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"The Wellspring of Discovery"
Dr. Rita R. Colwell
Director
National Science Foundation
25th Anniversary American Association for the Advancement
of Science Colloquium on Science and Technology Policy
William D. Carey Lecture
April 11, 2000
Good afternoon. It is a great pleasure to be here and
truly an honor to deliver the William D. Carey lecture
this year. It is a dual privilege to speak to you
as director of the National Science Foundation during
the year we are celebrating our 50th anniversary.
In some ways it is both a blessing and a curse to
be the first head of a federal agency to deliver the
Carey Lecture while in office: the curse comes from
the fact that whatever I say, I will be asked to deliver
on it, while the blessing is that this occasion gives
us the opportunity to reflect on NSF's role as the
wellspring for discoveries, and provides inspiration
to probe frontiers we can only begin to envision.
As we look at some milestones since NSF's creation,
I will add a few of my own musings from a career in
science over much of this same time period.
As a scientist, particularly as a biologist contemplating
NSF's beginnings and its subsequent contributions,
I think of a discovery in the depths of the ocean
that can also serve as a kind of metaphor for what
I would like to explore with you today. I have in
mind's-eye the mineralized chimneys called "black
smokers" that form around the hydrothermal vents at
the bottom of the sea and tower above the communities
of life thriving around them at these unlikely depths.
The mouths of the vents spew forth boiling water full
of chemicals, creating conditions that are obviously
toxic to humans and to most other life-forms. We first
discovered these communities some two decades ago.
The list of described species inhabiting vents now
tops 300-all creatures living in the depths without
photosynthesis. Instead of using the sun's energy
they employ chemosynthesis to oxidize the hydrogen
sulfide emerging from the vents.
To me the black smokers are not only metaphorical but
literal wellsprings of discovery, for there are even
suggestions that these springs could have been the
birthplace of all life on our planet. Basic research
has taken us to one of the most extreme environments
on earth and brought back discoveries whose implications
we have just begun to fathom.
Returning to the Earth's surface, I'd like to explore
another origin, the beginning of NSF. William D. Carey,
the honoree of this lecture, helped to bring the foundation
into being, and on a personal level I am honored to
recall Bill Carey as a friend. He was a deep thinker
on matters both intellectual and emotional, gruff
but with a big heart. In fact, while Bill Carey was
at the Bureau of the Budget, he was the main advocate
in the administration for creating a national science
foundation. It was his perseverance, openness, and
political savvy that helped carry the day. Ultimately,
with Bill Golden, John Steelman and others, he helped
to break a logjam holding up legislation to establish
NSF. Interviewed later, he recalled Science: The
Endless Frontier, the report by Vannevar Bush
that sketched out the need for a science foundation.
"There was a sense," he said, "that the Report had
a valid and urgent message and that if somebody didn't
pick this up and move with it, it could be quite a
national loss..." Elsewhere he recalled the excitement
of those years. "You have to think of the atmosphere,"
he said.
"This was postwar, most of the world in ashes,
the U.S. riding very, very high, dreaming great
dreams...There was to be a new age of science
and creativity...We were building a brave new
world and all would go well. There was a very
short window of idealism and optimism that closed
very abruptly."
Bill also said, "I don't think any of us ever imagined
we were inventing a $3 billion research investment
enterprise." (Little did Bill Carey imagine our current
hope that four billion for this year's budget
is just the beginning!) Bill Golden also helped by
advising President Truman that NSF should devote itself
to fundamental research. As it happened, it took five
years of debate over how the support of the "best
science" could be reconciled with the pluralism of
America. I think we all agree that this discussion
has never stopped-and it has been, and continues to
be, a healthy exchange.
On January 4, 1950, President Harry S. Truman delivered
his State of the Union message. The speech is full
of the tenor of the times, conscious of the war just
passed, recognizing the nation's entry onto the global
stage, conveying a sense of great opportunity but
also a sense of fateful choice. I would like to share
a passage from that speech, in which the president
calls for the establishment of NSF:
"The human race has reached a turning point. Man has
opened the secrets of nature and mastered new powers.
If he uses them wisely, he can reach new heights of
civilization. If he uses them foolishly, they may
destroy him...To take full advantage of the increasing
possibilities of nature we must equip ourselves with
increasing knowledge. Government has the responsibility
to see that our country maintains its position in
the advance of science. As a step toward this end,
the Congress should complete action on the measure
to create a National Science Foundation."
That following May-on May 10, 1950-President Truman's
train stopped in Pocatello, Idaho, and that was where
he signed S-247-the act that created NSF. By the way,
we've just learned that the mayor of Pocatello has
officially named this May 10 "National Science
Foundation Day." So, if you're in Pocatello, raise
a toast to NSF!
