The Crisis in Research

SINCE World War II, the United States has witnessed an astonishing growth in scientific research and development. Now, with national policy supporting a rapidly growing program in space technology, notably that required for a race to the moon, we see a further buildup of total national effort, especially in development and technology as distinct from basic research and science.

Inherent in this growth of our development commitments is a multitude of problems that call for public understanding and debate. The issues are profoundly important not only to our national security and world position but also to the nation’s general welfare, its economic growth, the utilization of its human resources, and the integrity and strength of its system of higher education. In this article I should like to highlight some of these issues which need more public discussion than they have so far received, giving special attention to the impact of federal funds for research and development, including those allotted to the space race, on the future strength of American industry and our economy.

Let me list some of the salient and striking facts about our current effort:

Our annual rate of expenditure in the United States for scientific research and development is approximately $17 billion — about 3 percent of our gross national product.

There has been more than a threefold increase in annual dollar outlay for research and development in the last decade, and whereas ten years ago the federal government supplied less than half the funds for this effort, today it finances about two thirds of it.

Out of the $12.4 billion the government is spending in the current fiscal year for research and development, about 65 percent will be spent by industry under contract. Private industry itself is expected to finance another $5 billion for research. Three quarters of all research and development in the United States is performed in industrial laboratories.

Obviously, with some two thirds of the country’s research and development effort being paid for by federal funds, and with its great procurement contracts, the government has become directly or indirectly the employer of 60 to 70 percent of the nation’s scientists and engineers.

Dollar expenditure, including public and private, for research and development is rising about 15 percent each year, but our pool of technical manpower is growing only 6 percent a year. With growth in available personnel not keeping pace with the nation’s expanding research expenditures, we may eventually face the possibility of a decline in research productivity and quality of performance. Already the talent squeeze, coupled with the rising cost of instrumentation and other factors, has forced the cost of research to increase by nearly 50 percent since 1954, and this cost will probably double before the end of this decade.

In research that involves the most advanced science and technology — and much of the research financed by the government is of this kind — the demand for top-grade talent educated to the Ph.D. level is far greater than the supply, and the gap seems to be widening.

Projections of research and development outlays to 1970 yield some startling figures. Given present trends, including the very rapid expansion of our space program, total national expenditures for research and development could exceed $40 billion by 1970, with the government’s share of the bill growing greater and industry’s becoming smaller. Some projections (which assume, perhaps wrongly, that a large military space program will inevitably be added to the rapidly growing NASA program) place the government’s own expenditure at this figure or higher by 1970.

THIS basket of facts and future possibilities holds an array of issues that must command the attention of thoughtful people in government, industry, and the universities. Private industry, especially, is confronted with some profoundly difficult questions.

For example, there is a tendency for government funds applied to space and weapons research and development to retard the growth of privately financed industrial research and development. As Dr. Jerome Wiesner commented in recent testimony before a congressional committee, there is danger that this growing federal research will price private research out of existence. The ease of getting military and space contracts may tempt private companies to neglect research financed by themselves and directed at competitive commercial objectives. The high salaries frequently associated with government contracts tend also to draw high-quality talent away from other fields of industrial research.

Because of the kind of large-scale, sophisticated research currently needed by the government, the industrial research it sponsors tends to be concentrated in a small number of companies. In a few industries this concentration may lead to a weakening of the technological capability and the competitive strength of other industries and of small companies at a time when these industries and companies need strengthening if our economy is to grow.

The argument is advanced, especially by protagonists of an expanding man-in-space program, that military and space research have commercial potentialities sufficient to offset these effects and to ensure our continued economic growth. Certainly they have important by-products, especially in furthering the development of advanced technology important to all industry, but I have not yet seen convincing evidence to support the view that our military and space programs can attain their objectives and at the same time feed the civilian economy with enough new technology to warrant any letup in the growth of privately financed research. Industry has a very great responsibility diligently to seek out the by-products of the military-space research and development programs that have commercial application and at the same time to maintain an adequate growth of privately supported research and development oriented toward new products and processes. Industry should not take the easy course and let its own research and development effort become deemphasized by a growing volume of research sponsored by the federal government. This is not unlike the requirement faced by our universities to maintain an adequate level of privately supported basic research, uncommitted to any objective but advancing knowledge.

