointments in the Department of Statistics, the Heinz College, and
the Department of Machine Learning, and I served as a member of the
Committee on Assessing the Value of Research in Advancing National
Goals of the National Research Council. The National Research Council
is the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences, National
Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine of the National
Academies, chartered by Congress in 1863 to advise the government on
matters of science and technology. The Committee was established with
funding from the National Science Foundation pursuant to Section 521 of
the America COMPETES Act of 2011. Today I will share with your
Committee some of the highlights of our report, Furthering America's
Research Enterprise, and I append to my remarks a list of members of
the study committee and the Table of Contents of the report.
The context
The benefits of the Federal investment in scientific research are
manifest and have enabled the United States to achieve unprecedented
prosperity, security, and quality of life. But the Nation now faces
increased global competition for new technologies and other
innovations, in the face of growing economic exigencies. Congress wants
to enhance the benefits of scientific research for the U.S. economy and
other purposes and to keep the Nation at the forefront of global
competition for new technologies and other innovations.
How can that be done effectively and efficiently? In particular,
how can we increase the returns on current Federal investments in
scientific research? In seeking answers to those questions, Congress
asked the Academies to study measures of the impacts of research on
society, especially those that could serve to increase the translation
of research into commercial products and services. Also of interest was
the use of such measures for purposes of accountability. The purview of
the study was all federally supported research.
The Committee's Findings
I. Current measures are inadequate
While some measures of research outputs and benefits are useful for
specific purposes, the Committee found that current measures are
inadequate to guide national decisions about what research investments
will expand the benefits of science.
The problem is that metrics used to assess any one aspect of the
research system in isolation, without a strong understanding of the
larger picture, may prove misleading. The benefits of research
investments tend to arrive unpredictably, vary widely in eventual
value, and require substantial additional investment (as well as
investment in other fields of science) to realize their economic payoff
through innovation. With few exceptions, approaches to measure the
impacts and quality of research programs cannot depict the diffuse,
interconnected and highly non-linear pathways that lead from research
to technologies and other innovations. The widespread adoption of the
innovation is a process that itself requires investment and substantial
know-how.
Existing metrics give some indication of how well the system is
performing, but the ultimate impacts, the emergent phenomena that truly
matter to society such as an abundant supply of natural gas enabled by
fracking technology, communications and commerce enabled by Google and
the Internet, and medical advances enabled by genomics depend on a
number of critical components, and the relationships among them, in the
complex systems of research and innovation. These components often are
intangible, including opportunities and relationships that are not
captured by most data collection programs and cannot be measured by
currently available methods.
II. Reaping further benefits
The committee concluded that the American research enterprise is
indeed capable of producing increased benefits for U.S. society, as
well as for the global community. To reap those benefits, however, we
first need to understand what has made the American research enterprise
so successful: what drives it and why has it been so productive.
Our research enterprise has been so successful because it has
evolved as a complex, dynamic system with many of the characteristics
of American free enterprise. It is decentralized. It is pluralistic,
driven by a diverse array of researchers, companies, institutions, and
funding agencies. It is competitive, requiring researchers and
organizations to compete for funding, for talent, for positions, for
publications, and for other rewards. It is meritocratic, bestowing more
significant rewards on those with highly competitive ideas and
abilities through a built-in quality control system of peer review. And
finally, it is entrepreneurial: it allows for risk taking, for facing
the prospect of failure head on to reap potentially great rewards.
Just as business thrives in free enterprise for its products and
services, so too does our extraordinarily productive research
enterprise for its ideas and discoveries.
As our assessment progressed it became clear to us that increasing
the benefits from the Federal investment in research depends far less
on Federal promotion of the commercialization of research discoveries
or on trying to predict the scientific fields that are most likely to
lead to commercial products and services, than on Federal policies that
promote the conditions for the research enterprise to thrive. We
identified three crucial pillars of the research enterprise:
1. A talented and interconnected workforce. The importance of talent
cannot be overstated, both as input and as output. Talent
benefits not only from public investments in traditional
education and research training in science and engineering but
also from highly skilled immigrants; partnerships; supportive
research environments; and worldwide networks through which
researchers connect with others, develop professional
relationships and share ideas and scientific resources.
2. Adequate and dependable resources. Stable and predictable Federal
funding encourages talented students to pursue scientific
careers, keeps established researchers engaged over a career,
and attracts and retains foreign talent. It also supports a
diversity of institutions that both fund and conduct research,
as well as essential scientific infrastructure-the tools
necessary for conducting research. Flexibility and stability in
funding, along with a culture that tolerates failure, may
inspire researchers to pursue riskier and more innovative
research with a greater chance of failure but also a greater
likelihood of transformative impact. These resources are
increasingly important to future U.S. competitiveness, given
the rising investments in research by other countries,
particularly China and other Asian nations.
3. World-class basic research in all major areas of science. Basic
research, in which investigators pursue their ideas primarily
for increased understanding and not necessarily toward a
technological goal, often provides the foundation of discovery
and knowledge for future economically significant innovations.
Federal investments in basic research contribute to the growth
of a trained research workforce, support the scientific
infrastructure to conduct research, and enable U.S. researchers
and would-be innovators to exploit the world-wide networks of
researchers, who open access to a vast stock of knowledge and
technological approaches. Absent a strong pool of scientists
and engineers familiar with basic research at the cutting edge,
scientific research and its products are unlikely to be
developed and applied in ways that create value for society.
World-class basic research in all major areas of science is
important because truly transformative scientific discoveries
increasingly depend on research in a variety of fields. Moreover, in
today's highly connected world, a discovery made somewhere is soon
known everywhere. The competitive advantage may go not to the Nation in
which the discovery was made but to the Nation that can use it more
effectively to develop new technologies and other innovations by
relying on a broad foundation of knowledge, talent, and capacity
derived from basic research in a diversity of scientific fields.
Finally, a world-class basic research enterprise attracts scholars from
around the world who further enhance excellence in research and create
a self-reinforcing cycle.
The development of Google is a good example of why a diversity of
basic research is important. Google owes its remarkable success in part
to its algorithm for ranking Web pages. The 1997 patent application for
the algorithm, which acknowledged support from the National Science
Foundation (NSF), drew heavily on multiple discoveries spanning nearly
45 years of social and information sciences research--discoveries made
possible by funding from four Federal science agencies and protected by
a handful of seemingly unrelated patents awarded to a university
(Carnegie Mellon), corporations (Lucent, Libertech, AT&T, Matsushita),
and industrial laboratories (AT&T Bell Labs). Critical to the
development of the algorithm was decades-old research on methods to
determine social status, and social network research from the 1970s.
The development of the Google algorithm illustrates the importance of
seemingly unrelated social science research; the convergence of
research at universities, corporations, and industrial laboratories;
and the unpredictable benefits of federally-funded research. Moreover,
the economic model for Google advertising utilizes a variant of the
Vickrey auction, first described in a 1961 theoretical economics paper
and later developed by many others with NSF support. Other Internet-
based companies have followed suit.
New as well as existing measures could be used to assess each of
the three pillars. Such measures might include, for example, indicators
of human and knowledge capital, indicators of the flow of knowledge in
specific fields of science, indicators with which to track the flow of
foreign research talent, portfolio analyses of Federal research
investments by field of science, international benchmarking of research
performance, and measures of research reproducibility. Another recent
National Research Council report, Capturing Change in Science,
Technology, and Innovation: Improving Indicators to Inform Policy,
identified many measures for assessing the performance of policies
intended to strengthen the three pillars of the research system.
The levels, composition, and efficiency of federally funded
research need to be adjusted to meet today's circumstances and we need
better metrics to inform policy decisions about research. But the
United States lacks an institutionalized capability for systematically
evaluating the Nation's research enterprise as a whole, assessing its
performance, and developing policy options for federally funded
research. An organization charged with such a responsibility would
increase the demand for policy relevant data of high quality. Although
NSF's National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics produces
valuable data (e.g., Science and Engineering Indicators) that could be
used in policy analysis, NSF's role differs from that of Federal policy
analysis agencies or statistics agencies such as the Bureau of Economic
Analysis or the Economic Research Service that conduct policy analysis.
One U.S. data collection program--STAR METRICS (Science and
Technology for America's Reinvestment: Measuring the Effect of Research
on Innovation, Competitiveness and Science)--is designed to collect a
number of measures of the impacts of federally funded research. This
data program is a joint effort of multiple science agencies (the White
House Office of Science and Technology Policy, NIH, NSF, the Department
of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency) and research
institutions. While STAR METRICS aims to document the outcomes and
public benefits of national investments in science and engineering
research for employment, knowledge generation, and health, our
assessment is that it is not ready for prime time use.
STAR METRICS could potentially be of great value in assessing the
value of research if efforts were made to (1) broaden coverage by
enrolling additional institutions, (2) deepen coverage by expanding the
data elements reported, (3) link the data to other national and
international datasets, (4) establish the quality of the data, and,
most importantly, (5) ensure broad, easy access for researchers. Such
expanded data and access need to be coupled with modern analytical
tools, such as complex network modeling and analysis. Our report
provides a simple illustrative example, but with better data, such
tools might reveal important interactions among components of the
research enterprise using an expanded and restructured STAR METRICS
program.