In 1951 President Truman nominated Alan T. Waterman
as NSF director. Vannevar Bush described Waterman,
chief scientist at the Office of Naval Research, this
way: "He is a quiet individual, a real scholar, and
decidedly effective in his quiet way, for everyone
likes him and trusts him." Waterman ended up serving
two six-year terms, with the early years of his tenure
marked by argument over NSF's mission. The crux of
it was this: The Bureau of the Budget wanted NSF to
evaluate science programs across the federal government.
Waterman and the science board, however, considered
the top priorities to be support for basic research
and graduate education and, thankfully, Waterman eventually
prevailed.
NSF received its first real budget in 1952. The appropriation
was late-and totaled only $3.5 million, a far cry
from what Vannevar Bush had proposed. Grant number
one, the first NSF grant--for $10,300 over three years--went
to Sidney Weinhouse at Philadelphia's Institute for
Cancer Research. NSF gave out a total of 97 research
grants in 1952 to biological, medical, mathematical,
and engineering sciences.
Besides the transition from a budget of three-and-a-half
million dollars to one of almost $4 billion, we have
seen major changes over these fifty years in how the
federal government supports science and technology.
We've moved from a massive infusion into physics and
engineering to a recognition that all disciplines
must be nourished. We have watched science and engineering
become a truly global enterprise. We have watched
disciplinary boundaries established for convenience
now receding in significance, with some perhaps disappearing
altogether. We are watching information technology
drive our progress and accelerate the intersection
of the disciplines.
I speak from personal experience when reflecting upon
how our enterprise of science and technology has evolved
over these decades. I also speak as a believer in
the power of basic research to improve lives, sometimes
unexpectedly and sometimes as a result of directed
leadership. I have always been intrigued by complexity.
Reductionist science, dissecting the whole into the
smallest parts, seemed to me like clearcutting a forest
in order to study one tiny seedling. I have always
been more interested as a biologist in how it all
comes together-intrigued by the mixture, by the froth
that makes life bubble. I have spent more than 30
years studying cholera, a terrible water-borne scourge
that still kills thousands every year in developing
countries. Today we have reached the point in our
research where women in Bangladesh are testing a simple
filtering system for their drinking water, using sari
cloth to remove plankton and particulate matter to
which the cholera bacteria are attached. To get to
this point took decades of study for us to define
the life cycle of the organism that causes cholera.
New technologies, notably information technologies
and satellite remote sensing, have been an integral
part of this work. During the 1960s, I was the first
American scientist to develop a computer program to
analyze taxonomic data for marine bacteria. This research
eventually led to a conclusion that was considered
radical at the time: The strain of cholera found in
outbreaks of the disease belongs to the same species
as harmless strains found everywhere in brackish waters,
estuaries, and coastal waters. Very recent data indicates
that the bacterium is even part of the mesophilic
community that lives not far from the hydrothermal
vents in the ocean.
I have seen firsthand the power of meeting other disciplines
more than halfway. We gain a richness of vantagepoints
at different scales, such as the broad view provided
by remote sensing techniques. In recent years, satellite
data have shown how global environmental change influences
the spread of cholera. Further refinements to those
techniques could help us save thousands of lives a
year by effectively monitoring and predicting conditions
conducive to cholera epidemics. Without remote sensing,
developing models to allow proactive measures against
the disease would be difficult, if not impossible.
During these years as a researcher, I have come to
view NSF not so much as a government agency but rather
as a source of ideas and discovery, as a wellspring,
if you will, of creativity. Our role at NSF is not
so much to sustain as to spark discovery. The 50-year
mark is an appropriate juncture at which to consider
what impact NSF has had as a generator of discoveries.
Let us begin by putting the agency in perspective.
Of the national research and development expenditures,
the federal government accounts for barely one-fourth
of the pie. Furthermore, NSF is a small player here-accounting
for only 3.5% of total federal investment in research
and development. It is a very important 3.5%, however,
because it underwrites nearly one-quarter of all federal
support for basic research at academic institutions.
We can look at one increasingly familiar measure of
success: patent citations. Half the citations on patents
refer to articles originating in academe; in mathematics,
the life and biomedical sciences, and clinical medicine,
the percentages are even greater. In archival journals,
nearly two-thirds of the papers cited on patents were
published by organizations primarily supported by
public funding. It's one measure of how publicly funded
research produces the knowledge that spurs innovation.
