Funding Science: An Adventure in Public History

Science policy in American government has become a specialized field of study, the public edges of which become visible only at particular, decidedly dramatic, moments. Wars or threats of war, scandals having to do with reliability of reports of scientific evidence, outbreaks of disease, or dramatic advances in applications of science to daily life all bring science to the headlines and raise questions of public funding and management. The Cold War served as a special context for the science debate by adding competitive elements that posed life and death alternatives on a scale that reached global proportions that even the AIDS crisis today has not been able to touch. Armageddon-like scenarios gave science an almost religious aura that reached into science fiction and seriocomic movies like Dr. Strangelove and Star Wars to enliven public imagination. The fear also assured continued public funding. That assurance had a problem concealed beneath it. The distinction between pure and applied research would remain unclear for as long as the urgency existed. In the aftermath it would become irrelevant. Even less clear was the degree to which that funding provided a special pork barrel of its own, one at which academia and the arts and sciences fed with table manners that seemed, to them in any case, more seemly than those displayed by defense contractors.

Such contexts color a subject that in its daily operations is unlikely to attract attention outside the academy and when it does, as in the case of political debate over the appropriateness of federal funding of research, will erupt in a special kind of public discord. Professors, unaccustomed to the pressures of partisan politics, face political leaders who call them “doctor” the way the piano players in the old movie westerns were called “professor” and proceed to chastise them with respect as though they were either failed heroes who had promised more than they could deliver or mystery villains on the verge of committing who knows what new kinds of sin. Science administrators, drawn from an academy that puzzles in its inner circles over the credentials of its servants (Nobels are awarded in spite of such service, never because of it), face problems they were not trained to understand and work with government and political colleagues whose experience and knowledge may seem at times new and strange.

We live at the end of what is certainly one of history’s remarkable eras. Science has been king for quite a while now, but is reign since the dramatic ending of World War II marks a dynasty that deserves a name of its own. The building of a new American intellectual establishment, quartered in universities and the federal government joined in what must surely be one of the shakiest such alliances of all times, has marked everything those of us today have ever known. Like Romans watching the dismantling of their classic structures to provide stones for odd buildings they had no intention of inhabiting, we keep hoping it isn’t really happening. Some of us will blame all of us for failing to do or say something we ought to have known to do or say, but that will be a little silly. Blame is not going to be as useful as it once appeared to be, for we are part of a reality that has always been richer and more complex than we Americans in particular have liked appreciating. It is a reality created out of ideas of progress and democracy that may be less intelligible and certainly less productive of the good life than we have wanted them to be. The fact that it is our reality does not make it real; it may never in fact have been real, and that may be the most painful fact of all. Science, popularly understood, is promise. Failed promises really have no acceptable explanation in the political arena where everything ultimately is officially judged and punished in American life.

Alexander J. Morin’s Science Policy and Politics...