Despite all the funds we pour into research annually, the percentage of our gross national product that we devote to civilian-commercial research and basic research could be surpassed in the next few years by competing industrial nations, such as Japan and certain members of the European Common Market, which do not have military and space expenditures as heavy as those borne by the United States. Privately financed industrial research has made an immense contribution to our welfare and prosperity in the past, and we depend on it to do so in the future.

If our vast research and development effort in defense and space works, even for the short term, to curtail productivity and economic growth in the United States, the results will damage not only the civilian sector but the space and military sectors as well; our national goals of all kinds, and certainly our defense, depend upon rising productivity and upon our maintaining a sound rate of economic growth. Both depend in part upon the inventiveness and initiative of the civilian sector of our economy and upon an adequate effort in uncommitted basic research, in contrast with applied research and development. While I doubt whether we yet know very much about how economic forces are affected by the distribution of effort between civilian-commercial research and development on the one hand and military-space research on the other, we do hear, increasingly, concern expressed that the growing military and space research programs may be retarding innovation in consumer products and shortchanging the consumer sector of our economy.

This is why some of us feel that we cannot charge ahead with additional space and other large technological government programs without being mindful of the possible adverse effects on our civilian economy and of the importance of weighing them along with the good effects. I note this in full recognition of the economic assistance our expanding space program is providing many industries and communities.

THE way our technical personnel distributes itself and is utilized is more important than the way we allot our research and development dollar, although the two, of course, are linked. While we may not yet face an absolute shortage of technical personnel in the United States, unquestionably we do face an acute shortage of exceptional talent possessing that level of education in science and engineering which enables it to master and use effectively the new and advanced technologies. As I have noted, the impact of government funds has been to draw to government-supported research a high proportion of this up-to-date talent, with the result that industry, in its nonspace and nonmilitary work, has found it increasingly difficult to get enough men to do the high-quality work it requires. The glamour of space research has drawn high-quality industrial personnel away from missile and other weapons programs that militarily are as urgent as ever but now seem relatively old-hat. Indeed, there is an increasing number of informed people who are worried about a possible drop-off in the advances the United States has been making in military technology. The future of the nation requires that we continue to maintain superiority in military technology (including space technology legitimately important to military strength); in the dangerous world in which we live, this goal must have top priority in the use of our scientific and technological resources. One gains the impression that our military research and development, aside from evolutionary improvements in atomic weapons and from advances in space technology in the last five years or so, may have lost innovative vigor. We need to try to understand the influences which may be producing this effect, if indeed it has happened, just as we need to be sensitive to conditions that may be reducing the ingenuity, inventiveness, and advance that have long characterized our nonmilitary, nonspace industrial technology.

These undesirable effects can occur, despite a steadily growing expenditure for research and development, if that expenditure is not carefully managed to encourage innovation and the increase of productivity and if we fail to recognize that fundamental advances in research depend upon brilliant, creative minds and not on numbers or dollars.

Science and technology are both advancing so rapidly, and so much in the direction of greater complexity, that we do not have enough highly educated personnel to carry out well all the tasks we have set for ourselves and at the same time to master and exploit new fields. As we consider further major national programs involving largescale research and development, we must consider our manpower budget as well as our dollar budget most carefully, both in the executive branch and in Congress.

If we are to have the personnel who can master these advanced technologies, we must accept the necessity of doing two things:

First, we must increase the number of scientists and engineers educated by our universities and institutes of technology. We must urgently try to increase the number of young people who are educated to the level of the doctor’s degree or its equivalent in science and related fields. In a recent study (the Gilliland report) issued by the President, his Science Advisory Committee recommends, as a minimum, that the number of doctor’s degrees awarded each year in engineering, mathematics, and the physical sciences combined be increased from the 3000 presently given to 7500 in 1970. Such an unprecedented increase could be achieved only by a large increase in federal aid for financing graduate education.