Enhancing America's research enterprise requires a better
understanding not just of the three pillars of talent, resources, and
basic research, but also of the relationships and interactions among
them. For example, resources for basic research also provide for talent
through the training of a research workforce and, by engaging
undergraduate students in research, as we do at my university, Carnegie
Mellon.
Let me use my Department of Statistics as an illustration. My
faculty colleagues and I have a diversity of research grants and
contracts that employ and train our Ph.D. students. But this Federal
and international research support also creates a research environment
that allows us to engage and train many undergraduates and master's
students, who go on to advance their research skills at other research
universities in statistics and many quantitatively-related disciplines.
And this pattern is replicated across the university, fostered in part
by the interdisciplinary activities of my colleagues. These students
represent the future of our scientific workforce.
Other measures, which can help to make the research enterprise more
efficient and which can provide information to guide the allocation of
research funds arise in evaluations. We address in our report the
evaluation of research funding programs, of peer review, and the
effects of different funding programs, such as the NIH Pioneer Awards,
on research performance. Unfortunately, most attempts at evaluation do
not address the fundamental question: What would have happened but for
the research funding program? At a higher level, evaluation efforts
rarely address questions such as: what alternate allocation of
resources between programs might promote a healthier research
enterprise? If evaluations are conducted at all, they are often added
after the fact. Evaluation needs to be built into research funding
programs from the outset to help avoid the unmeasurable biases
associated with ad hoc retrospective evaluation. Moreover, few
evaluation studies or approaches adopt randomized controlled field
experiments that control for biases and input differences. We need to
address these evaluation challenges.
Measures of research activities, outputs, and technology transfer
are important, but we need to improve both the measures and the
underlying data. Greater benefit will come from measures to guide the
pillars of the research enterprise--talent, resources, and basic
research. If we cultivate talent, provide adequate and dependable
resources, and invest in a diversity of basic research, fresh
discoveries will continue to power our economy and to enrich our lives
in unpredictable and unimaginable ways.
Attachment
Furthering America's Research Enterprise
Committee on Assessing the Value of Research in Advancing National
Goals
Richard F. Celeste, Ann Griswold, and Miron L. Straf, Editors
Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education
Copies of this report are available from the National Academies Press,
500 Fifth Street, NW, Keck 360, Washington, DC 20001; (800) 624-6242 or
(202) 334-3313.
A PDF of the report may be downloaded without cost from the Press
website at http://www.nap.edu.
Suggested citation:
National Research Council (2014). Furthering America's Research
Enterprise. R.F. Celeste, A. Griswold, and M.L. Straf, (Eds.),
Committee on Assessing the Value of Research in Advancing National
Goals, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education.
Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
______
Committee on Assessing the Value of Research in Advancing National
Goals
The Honorable Richard F. Celeste (Chair), Colorado College (emeritus)
Rodney A. Brooks (NAE), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(emeritus)
Alicia Carriquiry, Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
Christopher M. Coburn, Partners Healthcare, Boston, Massachusetts
Stephen E. Fienberg (NAS), Department of Statistics, Heinz College, and
Machine Learning Department, Carnegie Mellon University
Bronwyn H. Hall, Department of Economics, University of California,
Berkeley, and University of Maastricht, the Netherlands
John E. Kelly, III, International Business Machines Corporation
Josh Lerner, Harvard Business School
David C. Mowery, Walter A. Haas School of Business, University of
California, Berkeley
Jason Owen-Smith, Department of Sociology, Organizational Studies
Program, Institute for Social Research, and Barger Leadership
Institute, University of Michigan
The Honorable John Edward Porter (IOM), Hogan Lovells, Washington, D.C.
Stephanie S. Shipp, Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, Virginia Tech
Gregory Tassey, Economic Policy Research Center, University of
Washington
Jeffrey Wadsworth (NAE), Battelle Memorial Institute
David Ward, University of Wisconsin--Madison (emeritus)
Miron L Straf, Study Director
Steven Ceulemans, Consultant
Ann Griswold, Science Writer
Viola Horek, Manager of Operations
Mary Ann Kasper, Senior Program Assistant
______
Contents
Summary
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Evolution of the U.S. Research Enterprise
Chapter 3 Understanding the Pathways from Research to Innovation
Chapter 4 The Usefulness and Limitations of Metrics in Measuring the
Returns on Publicly Funded Research
Chapter 5 Measuring Research Impacts and Quality
Chapter 6 Understanding the Research Enterprise as a Complex System
Chapter 7 Conclusion
References
APPENDICES
A. An Evaluation of STAR METRICS
B. U.S. Universities and Industrial Innovation: An Interactive
Relationship Producing Economic Value from Research
C. Annotated Bibliography of Selected Studies
D. The Study Process
Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff
The Chairman. Thank you very, very much.
Lots of questions.
Dr. Cerf, your career is a very good encapsulation of how
government-funded, basic research can lead to technological
innovation that has far reaching consequences for our economy
and our world. Now you have spent part of your career at some
of our leading universities, conducting research and training
students. You spend part of your career as a government
researcher at DARPA and you have worked in the private sector
at companies like IBM, MCI, and Google that have been able to
build successful business models based on your previous work.
Can you explain why developing a breakthrough technology
like the Internet is not possible without our network of public
and private resources?
Dr. Cerf. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for that question. It's
one of the most fascinating parts of my career which is
alternating back and forth between the research environment and
the private sector taking advantage of what's been learned
thanks to research support.
Let me suggest two things. First of all, in the case of
ARPA, my work at UCLA and then Stanford University was
supported by the defense department; the Advanced Research
Projects Agency. And, although I would characterize the work as
applied more than basic research, hiding underneath a lot of
what we did was the need to have good understanding of
mathematical models of the behavior of the systems that we were
building.
So, to give you an example, Dr. Leonard Kleinrock, at UCLA
and formerly MIT, built mathematical models of the way in which
computer networks would function and was able to make some
predictions about how it would behave. And my job when I was at
UCLA, doing the predecessor to the Internet, was to gather data
from the way this network functioned and compare with his
queuing models to see whether or not his predictions were
accurate relative to what we could measure.
And the thing that's so important about this, and I thank
you so much for asking this question, is that there was in fact
a feedback loop because the model sometimes didn't correctly
predict what would happen and it would make us go back and
figure out how to change the model in order to get better
predictions.
On the other hand, sometimes the model would predict that
bad things would happen and we had to go back and figure: How
do we stop that from happening in the actual implementation? So
this wonderful yin and yang of research and modeling and
analysis and actual implementation really reinforced this
process. But it took some years to take advantage of all that.
And I won't go on and on, on this point, but I can tell that
almost in every case there's some fundamental theory that has
to support the mechanical outcomes.
I can't resist telling you one other anecdote. At Stanford
University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as graduate students,
had funding from NSF to do some research on the ability to
manage large amounts of data and to try to figure out how to
organize it. And in order to test their idea, they had to have
enough computing equipment to do what they wanted to do which
is literally download the entire worldwide web and index it.
Now I'm fond of going around telling everyone that
permission-less innovation is really important. You shouldn't
have to get permission to invent something. Well, I hadn't
understood that this phase applied to what Larry and Sergey
did, because I understand now that since they didn't have
access to all the computing equipment they needed, they
borrowed some. And I now understand that they didn't always
have permission to borrow it. And yet, we now see permission-
less innovation producing an extraordinary outcome; the success
of Google.
The short story, sir, is that no successful implementation,
no successful engineering, no successful business ever gets
anywhere if there isn't a fundamental foundation below it that
makes it work. And that's why understanding how the world works
is so important.
The Chairman. Thank you and I turn to Senator Thune.
Senator Thune. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Fienberg is a statistician and member of the National
Research Council's Committee on Assessing the Value in
Advancing National Goals. You identified new and existing
measures to assess basic research, workforce, talent and
resource. According to your report, such measures might include
portfolio analyses of Federal research investments by each
field of science, indicators to track the flow of foreign
research talent, and international benchmarking of research
performance.
The question is: how well, if at all, is the United States
currently utilizing these measures and how could better
assessment in these areas guide Federal policies regarding
which research investments best expand the benefits of science?
Dr. Fienberg. That's a complex question. Let me try to
answer it in pieces. The place where we have metrics or
measures at the moment, that seem to be doing pretty well, is
in performance. We can count outputs. We count how many papers
scientists publish; patents, publications and journals. So
there we measure pretty well.
Evaluation measures tell us how research programs compare
in terms of ultimate outcomes that benefit society, and it was
really here where we saw much room for improvements. We looked
across the board, at both what the U.S. measures now including
the kinds of data gathered by the agency within NSF but more
broadly, and then we asked what other countries were doing and
how they were trying to gage their own research enterprises.
And we found an astonishing lack of tools for that kind of
assessment, especially at the program level where you want to
ask how a program as a whole is doing as opposed to how an
individual scientist or a subset of projects do. And that's an
area where we actually need to invest in new research if we're
going to get those kinds of performance and evaluation measures
in hand to help you and the policymakers in Congress actually
be able to assess the kinds of tradeoffs.
The three pillars that we identified, again talk about
broad indicators, but even here there's much room for
improvement. There is a program that was initiated by a number
of Federal agencies called ``STAR Metrics.'' And it was
designed to give a unique look at these kinds of issues. We
studied STAR Metrics in our committee deliberations, and we
gave some illustrations of how those metrics might be used.
