This Gifted Age: Science and Technology at the Millennium

Jack Gibbons is surely one of the most thoughtful and literate individuals to have served as presidential science advisor. This Gifted Age is a collection of his speeches and nontechnical writings from 1972 to mid-1995. Arranged in chronological order, they mirror his career, beginning at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a nuclear physicist who turned to research on environmental and energy issues, through thirteen years as director of the congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), to approximately the midpoint of his recently completed term as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Assistant to the President for Science and Technology.

Gibbons was a leader in energy policy research, especially conservation, long before the topic rose to the top of the national agenda in the mid-1970s. He helped initiate and subsequently directed a program of environmental and energy research that transformed Oak Ridge from a nuclear energy lab to one with a much broader scope. He served as director of the U.S. Office of Energy Conservation under President Nixon and directed an environmental research center at the University of Tennessee. His work from those years, together with that of his years at the helm of OTA, provides the materials sampled in part 1 of the book.

Many of the chapters in this part are devoted to energy demand and conservation and related environmental issues. In general, these papers stand well the test of time. The report of the National Research Council’s Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Systems (CONAES), which Gibbons (who chaired the panel) wrote, and which was first published in Science in 1978, is a particularly good example. It helped demolish a number of myths, including the notion that growth in gross national product inevitably implies growth in energy consumption. Other articles in this part deal with broader issues, including population policy, technology and governance (mainly the role of OTA), and the government’s role in the promotion of new technology for industrial competitiveness, as well as education and other social goals.

Most readers, especially those in the fields of science and technology policy and the contemporary history of U.S. science and technology, will probably be more interested in the second part of the book, which covers the first half of Gibbon’s term at OSTP, 1992–95. Reflecting the pace of life in the White House and the scope of issues with which a presidential science advisor must deal, the papers in this section occupy nearly as many pages as the first part of the book, which spans the previous two decades. Topics range from the superconducting supercollider to policy for biotechnology to educational reform, national security, space exploration, the national information infrastructure, and, of course, research funding.

What binds these chapters together is their place on the OSTP agenda, and nearly all of them are adapted from speeches and testimony in which Gibbons was acting as the Clinton Administration spokesman on science and technology policy. As such, they contrast with the more analytical articles in the first part of the book. They make an excellent resource for tracing the development of the Clinton-Gore science and technology policy, chronicling in papers from 1993 the administration’s early agenda, its high hopes for an activist federal role in promoting civilian technology development through partnerships with industry, and, in speeches from 1995, its response to the changed political situation, when the administration faced a new Congress hostile to most of its science and technology agenda.

One of the most memorable chapters is one titled simply “Report Card,” originally presented as the keynote address at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Science and Technology Policy Colloquium in April 1995. In the highly charged atmosphere surrounding congressional calls for major cuts in discretionary spending, Gibbons defended the administration’s policy initiatives and, in a strongly worded speech regarded as unusually “political” for...