And, second, we must devise ways to upgrade technical personnel already at work in industry. There are probably several hundred thousand engineers in the United States whose skills are obsolete in terms of the new technologies and the current requirements of science-based industries. We need to find a way, as one of our leading industrialists has already proposed, whereby this great pool of engineers can be afforded an opportunity to develop new competence in depth in mathematics, science, and engineering, so that their usefulness will be enhanced and their obsolescence docked. We thus face the need for one of the largest and most professionally advanced adult-education programs in history, a program which, to be successful, will require participation by the most advanced and science-rich universities and engineering schools. It cannot be a minor effort or handled by amateurs if we are to continue to lead in our industrial technology. A few leading companies and institutions are now experimenting in the development of strong programs.

What Admiral Rickover recently emphasized in speaking of industrial deficiencies in nuclear-reactor technology, informed scientists and engineers have long been pointing out about inadequate industrial mastery of many new and emerging technologies. It is of the utmost importance to our commercial competitive position, as well as to our security and national prestige, that our private industry achieve unmatched competence in putting our advanced technology to work. The universities and institutes of technology share with industry the possibility for achieving this mastery; it requires the finest and most modern education of our talent, along with a quality of management to match the competence of our technology. A number of American companies have a technological competence and brilliance unmatched anywhere else in the world, but we need many more as good as the best we now have.

Fundamental, also, is more efficient utilization of the personnel now in service. This involves many factors, including better management of our government research and development programs and the improvement of contracting procedures, so as to eliminate incentives to waste or misuse manpower. At the request of the President’s Science Advisory Committee and with the endorsement of the President, the National Academy of Sciences has appointed a committee comprising outstanding industrial, educational, and other leaders to undertake what is undoubtedly the first comprehensive review of the utilization of technical manpower in the United States.

The federal government faces a desperate struggle to recruit and hold competent technical supervisory and managerial talent. In fact, it is suffering a dangerous weakening of its management strength largely because its pay scales and personnel policies have not been adequately competitive with those in industry and other private institutions. The recent federal pay increases authorized by Congress are a first step in remedying this weakness.

High competence is required in government if we are to make the enormous research and development contracting system work well, preserving the desirable features of government laboratories, private industry, and nonprofit institutions. We need managers in government, as well as in industry, who are sensitive to the problems of national balance in the research and development effort, who combine a mastery of both technology and management, and who can minimize the pooljudgment that often results in faulty plans and requirements, excessive failures, unnecessary technological complexity, or the launching of projects not practically attainable. The President’s Science Advisory Committee has continually emphasized these requirements and accomplished much in initiating measures to meet them, thus proving itself increasingly helpful to the President and to the strengthening of the government’s resources for planning and managing research.

These matters need increased public attention as we adapt ourselves to the greatest research and development effort in history. We are, in fact, becoming a research-oriented society, a condition that has arrived so fast that, quite understandably, we are encountering growing pains. I do not feel that the present magnitude of our government research effort is too large, even though it may be lacking in balance. I do feel, given present rates of growth, that we face crucial decisions about the future size of the effort, especially the level of our space effort and our capability to carry through present space commitments with success and without unnecessary waste and failures. These decisions must be made with an acute awareness of our manpower resources and of the vital needs of the private, commercial sector of our economy, the engine of our economic growth. Privately financed research, both in industry and in the universities, needs to be steadily increased.

As a research-oriented society, we have the possibility of — in fact, we may now be in the midst of—a great creative thrust in which the energies of our people will find a new measure of release and our power as a nation will be raised to a new level of benignity. This renaissance through research, especially corporate sponsored research, can afford a flowering of individual skills and new avenues of individual fulfillment that will draw out as never before the latent talents and the sense of joyous exploration in increasing numbers of our people. Such is the promise of research if we deploy our funds and creative talent wisely.