But, what we concluded was that it wasn't ready for primetime.
The data were insufficient. They weren't linked to other data
that you would want to link it to for outputs, and the data
weren't necessarily of high quality, and they weren't
accessible by researchers who could provide the feedback to
government agencies to make it work.
And so, I think that we have a long way to go to be able to
really take stock of the real benefits and to be able to weigh
decisions about different kinds of programs at a fairly high
level.
Senator Thune. Dr. Cerf, without a coordinated strategy the
potential exists for multiple agencies with similar research
funding to fund duplicative or overlapping research. What
duplication have you witnessed or come across in your capacity
at Google or as a member of the advisory boards for NSF and
NIST, and can advisory bodies like those upon which you serve
do more to review and oversee federally-funded research
programs to ensure efficiency in the research enterprise?
Dr. Cerf. So this is a really interesting question,
Senator, because efficiency is not always manifest in the
research enterprise. In fact, I must say, although I don't
depend upon them, accidents are sometimes the most important
sources of surprising and successful research.
I think you will remember the discovery of penicillin was
preceded by a question of mold showing up in some petri dishes.
And, around that mold, it appeared that no bacteria were
growing. And Fleming, to his credit, instead of discarding this
and saying ``Well, there must be something wrong'' said, ``Hmm,
that's funny.'' And it's the people who asked that question,
that are the ones that end up with the Nobel prizes. So this is
not to argue, however, that we can't be more deeply
appreciative of how to fashion and how to decide research
expenditures.
One way to do this is to take advantage of the scientific
community's awareness of what we don't know. And one of the
things that is so valuable about the peer review process is
exactly that. When people make proposals, it is often to
express things that we don't know. And the other is to review
those processes and help us understand whether it's worth
pursuing.
Nonetheless, I think I would like to aim my response partly
at Dr. Fienberg's comments and ask a question about the way in
which we evaluate research and its success. I've often wondered
whether anyone has taken the time to look at a successful
enterprise and ask the question: What led to that? You know,
what is the tree of research results and maybe, you know,
application results that have led us to this particular
outcome? It's kind of like if you're an academic, you teach
students and then some of them become academics and they teach
students and then you have these academic grandchildren and
great-grandchildren. I keep thinking that research results have
a similar kind of character. Somebody gets a fundamental result
and the question is: How did we take advantage of that
knowledge?
So imagine lasers and eventually ending up with optical
communications and CDs and DVDs and so on. I don't know if
anyone--let me ask you. Am I allowed to ask the other guys
questions?
[Laughter.]
Dr. Cerf. Let me ask Dr. Fienberg.
Does anyone try to lay out the ancestry of these successful
results? And if they don't, maybe we should because it would
give us some insight about how this actually works.
Dr. Fienberg. People actually do that, but there's an
interesting side question. That is, that's a case study and
people do such case studies in universities today. The more
interesting question is: What would have happened if we hadn't
funded the research program and it hadn't produced these
outcomes? Where would American society be? Where would American
industry be? And that counterfactual question is a much harder
one to ask and answer, and it's one for which we have very poor
tools to assess the outcome.
Senator Thune. Mr. Chairman, I think their questions of
each other may be better than mine. I don't think they're
really necessary to this hearing but I'm glad that the Senator
from Massachusetts has arrived.
Let me just ask, because you mentioned, Dr. Fienberg, and
as the National Academy's report has identified, that the
United States lacks an institutional capability for
systematically evaluating the Nation's research enterprise,
assessing its performance in developing some of these policy
options for research. Isn't the White House Office of Science
and Technology Policy well positioned to perform that role?
Dr. Fienberg. That office could be in a position to perform
that role, but at the moment, at least, it really doesn't fit
the formal mandate and it's overburdened with other activities.
And so, there needs to be an organization not unlike that with
the mandate to gather the data to integrate across agencies and
to look independently at that. That's clearly one place to
place such a capability.
Senator Thune. Do you think that shortcoming in any way
creates an impediment to growth, to economic growth?
Dr. Fienberg. I think it has to.
If you want to know which of five programs or which of five
different allocations across programs are going to yield the
greatest benefit and you have no data and no insights, it's
very hard to make policy choices on a rational, as opposed to a
political, or other gut bases.
Senator Thune. OK.
One final question, Mr. Chairman, I used twice my allotted
time but I wanted to ask the question on the R&D tax credit.
Dr. Lane, you had mentioned, as I mentioned in my opening
statement, you also highlighted, there are a lot of groups
including the Business Roundtable that have suggested making
that research credit permanent. How would that incentivize
private businesses to unlock innovation and invest more in
long-term R&D as well as promote jobs in manufacturing? Can you
think of any specific examples of how our doing this in fits
and starts and temporary extensions has inhibited companies
long-term planning?
Dr. Lane. Well, thank you, Ranking Member Thune.
I think the purpose of that tax benefit was to encourage
corporations to make some long-term investments in R&D because
those really can constitute investments, and they're difficult
to justify under certain circumstances. The idea of the R&E tax
credit was to promote that because it was very important to the
corporations to be able to look ahead further than they're
currently able to do. The problem with making it temporary is
that, or I hear from such corporations and Dr. Cerf can correct
me if I'm wrong, is that when you don't know it's going to be
their next year or the year after that, you're not going to
make those kind of long-term commitments.
And so, one thing that does, I believe, is get in the way
of a richer, stronger partnership between the private sector
and the research universities of the country, and probably the
national labs as well. So one thing that our committee is
focused on is finding mechanisms to strengthen this partnership
between the sectors. And there are a number of issues that
we'll talk about, but one of them we think would definitely
help is making this tax credit permanent.
Senator Thune. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Would you forgive me if I asked one question?
Very smart man.
This is really to all of you. You've indicated about the
importance of failure in broad Federal research. You say that
``failure is the handmaiden of wisdom in the scientific
world.''
Now, that's a very hard concept for most people who are not
scientists to understand in a political world much more
difficult. Most people who work in government or private
business want to be able to demonstrate that their investments
have been successful. Now, what I would like you to do, each of
you or any of you, is to give me an example, hopefully a real
live example, of where you had to fail in order to succeed;
number one.
Ms. DiChristina, I'd be interested in your thought on this,
too.
Second, that it's sort of axiomatic, and Senator Thune has
brought in another thing to this permanent tax credit, that you
enable business to have more confidence into their future;
therefore, they're more likely to invest. But underwriting I
think your testimony is sort of an axiomatic matter that the
private sector has to, at some point earlier than is convenient
for the genius of failing in order to learn more, has to see
results.
There are some huge companies; pharmaceuticals spent years
working on things, though that's not the same. So if you could
help me understand through precise examples of where the
private sector just had to get out of your joint partnership
because they could not justify to their board of directors or
to their shareholders continued non-success. It's a very
important principle because the people who do research at a lot
of these private sector businesses are trained highly like you
are. And they are genuine scientists. And they're driven by the
same desire to get a result and have to at least in their own
thinking realize that sometimes we have to fail in order to
drive us to figure out why we failed, therefore come to a high
level of understanding. So help me understand that in the real
world.
Dr. Cerf. OK. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Several examples. You will recall how many times Edison
tried different ways at making a light bulb with different
materials. And the point there is very clear that he had to
fail a lot before he found something that worked. And what's
important about this is failing fast as opposed to failing
forever. And it's very important in the scientific enterprise
and in business enterprise to learn quickly what works and what
doesn't work. And so it's important to accept the idea that you
want to learn from a failure. It's not that you want to fail
but if you're going to fail you want to fail quickly and figure
out why and try to be successful the next time.
I'll give you another scientific example. Newton's model of
the universe was very successful except there were certain
anomalies that it didn't explain. And it was the failure to
explain that led Einstein to come up with a very alternative
model. And, of course without repeating the rest of history,
the quantum theory guys demonstrated that some of Einstein's
theories didn't work under certain conditions. And again, the
failure of the theory has led to and forced development of
better theories.
And to give you another concrete, from my own personal
experience, the first design of the Internet didn't work right.
The second design didn't either. The third design didn't
either. And the only way to find that out was to implement it
and see what went wrong. It's not that we thought that we were
doing it wrong we thought we were----
The Chairman. It was as if it were the answer. You'd
arrived at the answer.
Dr. Cerf. I'm sorry?
The Chairman. To implement it because in order to have it a
failure you had to assume that it was going to work so that it
could fail.
Dr. Cerf. Yes, but we didn't deliberately set about
designing something that we knew wasn't going to work. Yes, we
weren't that stupid. But we were stupid enough to try out
something we thought would work and it didn't. And what was
important is that we discovered very quickly that something
didn't work, we discovered why it didn't work. We reiterated
four times. The version of the Internet you're using today went
through four cycles of that and I've been through exactly that
same scenario with an interplanetary extension of the Internet.
We went through multiple cycles of trying to design until we
found something that worked right.
I think in the business world it's the same thing, except
not all businesses either feel the freedom to allow people to
try something ambitious that might not work. And at Google, I
must tell you, the top of the company insists that we shoot for
the moon, literally. We have an organization called Google X.
