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The Threat Of 'Pork-Barrel' Science
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10540 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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1 / 1993 |
3,492 Words |
| Author
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Frederick Seitz
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Ever since World War II, the advance of science in our country has depended increasingly, although not entirely, upon federal subsidies. Thus, in turn, has focused more and more attention on public support for science, particularly during a period of recession when every source of expenditure is being examined.
It must be emphasized at the outset that the days when good scientific results could be obtained with string and sealing wax are gone because scientific research is being extended ever deeper into the natural world. For example, the cost of equipping a reasonably good but not extravagant biochemistry laboratory is in the range of several million dollars. The same it true in the area designated as condensed matter physics.
By contrast, the investment needed to work at the very frontier of a field of "big" science such as high-energy particle physics is now in the billion-dollar range, as is indicated by the cost estimates for the superconducting supercollider being planned for construction in Texas. Similarly, the overall cost of the Hubble space telescope, launched in 1990, was over$1 billion. It is estimated that the cost of the so-called human genome project would be in the range of $3 billion. The annual operating costs for these big science items would also be comparably large, granting that the facilities would be used by many widely distributed groups.
As budgets become tighter, there is an understandable tendency for some of the scientists working at the smaller, or bench scale to complain about the money that flows into so-called big science, as if it were all a diversion from small science. They properly point out that the aggregate results of their own research are of unquestioned value to mankind, since it has led fairly directly to miraculous new tools of medicine and many other benefits to health, as well as to the integrated circuits and other devices that have supported the associated information revolution. They wonder if these obvious benefits arising from their work can indeed be matched by the results obtained from big science.
BIG SCIENCE
Our curiosity concerning the nature of the world about us has known few bounds, being focused at times on the cosmically large and the microscopically small as well as on matters within easy reach of our hands and eyes.
The Greeks, during the great centuries of Athens several
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