It's the one that does the self-driving cars. It's the one that
does Google Glass. It's the one that just invented a contact
lens that measures the level of glucose in the tears of your
eyes, calculates what the blood level of glucose would be and
therefore would allow a diabetic--this is not operational yet--
not to have to prick his fingers four or five times a day to
figure out what kind of insulin should be taken.
These are moon shot things. And the company allows our
engineers to try them out. Not every company, I think, feels
the same level of willingness to do that. And so it's very
possible that, for some other companies, this R&D credit that
you were asking Dr. Lane about, might have an influence on
their decisions. I'm lucky to work at a company that insists
that we try things out even if we're not sure they're going to
work.
Dr. Lane. Mr. Chairman, could I add a comment; just a brief
comment?
The Chairman. Yes.
Dr. Lane. In a way, research is mainly about failure. I
mean, the research projects I know about, either my own
institution or the ones we funded, the researcher fails again
and again. And you try this. It doesn't work. You try this. It
doesn't work. You learn from it to try something else that
doesn't work. You don't publish all the failures but that's
what occurring day-by-day.
Dr. Cerf. And maybe we should.
Dr. Lane. Maybe we should, but most of the time in the
laboratory you're failing and learning and failing again and
learning. That is the nature of research and that's a reason
why whoever funds that research has got to have the patience to
understand that process and be willing to live with it.
Otherwise, we're not going to get it done.
The Chairman. And the continuity of funding.
Dr. Lane. Right.
Dr. Fienberg. I----
The Chairman. Please.
Dr. Fienberg. If I would be allowed, I could give a very
different personal answer. When I was a graduate student, my
advisor and a group of others at the National Academies were
trying to answer a very vexing question about whether an
anesthetic called halothane caused people to die when they had
operations on their kidneys. And a number of deaths had
occurred and nobody could understand whether or not this
anesthetic was the cause.
We set about to develop new statistical models to address
that problem. The data were manifold; people could not fit the
data into the computers at the time. So everybody had to invent
work-arounds and people proposed the theories, statistical
theory for doing that that was now quite correct. After that
report was published, I worked on that problem for 4 years and
I published three papers and still didn't get the theory
correct.
A decade later, with funding from ONR, from DOD, I worked
on it again with the collaborators and we got really close. We
had a manuscript of 200 pages, except there was a hole in the
theorem and we never published it. And two decades went by
again and, with NSF funding, one of my Ph.D. students took new
mathematical tools, proved the theorem and those ideas turned
out to be exactly what my friend and former colleague who was
running Google Pittsburgh was using in his research on
advertising for Google. And that was a 40-year legacy of
efforts and, ultimately, we just published the results 3 years
ago.
The Chairman. Thank you, sir.
Senator Markey.
STATEMENT OF HON. EDWARD MARKEY,
U.S. SENATOR FROM MASSACHUSETTS
Senator Markey. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, very much and
thank you for having this extremely important hearing.
Research and development science is critical to our
economic growth, critical to keeping our lead in the world.
We're looking over our shoulder at number two, three and four.
We are winning Nobel Prizes this year because of an investment
30 or 40 years ago in young scientist, young technologists.
Whether or not we are going to be successful 30 and 40 years
from now and winning Nobel Prizes against China and India is
going to be determined by the vision that this generation has.
The last generation had one. Will this one? And will it
ultimately be at the same level of results of fruit that the
last generation is able to enjoy looking at the
disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes in science that we win
today?
So, Dr. Cerf, I just want to go back in time if I can.
We've known each other for a long, long time. If you could take
us back in time: It's 1966 and the Federal Government goes to
AT&T and says ``We'd like you to design a packet-switched
network.''
And AT&T says, ``No, no, no. No, thank you. We already have
a monopoly. We have the long lines going across America, we
don't have time.''
Then they went to IBM and said, ``We'd like you to develop
a packet-switched network.''
And they say, ``No, we don't want to do that.''
And so, they go to a little company, Bolt, Beranek and
Newman, up in Cambridge and they get the contract to design
this packet-switched network. And then you and Bob Kahn and a
whole bunch of other people, you know, playing off this Federal
funding that's coming in. You kind of invent something here
that's new and cool and it's not just applicable to defense but
for the private sector as well.
Talk about a little bit of the role that the Federal
Government played in having the vision not to invent it but to
invest in the people and the science and the research that
could invent it.
Dr. Cerf. But, you know, in all fairness, the then Director
of the Information Processing Techniques Office, Licklider, was
in fact one of the creators of the concept. You will recall a
very famous note that he sent around in 1965 to his colleagues
to talk to them about his idea for an intergalactic network.
And of course, he was just tongue and cheek, but he had the
belief that computers could be used for more than just
computation, that they could be used for dealing with non-
numeric problems and could be used in command and control. And
that was what drove the early ARPA initiative in the use of
computing.
Second thing is that, in the run-up to the ARPANET, Larry
Roberts was brought down from Lincoln Laboratory to ARPA. ARPA
had been funding something like a dozen universities to do
research in computer science and artificial intelligence. And
every year each of those universities asked ARPA for the latest
computing equipment because, after all, you can't do world-
class computing without a world-class computer. And even ARPA
couldn't afford every year to buy another world-class computer
for every one of these research institutions. And so, Larry
Roberts said, ``We're going to build a network and you're going
to share.'' Everybody hated the idea and he said ``We're
building the network anyway.''
So that first network, the ARPANET, was a resource sharing
network and it was driven by the government guys.
Senator Markey. Yes.
Dr. Cerf. So the bottom-line on all this is that ARPA and
the Department of Energy and NASA and the National Science
Foundation, together, have funded network research for almost
40 years.
Senator Markey. So the bottom-line is no Federal
Government, no funding----
Dr. Cerf. None of this would have happened.
Senator Markey. No Bolt, Beranek and Newman. No invention
of ARPANET. No Google. No Hulu. No YouTube.
Dr. Cerf. No Yahoo!. No nothing.
Senator Markey. So just to say the words. I just want to
say the words; okay?
And even today, what new things are coming to Google as
possibilities because of that investment? Because of what is
being done by the Federal Government?
Dr. Cerf. So I think that the two most important things
that I see at Google right now, apart from the really crazy
stuff like the autonomous vehicles and the balloons that are
floating at 60,000 feet delivering Wi-Fi services and the lens
that I just mentioned earlier, those are our kind of moon-shot
programs. But Google is all about organizing information.
That's what our motto says: ``Organize the world's information
and make it accessible and useful.'' The idea that people want
to share what they know with everyone else is the avalanche
that happened when the World Wide Web struck in 1993. And
Google is taking advantage of that ability to find and share
information, help people discover information.
The second thing that's going on is the Internet of things
is upon us, and Google just made an investment in a company
called NEST; its early foray into that. The idea of having
ordinary equipment being able to communicate with each other,
with us and to aggregate that information to create Smart Homes
and Smart Offices, Smart Cars and Smart Cities, and maybe
someday Smart Continents. That's what I see the future is about
because it's about getting the information and being able to do
something useful with it.
Mr. Fienberg is going to be important to that, and his
colleagues and his students, because analyzing this
statistically will turn out to produce some very, very deep
insights that you couldn't get if you couldn't manage all that
information.
Senator Markey. I'm presiding over the Senate in 14 minutes
so I have to run out, but I would just like to say that I said
BBN, Bolt, Beranek and Newman, got the contract to do it and
then everything flowed out of that but Leo Beranek, who is the
owner, he eventually was the head of Channel 5, the ABC
affiliate up in Boston. He was the Chairman of that Board.
So in the late 1970s he would sit there with me and he
would just explain how these lines on a TV screen are just
information and how eventually it was just going to be all
digital and the screen would actually have data as well as a
picture and a voice and how it was all going to evolve very
rapidly, this guy who got the contract from ARPANET to build,
you know. And so, he would explain it to me in the late 1970s,
I would try to explain it to other people who, I was a Member
of Congress, but the Committee up in the House wasn't yet ready
for this level of, you know, it was still a far off event. But
he always kept coming back to first you had to break up AT&T
who didn't want the contract in 1965.
He would keep coming back to the central point that,
unfortunately, there were many Nobel Prizes being won but it
was off of basic research, none of it for applied; OK? If you
got to get it out of the laboratories, get it out there and
then the young people will take over.
And I will just say one final thing, because I do have to
run. And that's to you, Dr. Lane. One of the most incredible
moments that you have as a boy whose father is a milk man is
you're a Cub Scout and Mrs. Carrie used to put the ten of us in
a little van, you know, and take us around to see interesting
things that we otherwise see from our neighborhood. And when we
were ten, we went to the Museum of Science in Cambridge, you
know? And the National Academy of Arts and Science is up there
in Cambridge.
And thank you so much for all of your leadership, Dr. Lane.
We really appreciate it.
But, as we were taken through that Museum of Science, it
was eye-opening to us; huh? And we were the Catholic boys, you
know, from Malden. It turns out is that it wasn't just the
Catholic boys, but the Protestant, the Jewish, the Hindu, the
Muslim, the Jain; everyone was put on a bus and taken there
when they were 10 years old, 11 years old because, regardless
of the religion, science was in answer to our prayers. It could
solve problems.
And so, scientific education is just so important and it's
just something that we have to continue to invest in and
revere. And I just want to thank you, Dr. Fienberg, Dr. Lane,
Ms. DiChristina and you, Vint. Thank you all so much for all of
your great work. Thanks.
The Chairman. Now you're not signing off are you?
Senator Markey. I'm presiding. I have to run.
The Chairman. Well just let the Senate idle.
[Laughter.]
The Chairman. You're more important here. You're just going
to sit there presiding over people who aren't talking.
[Laughter.]
Senator Markey. Thank you.
The Chairman. OK. Thank you, Senator Markey.
We have the Commerce Committee and remember, again, going
back to Chuck Vest. He would come down and there would be about
four or five of us sitting around and he would just go into a
hardcore get-with-it on science. I mean this; I'm talking 10,
12, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. And he'd just do it and he
would do it because he was determined to try and make the
Commerce Committee more receptive to the things that he knew
were important. And what's happened now, interesting, is that
we have like Ed Markey and Richard Blumenthal and others that
are extraordinarily adept, good thinkers on the Commerce
Committee. But we're caught in a time when the Congress doesn't
want to do anything. So it makes it kind of difficult.
Now I want to ask a question to you, Dr. Cerf, and then I
want ask a question to you, Ms. DiChristina.
Dr. Cerf, a few years ago you testified before this
committee about the importance of the standards, TCP/IP,
standards that you helped develop for the Internet. They're
open. They're public standards that are available to anybody.
Nobody has to ask permission to pay a royalty to use these
standards. For example, Google didn't have to get permission
for an Internet gatekeeper before it launched its search engine
back in 1998 because it was all there. So these open standards
have been one of the secrets to the success of the Internet; I
would judge you agree. Isn't it true that because the United
States led the effort to develop the Internet, we were able to
prevail in the debate over open versus closed standards?
And second, I know you think a lot about this issue and I
appreciate your roles in outside advisory to NIST. If the U.S.
loses its role as a technology leader, won't we also lose our
leadership role in developing standards that encourage openness
and economic growth?
Dr. Cerf. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Those are both
really important questions.
First observation I would make about standards is that they
are a substitute for an endless amount of negotiation. When you
agree on a standard, especially if it's a global and
international one, and everyone chooses to adopt the standard,
what it means, in my case and in the case of TCP/IP, is that
two completely independent parties who never, ever met, never
had a discussion or a debate, if they build their equipment to
meet those standards, they will interoperate. That's why when
you plug your computer into the Internet you can talk to 3
billion other devices anywhere on the Internet because they all
observe, voluntarily, the same set of standards.
So it's a tremendous platform for innovation and creation
and competition. Some people will tell you, ``Oh, standards
stifle innovation.'' Wrong. Standards create an environment in
which lots of competition and lots of innovation are possible
when you build on top of those standards. So that's the first
point.
I'm sorry, but I forgot what the second question was. Help?
The Chairman. It has to do with your working with NIST.
Dr. Cerf. Oh, with NIST. OK.
So the question there is what happens if we don't adopt and
use these standards. NIST is one of the key players in
standards-making for the Federal Government, and one thing
that's very clear is that industry benefits enormously from
having those standards around for exactly the same reason. And
if we lose the leadership in the creation of those standards,
then we will lose some of the momentum that the U.S. has been
able to use to propel our industry. This doesn't mean, by the
way, that we can't adopt and use other people's standards
because we use international standards from other organizations
like the International Standards Organization or the
International Telecommunication Union. We participate in the
creation of those standards but it's the ability to adopt and
use them quickly and effectively that's the most important
thing. NIST has helped with that and especially for the
Government enterprise and for the private sector.
The Chairman. You know it's interesting because NIST has
become, wrongly, very controversial in the whole question of
trying to pass the cybersecurity bill. Olympia Snowe, since
departed unfortunately, not from life but from this Senate, and
I put out a cybersecurity bill 4 years ago, which seems like 30
years ago to me. And what was key to that was that NIST was
deemed to be that organization which could bring private
industry and the public sector together to figure out what were
the basic standards that had to be met in order for somebody
to, let's say, get liability protection as they try to protect
themselves against hacking. And it became very controversial
because part of the Senate said, ``No, we don't want to have
NIST making judgments. We can't have the government making
judgment about what level of standards.''
But on the other hand, if you don't have a level of
standards in cybersecurity then, since it's all voluntary
anyway, you end up with nothing.
Dr. Cerf. Is there a question in there?
The Chairman. No.
[Laughter.]
Dr. Cerf. First of all, NIST is one of the few bodies in
the Government which regularly interacts with, has convening
power for bringing the private sector and Government agencies
together. And I think, as the former Chairman of the visiting
committee on advanced technology, that NIST does this extremely
well.
I think your point should be very well taken. That if we
have no standards for security or safety, then how does anyone
even judge how well these systems are protected. The problem is
very hard. Protecting against attacks in the cyberspace is very
difficult for the very simple reason that software has bugs.
And I'm embarrassed to tell you that, as a former programmer
and as a current user, we don't know how to write software that
has no bugs. But we could certainly do better than we do now.
And that's why we need at least standards that could be
voluntarily adopted.
So I hope that you will continue in your effort.
The Chairman. Oh, I will.
I mean I just think, without sort of a common accepted
standard that protecting yourself against cybersecurity doesn't
have any meaning. And particularly in a body like the Congress
where liability protection becomes such an enormous--we had to
go through this on FISA. We had to give Verizon and AT&T
protection on FISA because we were using their servers all over
the world and they were getting massive, you know, claims made
against them; suits brought in front of them because they were
so doing. But they were so doing at our direction, the
government's direction. So everything rolls around liability
protection.
Dr. Cerf. One of the biggest problems, I think, anyone
would have including NIST is figuring out how to measure how
secure or how well secured something is. And I think this is
still the subject of considerable amount of research. And the
reason for this, quite frankly, is it's made out of software,
and software is really tricky complicated stuff. But that
shouldn't stop us from at least trying hard to figure out ways
to evaluate the security and safety of software.
And I think, Professor Fienberg, this might be yet another
problem to land in the lap of the statisticians among others.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Now, Dr. DiChristina, I just came from what is almost my
favorite meeting of the year, which is the National Youth
Science Camp which is located actually in West Virginia, eight
miles from my farm. And within the protection of the radio
astronomy collection of operations out there which you can't
even run a car through that eight mile radius; that 10 mile
radius. I mean it's so protected.
So it's a wonderful experience for them. They come from all
over the country and they spend 2 weeks there. And they get
pounded on STEM. Now I just came from, you know, 100 of these
folks, all young. Almost all of whom have decided what they
were going to do in life. The two from West Virginia: one had
decided they wanted to be a molecular biologist and announced
that to me; and the other said that she was going to be a
surgeon. Well, they're still in school; OK? And there's a lot
that happens between what you want to do and then what you get
to do.
So Dr. DiChristina, if we accept as a matter of public
policy that STEM, which now, you know, has good bipartisan
momentum and a lot of money, in the training of teachers, in
the picking out of course, and in the influencing of students
to stick to the training of STEM before they decide what they
want to do--and I'm making the judgment, perhaps wrong, that
when young people, somebody 17 years old, says ``I want to be a
molecular biologist.''
I say, ``You don't have any idea what you want to be yet.
Get out in the world. Get outside of your comfort zone. Go join
the Peace Corps.'' You know? ``Go to some other country. Join
VISTA. Do something, anything, to take you out of your pattern
of self-perceived progression in life.''
You've got the magazine. How do we encourage young people
to stay loyal to STEM, frankly, not just for their own purposes
but, frankly, for us being able to develop and keep the funding
that's necessary?
Ms. DiChristina. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. I'm asking you to be A propagandist, which is
not fair.
[Laughter.]
Ms. DiChristina. Fortunately for me, it turns out to be a
suitable role, I think. You've asked me a lovely question.
Thanks very much.
And one that has both a simple and complicated answer to
it. It lets me to circle back a bit to the conversation we were
having earlier too; about failure and getting through a failure
and succeeding, which is part of it as well. In fact, one thing
I sometimes--when I'm in a kidding mood and people ask me, you
know, ``How did you get to be what you're doing?''
I tell them that I am, in many ways, a failed scientist. So
when you think about, you know, if you'd asked me when I was
younger, I was definitely going to be a scientist. I took all
the classes in eighth grade. I was an ``Alchemist,'' which was
an after-school club, just so I could hang around and clean the
test tubes and be longer around science.
And, I think, for many people and many young people
especially, as Vint mentioned just a little while ago, you
know, we've been called ``born scientists.'' In fact, there's
quite a body of research around that. Alison Gopnik and others
have written about how it's innate to humanity to be curious,
to ask questions, and you don't have to believe me. You can
look at any young child in a highchair, dropping things off the
side that weigh different amounts to see how they'll fall. That
is a baby scientist.
But the problem for many of us is that, as we get older,
we're not able to keep touch. And you already, Mr. Chairman,
pointed that out. How can we keep them down the track so their
minds are open and they're looking at things? And we thought a
lot about that at Scientific American, of course, which is why
we try to keep the doors open to inviting them in. And it's
something that I recommend, indeed, to anybody who is trying to
engage children. It's not just when they are very young, which
is, in some cases, we do a pretty good job at. And Scientific
American has a series of activities called ``Bring Science
Home,'' just to let parents and kids play with science.
But for many of us, as we get older, science becomes a
place we haven't been. Maybe fewer than 20 percent of the
American public has even ever met a scientist. In this I feel
very wealthy because I've met many. But for many people,
science is--well, let me put it this way. If you go to a new
country, aren't you always more interested in that country
after you've been there?
And science is a new country for many people. So the way to
keep them engaged is to give them contact points. We've talked
about a few of them. We talked about the Maker Movement. We've
talked about citizen science and creating those open doors.
These work all the way through the chain from when we're very
young to when we're in middle school which, frankly, we lose a
lot of people; in middle school which is why Scientific
American has a matching service that gets scientists from every
state in the union as volunteers into classrooms. It's on our
website and it's for free. And then right up on through to when
they're members of the American public and they can appreciate,
by contacting science directly themselves, how it can help both
inspire them and move the economy and our well-being through
the future.
So how we do that? We keep the doors open. We keep them
open in all the ways we can and it's, as usual, a wide set of
arrays which gives us a lot of options because that gives us
choices. You might like to do it online; I might like to go to
a dig.
At the U.S.A. Science and Engineering Festival held here,
in Washington, D.C. in April, 200,000 young people and families
came through just to be close to science. At our booth, we let
them actually handle media from fossil eras from 5 million
years old. And we had discoveries that will be published right
out of that booth made by children. That's the way to keep in
contact with science; is do it directly.
Thanks very much.
The Chairman. No, thank you.
Let me just close with, you know, America is in some
distress just now and we're going through problems of
immigration and can we govern ourselves and why is it that
we're sort of setting about to destroy the instruments of
government, such as NIST and other things, through non-funding.
It's interesting. Sometimes you have discussions now, and we do
aviation on this committee. And the FAA really hasn't had any
boost in funding for years, but they don't complain because
they're not getting cut as much. But, if they have the same as
they had the previous year, they've been cut. People just come
to sort of accept that and that's a very bad point-of-view.
So let me ask you about the younger generation. I just did,
intuitively--I mean, I was on cloud nine talking to that group.
They were so bright. They were so good. They are from all over
the world, but they represented, you know, two from each state.
Then every time I've been there, which has been 8 or 9 years
because West Virginia kind of does that, they're always the
same.
So my question to you is: has there been, in this buffeting
of the economics of progressing in life and surviving in life
and paying off college this and graduate school that, has there
been in your judgment a diminution in the number of young
people and their interest in science and, more importantly,
their commitment to actually do something about that interest?
Ms. DiChristina. Thank you, again, for another lovely
question.
So here I think this is a very important one, and I think
that we are, of course, at risk if we don't choose the right
policies to enable the students to keep that exploration that
we were just talking about. But they do come in with that
enthusiasm. They do start with it. At least some data evidence
is helpful in this instance. We can see how they're reacting
thanks to digital platforms, such as the ones that Vint, here,
and others have been speaking about.
Google has something called a ``Google Science Fair,''
which is a global competition. And every year it's got
thousands and thousands of more students applying for it.
What's different from that competition compared with the
activity that you talked about which is one in person, which is
wonderful and there should never be a substitute for being in-
person with people. But thanks to the digital platforms that
have been developed, thanks to Federal research over time, and
vast collaborative networks, we can now enable students to
participate in science and research at a greater level through
those networks as well. It's another way for us to invite them
in.
And through the Google Science Fair, these students can be
anywhere around the world participating. In fact, Scientific
American gives a special award called ``Science and Action''
which was first won by a pair of students in Swaziland who came
up with a better way to feed their community.
So the digital platforms give us yet another way. There are
lots of other ways we could talk about, but I think that we
have to keep an eye on those filters; we have to keep them open
so that we're not discouraging the students from continuing on.
Thank you.
The Chairman. I was really disheartened yesterday to read
in The Washington Post, and that doesn't make it correct, that
applications for the Peace Corps are down for the first time.
And I'm trying my best not to make that into some kind of a
broader pattern but just a temporary something or other.
Yes, sir.
Dr. Cerf. May I?
One thing that occurs to me, Senator Rockefeller, is that I
wonder whether the drumbeat of reports of turmoil around the
world----
The Chairman. Would have----
Dr. Cerf.--are causing some students to decide maybe it
isn't safe to go and serve in that way.
But if I could pick up something that Ms. DiChristina
mentioned, there has been something that's happened in the last
four or 5 years that I believe is really going to be
transformational for young people's interest in science and
engineering. And the answer is these 3D printers, and it sounds
like a trivial statement but let me tell you that when you can
end up with a concrete thing that you did as opposed to a kind
of ephemeral piece of software that got written in a program
that ran, the concreteness of what comes out of the 3D printing
program is something that solidifies people's interest in
science and engineering. I made this, and I think that we are
going to see a renaissance of excitement in science and
technology as a result of that invention.
The Chairman. Yes, sir.
Dr. Lane. Senator, may I add a comment? This is another
area where immigration is so important----
The Chairman. Yes.
Dr. Lane.--to our country.
In addition to the point you made about the contribution
that had been made by generations of people coming here from
all over the world for their education and starting companies
and becoming a part of our society; their children go to our
schools; they bring values from countries that, for whatever
reasons, tend to consider science, engineering, and technology
a higher priority somehow than America has been doing in recent
decades.
Peer example is very important to young people and I
think--I have grandchildren in schools with second-generation
kids from all over the world. Kids who assume that it's very
important for them to understand STEM subjects and the careers
in STEM really are exciting careers to think about. This rubs
off. I think it influences other young people and reinforces
those who are already interested in science. But also, I think,
it shows to a larger number of young people how important
science, engineering, technology and mathematics really is.
So I think it's another side of immigration that this
country has profited from over the years.
The Chairman. And also, maybe, just a touch of disgust on
the part of younger people; of how my generation and younger-
than-me generations have not done things adequately for their
futures and, hence, the move toward more people becoming
independents as opposed to Republicans or Democrats. In other
words, that could be the surging of young people who, by
definition, I think are always sort of created to be energetic
and idealistic unless they're suppressed somehow. That may be
what you're saying is absolutely right. And let's just assume
that it is and we'll use that high note to end what has been an
excellent hearing.
I apologize for being greedy and keeping you here but I've
been looking forward to this for a long time to get such top
people, virtually, alone and----
[Laughter.]
The Chairman.--be able to get answers. And there's a young
woman named Ann Zulkolsky behind me who is even happier than I
am about all of this.
So thank you for your time. I have absolutely no idea what
time it is.
[Laughter.]
The Chairman. Or planes that you have to catch, but I don't
care. You were here.
Hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 5:20 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
Emerging Technology Consortium
Washington, DC
Hon. Jay Rockefeller,
Chairman,
U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation,
Washington, DC.
Hon. John Thune,
Ranking Member,
U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation,
Washington, DC.
Dear Chairman Rockefeller and Ranking Member Thune:
The Emerging Technology Consortium--a Non-Profit Economic
Development Corporation--submits the attached article from The Wall
Street Journal for inclusion in the record for the Commerce Committee's
hearing on The Federal Research Portfolio: Capitalizing on the
Investments in R&D held on July 17, 2014.
The Emerging Technology Consortium (ETC) is a non-profit
organization dedicated to using technology and innovation to create
opportunities in all communities--businesses with good paying jobs. The
21st Century global economy is open to companies that produce the right
product and/or service. In America today, this can happen if
Government, at all levels, leads public private partnerships that
create globally competitive businesses. America competes globally when
next generation industries are located in all communities. Leadership
must understand that there is no short cut to creating good paying
jobs; it starts with diversifying and the commercialization of research
that creates next generation industries. Those new companies will be
the educational catalyst because people can see good paying jobs in
their communities. Diversifying participating in innovation ensures
America's competitiveness in the 21st Century global economy.
America's competitiveness is predicated on all American's
regardless of age, gender, race, national origin or religion,
participating in research and commercialization activities. Noted
scholars and university administrator are calling for a re-examine the
grant review process as part of recalibrating our research policies.
Thank you for your consideration of this request.
Darold Hamlin,
President and Executive Director,
Emerging Technology Consortium.
Attachment: Article Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2014 OPINION, ``How
to Reverse the Graying of Scientific Research'' by Ronald J. Daniels
and Paul Rothman
Attachment
Source:
http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/
SB10001424052702304026804579411293375850348
OPINION
How to Reverse the Graying of Scientific Research
Dramatically fewer grants are going to young scientists. That's a cause
for alarm.
By Ronald J. Daniels and Paul Rothman--March 4, 2014 7:08 p.m. ET
Youth will be served, as the saying goes, but increasingly that's
not the case in scientific research. The National Institutes of Health
reports that between 1980 and 2012, the share of all research funding
going to scientists under age 35 declined to 1.3 percent, from 5.6
percent. During the same period, the number of NIH awards going to
scientists age 35 and under declined more than 40 percent, even as the
total number of awards more than doubled.
The numbers are similarly unsettling for the NIH's premier research
grant, called the R01, a highly competitive, peer-reviewed grant that
supports independent, investigator-driven science. From 1983 to 2010,
the percentage of R01 investigators under age 36 declined to 3 percent
from 18 percent. Principal investigators who were age 65 or older
received more than twice as many R01 grants in 2010 as those 36 and
under--a reversal from 15 years earlier. The average age at which
investigators with a medical degree received their first R01 grant rose
to 45 in 2011, from 38 in 1980.
Considering that many of the most significant scientific
breakthroughs were made by the 36-and-younger set--from Albert Einstein
developing his special theory of relativity at 26 to James Watson at 25
and Francis Crick at 36 discovering the DNA double helix--we deprive
young scientists of funding at our peril.
The reason fewer young scientists are receiving R01 grants from the
NIH is not, as some observers surmise, because the researchers are
securing alternative grants tailored to young investigators.
So what explains the tilt away from them? There are the long years
spent in doctoral and postdoctoral programs or the technical
requirements of the grant application. Or there is the length of the
review process itself, as a closed system that disfavors the daring
idea or the lesser-known applicant. This tendency is only more
pronounced in an age of strained Federal research funding: With a
smaller pot of money to dispense, there is even less incentive to
support the risky proposal or the new scientist.
Our most promising young minds find it more difficult than ever to
ignite their own research. More young scientists are leaving
laboratories for careers in industry. Some 18 percent of young
scientists are considering leaving the country for positions abroad,
where research funding is on the rise, according to a 2013 study by the
American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
The NIH has not sat idly by. The agency has launched special award
programs for investigators within several years of earning an M.D. or
Ph.D. It also has created a ``new innovator award'' for investigators
with unusually creative research ideas, and designed special rules to
direct more R01 funding to early career investigators. But none of the
initiatives in place has succeeded in reversing the trend toward
reduced funding for young scientists.
Many young scientists are not ready to lead a lab, and experienced
investigators advance innovative research on a daily basis. And at
least one recent study suggests that as the realm of knowledge has
expanded, the age at which researchers can produce innovative science
is inching ever upward.
Nevertheless, history has shown that it is often the youngest
scientists who defy orthodoxy and shatter paradigms. We must
recalibrate our research policies to fuel the promise of the most
talented individuals of all ages, with solutions on three fronts: re-
investment, re-examination and re-imagination.
First, we must restore the national commitment to funding
scientific research. Over the past 10 years, the NIH has absorbed cuts
in purchasing power in excess of 20 percent, and this overriding trend
is the greatest threat to nascent scientists. As these funds are
restored to the agency, a substantial portion should be invested in
awards tailored to young scientists.
Second, we must re-examine the grant review process. The U.S. was
the birthplace of peer review for research grants, and others adopted
it to remarkable effect globally. This country should now lead in
diversifying the pool of reviewers and, by this and other mechanisms,
reduce the advantage of experience.
Third, and more ambitiously, we should re-imagine the NIH grant to
alleviate the pressures that currently steer R01 funding away from
young scientists. We could increase the availability of grants
designated for young investigators, create a funding stream for smaller
demonstration projects that allow new scientists to obtain preliminary
data for an ensuing application, or fund a capstone award for
experienced scientists to complete their lines of study and preserve
the legacy of their work.
Other countries, including South Korea, Sweden and Israel, are
pulling ahead of the U.S. in research and development investment as a
percentage of GDP. These same countries are surpassing us in particular
in their commitment to the next generation of scientists. China
recently issued a strategic plan to build its science and technology
workforce by cultivating 3,000 of the most talented young scientists
over the next 10 years.
We will put our Nation at risk if we fail to make a comparable
commitment. If we miss out on investing in the next generation of
scientists, we will miss out on their discoveries as well--and the
benefits we all reap in improved drugs, technologies and jobs.
Mr. Daniels is President of Johns Hopkins University. Mr. Rothman is
CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine and dean of Johns Hopkins School of
Medicine.
______
Response to Written Questions Submitted by Hon. Amy Klobuchar to
Dr. Vinton G. Cerf
Question 1. Investment in computer science education is essential
if we want to maintain and grow the STEM workforce in the United
States. That's why I introduced the Innovate America Act with Senator
Hoeven, which would expand STEM education opportunities to kids across
the country by increasing the number of STEM secondary schools in the
United States and boosting computer science investments. Do you believe
that increasing the number of STEM schools would increase the retention
of students pursuing a college degree in the STEM fields?
Answer. It is not clear to me that increasing the number of STEM
schools would be as effective as ensuring STEM teachers at existing
schools have the qualifications and resources they need. The most
effective path forward is to ensure we have teachers with serious
college credentials in the sciences and other STEM disciplines who can
convey the excitement and substance of science and technology. That
means increasing incentives for teachers, providing for suitable
facilities for teaching--including laboratory equipment--and investing
in Internet-based resources--such as Massive, Online, Open Courses
(MOOCs)--that could be integrated into the school curriculum. MOOCs
have the potential to allow students to learn at their own pace,
reviewing lecture material as needed. They enable classrooms to become
places where problems are solved, techniques are discovered, and
collaborative science is conducted.
Question 2. Do you believe we have a sufficient amount of computer
science education in our elementary and high schools? What can be done
to improve computer science education?
Answer. No, I do not. I think we should make exposure to
programming a required course, or at least a course that can satisfy
science curriculum requirements. There are two reasons for this view:
(1) Learning to program teaches a certain kind of analytical
discipline, by building valuable skills such as dividing
problems up into solvable components, understanding how to
integrate the ensemble of software into a solution, and finding
and fixing errors (bugs), among others.
(2) We are currently surrounded by software, and it will only be
more so as the ``Internet of Things'' continues to expand.
Smart cars, homes, cities, and nations will become a common
part of our socio-economic landscape. It is important to
prepare students to understand the power and the potential of
computer-based systems while also providing them with a clear
appreciation for the hazards they may pose. That includes
understanding the opportunities and risks of online
environments.
The Association for Computing Machinery (www.acm.org/education) and
the Computer Science Teachers of America (http://blog.acm.org/archives/
csta/2014/08/) are strong advocates of increasing the visibility and
validity of computer science as a standard part of the STEM curriculum,
not just an optional elective.
Regarding improvement of computer science education, I refer to the
first question and my response. The key is to form teachers with much
better preparation to help students learn about computing and to
encourage participation in extra-curricular activities, such as the
Maker Movement and robotics contests. (A good example is FIRST, For
Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, founded by
inventor Dean Kamen and accessible at www.usfirst.org,). Bringing
working scientists into the classroom or making them available online
can also help. I find TED talks enormously stimulating--some of them
make me want to go back to school!
______
Response to Written Question Submitted by Hon. John D. Rockefeller IV
to Dr. Neal Lane
Question. Peer review directs our research dollars to the projects
that experts in the field think have the most potential. It promotes
competition and protects the scientific process from political
pressures. Can you explain why it is so important to give our expert
science agencies like DARPA, NSF, and NIST the ability to fund research
based on the merits of the research, and not on a political agenda?
Answer. Peer review, as it is used here, refers to the process
whereby the scientific and technical merit of a grant application is
evaluated. This task is carried out by scientific ``peers''-scientists
who have expertise in a relevant discipline and specific area of
research. Scientific expertise is crucial for understanding both the
principals of the research proposal and its potential to advance a
scientific field, wherein lies the true value of basic research.
Breakthrough achievements in basic research have led to some of the
greatest technological advancements, and were often pursued with no
clear application in mind.
For example, the genomics revolution and the Human Genome Project
were unleashed by the study of a thermophilic (heat tolerant) bacterium
from Yellowstone national park. An important treatment for diabetes,
the drug exenatide, grew out of early investigations into Gila Monster
venom. Neither of these important applications could have been
predicted. To address the high demand for kidneys and the challenge of
finding a donor, economists developed algorithms to match biologically
compatible donors to patients. And let us not forget the laser, which
would not exist today without fundamental experiments aimed at
generating a controlled, extended stream of microwaves through contact
with a molecule in an excited state, a project that might have been
considered frivolous at the time.
Each of these projects in basic research was funded by the Federal
Government through the process of expert peer review. Were basic
research proposals to be judged based on a political agenda, or even
the expectation that an application would result, the American system
that fuels the best research in the world would be put at risk.
______
Response to Written Questions Submitted by Hon. Amy Klobuchar to
Dr. Neal Lane
Question 1. Investment in computer science education is essential
if we want to maintain and grow the STEM workforce in the United
States. That's why I introduced the Innovate America Act with Senator
Hoeven, which would expand STEM education opportunities to kids across
the country by increasing the number of STEM secondary schools in the
United States and boosting computer science investments. Do you believe
that increasing the number of STEM schools would increase the retention
of students pursuing a college degree in the STEM fields?
Answer. While this question falls outside of my area of expertise,
it would seem reasonable to expect the number of students pursuing a
postsecondary degree in a STEM field to increase with the number of
STEM schools, assuming that these schools are accessible, have
effective teachers and up-to-date curricula, and are able to retain a
high percentage of students from enrollment through degree attainment.
STEM education, including computer skills, is critically important for
developing the competitive workforce that this Nation needs--not only
careers in science and engineering but many other occupations as well,
including medicine, law, and business.
Question 2. Do you believe we have a sufficient amount of computer
science education in our elementary and high schools? What can be done
to improve computer science education?
Answer. This, too, falls outside of my area of expertise. But
computer science is clearly an important part of primary and secondary
education, and a valuable skill in today's job market. Employment in
the computer sciences and math is expected to grow by 18 percent by
2022, and average annual wages (currently at $76,270) are expected to
exceed $100,000.\1\ However, according to a study by the National
Center for Education Statistics, computer science is the only STEM
field that has seen a decrease in student participation over the last
20 years, from 25 percent of high school students to only 19 percent in
2009.\2\ The source of the problem may range from outdated and
unexciting course curricula to limited availability of advanced
classes.\3\ Only 9 percent of schools offered AP computer science last
year, and only 31,117 students took the AP computer science exam,
compared with 282,814 students who took the AP calculus exam and
169,508 students who took the AP statistics exam.\4\ The path to
improving computer science education may begin with addressing these
two shortcomings.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ Emily Richards and David Terkanian, ``Occupational employment
projections to 2022,'' Monthly Labor Review, December 2013.
\2\ National Center for Education Statistics, America's High School
Graduates: Results from the 2009 NAEP High School Transcript Study,
2011.
\3\ Keith Wagstaff, ``Can we Fix Computer Science Education in
America?'', TIME, July 16, 2012, available at http://techland.time.com/
2012/07/16/can-we-fix-computer-science-education-in-america/.
\4\ College Board, ``AP Program Participation and Performance Data
2013,'' 2014, available at http://research.collegeboard.org/programs/
ap/data/participation/2013.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
______
Response to Written Questions Submitted by Hon. Edward Markey to
Dr. Neal Lane
Question 1. Dr. Lane, in your testimony you emphasize the need for
proactive polices that will maximize the benefit of the Federal R&D
investment to the American people. One area you highlight is the need
for a greater government-university-industry partnership. Your
testimony alludes to the U.S. falling behind in this area. Can you
expand on that and give us examples of what other countries are doing
that we could learn from?
Answer. Today, most innovative and successful companies do not
think of innovation as a linear, step-by-step process, moving from
research to invention, then prototype, then product design, then
marketing. Rather, ideas and data flow back and forth between the
different groups involved in turning research into products and
services--industry, universities, and government. In such an innovation
ecosystem, there is an ongoing iterative dialogue between researchers,
developers, and marketing teams. Innovation occurs in a web in which
ideas, data, and people move freely, improving both the quality and
speed of work.
Other nations have launched initiatives that encourage the transfer
of people and ideas across sectors, including Germany (Fraunhofer
Institutes), Taiwan (ITRI; Industrial Technology Research Institute)
and Singapore (A*STAR; Agency for Science, Technology and Research).
The nation that fosters partnerships and cooperation across government,
industry and academia, as well as a balanced portfolio of basic and
applied research will lead the globe in scientific and technological
progress.
Question 2. Dr. Lane, why is it important for NSF and other
agencies to support informal science education (ISE) programs? Can you
provide us with examples of successful ISE programs and recommend ways
Congress can strengthen these efforts supported by government science
agencies?
Answer. Several Federal agencies invest in support of informal
science, technology, engineering and mathematics education (ISE),
including the Smithsonian Institution and NASA. The National Science
Foundation (NSF) invests in a number of informal science education
(ISE) or out-of-the-classroom activities. The primary NSF ISE program,
Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL), seeks to advance new
approaches to and evidence-based understanding of the design and
development of STEM learning in informal environments. This program
supports work in a variety of informal settings and resources such as
broadcast media and film; science centers and museums; zoos and
aquaria; botanical gardens and nature centers; libraries; digital media
and gaming; youth, community, maker, and after-school programs; science
communications; citizen science; and education research and evaluation.
The AISL projects help broaden access to STEM learning experiences and
give participants new opportunities to understand the world around
them. In addition to AISL, NSF funding supports a number of other
programs with ISE components such as Cyberlearning and Future Learning
Technologies; Discovery Research K-12 (DRK-12); and Innovative
Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (I-TEST).
NSF is committed to supporting the research and development of ISE
programs in order to identify and understand the mechanisms that drive
effective outcomes. ISE has the potential to kindle an interest in STEM
and to spark the creativity that leads to both discovery and
innovation. These activities also contribute to a science-literate
citizenry that fosters the basic research critical to building a STEM-
driven economy.
Congress can strengthen ISE by continuing to encourage efforts to
build the body of knowledge around what works, for whom, and under what
conditions for learning in informal settings, and in how such
experiences motivate and engage youth and the public. Increased support
would allow more research and evaluation in order to identify
innovative practices and learning experiences that advance engagement
with and understanding of STEM subjects. Collaborations across agencies
that enable the assets of the science mission agencies, through
partnership with NSF, the Smithsonian, and the U.S. Department of
Education, to be deployed at large scale to reach and inspire many
youth across the Nation should be encouraged. Harnessing the lessons
learned from leading practices creates the potential to expand the
impact of successful programs through the dissemination of key findings
and the scaling of evidence-based models.
______
Response to Written Question Submitted by Hon. John D. Rockefeller IV
to Dr. Stephen Fienberg
Question. Peer review directs our research dollars to the projects
that experts in the field think have the most potential. It promotes
competition and protects the scientific process from political
pressures. Can you explain why it is so important to give our expert
science agencies like DARPA, NSF, and NIST the ability to fund research
based on the merits of the research, and not on a political agenda?
Answer. Policies established through our political process are
important to decide how much Federal funds will be invested in research
and the relative importance of national goals for research investments,
such as health, the economy, the environment, and energy. But those
decisions are very different from identifying quality science and the
scientists where we are most likely to achieve transformative results.
Only peer review by scientists can assess the latter.
Picking specific research projects or even scientific disciplines
to be funded through a political process and favoring them at the
expense of others is a mistake: it could lead to unintended
consequences that actually impede research and stunt innovation.
Scientific discoveries that eventually lead to truly transformative
innovations often depend on high quality research in variety of fields
that could not be predicted in advance.
As we noted in our report, Furthering America's Research
Enterprise, increased benefits of the Federal investment in research
are far more likely to flow by promoting the conditions for the
research enterprise to thrive. The three most impor-
tant conditions are what we call the crucial pillars of the research
enterprise. These are:
(1) a talented and interconnected workforce,
(2) adequate and dependable resources, and
(3) world-class basic research in all major areas of science.
We cannot assure the stock of knowledge from research of world-
class quality through a political process. The best way we have is
through the quality control system of peer-review.
So, for example, the political process may determine the relative
importance of research on developing better batteries. But the real
breakthroughs may come from basic research in chemistry and materials
science, and the statistical design of new experiments for testing, as
well as social science research on the adaptation of new technologies.
______
Response to Written Question Submitted by Hon. Amy Klobuchar to
Dr. Stephen Fienberg
Question. Investment in computer science education is essential if
we want to maintain and grow the STEM workforce in the United States.
That's why I introduced the Innovate America Act with Senator Hoeven,
which would expand STEM education opportunities to kids across the
country by increasing the number of STEM secondary schools in the
United States and boosting computer science investments. Do you believe
that increasing the number of STEM schools would increase the retention
of students pursuing a college degree in the STEM fields? Do you
believe we have a sufficient amount of computer science education in
our elementary and high schools? What can be done to improve computer
science education?
Answer. As important as these questions are, we lack data and
research to provide clear answers. One issue, for example, is how to
disentangle the effects of STEM schools from the students who attend
these schools. Nevertheless, many observers view STEM schools as the
best route to achieve desired STEM outcomes. And we do have knowledge
from research that speaks, albeit indirectly, to the question you raise
about increasing the number of STEM schools. This research is described
in another National Research Council report, Successful K-12 STEM
Education: Identifying Effective Approaches in Science, Technology,
Engineering, and Mathematics. Thus to address aspects of your question
I have relied on input from colleagues at the National Research
Council.
Preliminary research results indicate that the experiences of
students who graduate from selective schools appear to be associated
with their choice to pursue and complete a STEM major. ``Yet,'' as the
report notes, ``there are no systematic data that show whether the
highly capable students who attend those schools would have been just
as likely to pursue a STEM major or related career or make significant
contributions to technology or science if they had attended another
type of school. Furthermore, specialized models of STEM schooling are
difficult to replicate on a larger scale because the context in which a
school is located may facilitate or constrain its success. Specialized
STEM schools often benefit from a high level of resources, a highly
motivated student body, and freedom from state testing requirements.
These conditions would be difficult, if not impossible, to implement
more widely.'' (NRC, 2011, p. 8)
Nevertheless, the report notes from preliminary research that
``students who had research experiences in high school, who undertook
an apprenticed mentorship or internship, and whose teachers connected
the content across different STEM courses were more likely to complete
a STEM major than their peers who did not report these experiences.''
(NRC, 2011, p. 9)
Whether the amount of computer science education in our elementary
and high schools is sufficient is another question for which we need
research. A critical element of such research is the clear definition
of outcomes.
Thus, to truly answer both questions, what we need are data that
track the educational choices and progress of students over time,
including post-secondary outcomes.
Reference
National Research Council (2011). Successful K-12 STEM Education:
Identifying Effective Approaches in Science, Technology, Engineering,
and Mathematics. Committee on Highly Successful Science Programs for K-
12 Science Education. Board on Science Education and Board on Testing
and Assessment, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and
Education. Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press.
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