We are also seeing the heightened connections between
university and industrial science; while industry
spends more on research, its dependence upon publicly
funded research has grown even faster. The number
of these citations has grown explosively from 13,000
in 1990 to over 100,000 in 1998. The citations increased
ten-fold since 1988, and doubled again in the past
two years. Granted, some of this increase comes from
our new abilities to search on-line by computer, but
that doesn't explain the entire trend. We can zoom
in to look in finer detail at where academic patents
are being granted, and we find that the three largest
classes of academic patents all have biomedical applicability.
At the same time, the National Institutes of Health
receive over half of the federal academic research
pie. That will continue to work only if we maintain
a healthy foundation of basic science and engineering
research from which the life sciences can draw.
In federal research funding over the past three decades,
a major increase has gone to the life sciences, while
the shares going to engineering and the physical sciences
show the opposite trend: major drops in the share
of funding. We can also look at some major disciplines,
and where their federal funding comes from: While
NIH is concentrating on the biomedical sciences and
psychology, NSF is building up computer science, basic
engineering, and the physical sciences. In the non-medical
areas of the life sciences, NSF provides the majority
of federal support. Our support is truly the wellspring
into which other fields can tap. With this in mind-with
the worrisome slowdown in funding for mathematics
and physical science, with the shares out of balance-we
must ask whether it is possible to deplete pools of
knowledge. Will the source run dry?
As we take stock, it is instructive to look at some
of the discoveries we can trace back to NSF. As the
agency has grown, the rivulets flowing from the source
of fundamental research have turned into rivers following
unexpected courses. We can follow the channels formed
by ideas as they gathered enough momentum to carve
pathways for new ways of thinking. I would like to
recount just a few of these stories, emphasizing at
the same time that these are only examples drawn from
a wealth of discoveries we could enumerate.
The first example is the Internet. It's ironic that
so few people realize that key advances in Internet
technology were spurred by federally funded research.
What we know today as the Internet grew from predecessors
in the 1980s and earlier, notably ARPANET and NSFNet.
The high-speed backbone called NSFNet was a research
and education network used to link our supercomputer
centers to universities, and it helped to demonstrate
the effectiveness of networking technology. Now, of
course, millions use the Internet daily. During this
same early period, scientists and students from NSF's
supercomputer center at the University of Illinois
developed the first Web browser, Mosaic, which moved
the Internet from the realm of esoteric university
research to public communication and commerce.
We turn to the hot springs of Yellowstone National
Park for another example of an unexpected outcome:
the development of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR).
This technique, developed in the private sector, is
used in molecular biology to clone a small fragment
of DNA and produce multiple copies. The technique
we call DNA fingerprinting has wide application in
genetic mapping, medicine, forensic science, and even
tracking environmental pollution. The polymerase used
today was actually extracted from a heat-resistant
bacterium, which itself was isolated from a Yellowstone
hot spring through NSF-funded research. In fact, Thomas
Brock of Indiana University actually found the bacterium
while working out of a trailer in the park.
Here's another serendipitous story. It involves the
standard procedure for cornea repair, the "flap and
zap," in which a mechanical blade cuts a flap of cornea,
an eximer laser removes tissue, and then the flap
is replaced. The problem is the coarseness of the
initial cut, while a solution was discovered entirely
by accident. In 1993, a student was conducting research
at the University of Michigan on a femtosecond laser.
This laser emits light roughly a billion times faster
than an electronic camera flash. While the student
was working, the ultrafast laser accidentally entered
his eye, and he was rushed to the hospital. The examining
doctor was amazed to find a perfectly round laser
burn-far more precise than the slower-pulse lasers
the surgeons had been using. The examining physician
said, "You're fine. But tell us about this laser!"
The use of the femtosecond laser is now in the clinical
trial stage.
Sorting out the irregular oscillation of the atmospheric
and ocean conditions that we call El Niņo is another
success story. In the early 20th century,
British mathematician Gilbert Walker first noticed
the link between atmospheric pressure in the eastern
South Pacific and the Indian Ocean-with the failure
of the monsoon rains in India. But unraveling this
puzzle required advances in technology-both in computing
techniques and the gathering of massive observational
data sets. It also took the coming together of atmospheric
and ocean scientists to reveal El Niņo's secret. Today,
we can warn the populations at risk in Indonesia,
Ecuador, or California months in advance that droughts,
rains, and other severe conditions are on the way.
Tracing the complexity of our world is still another
challenge. It's one of our achievements that is more
diffuse, with pay-offs that we're just beginning to
explore. The prize, though, is nothing short of mapping
the underlying order of the universe. The perspective
of complexity, with its mathematical underpinnings,
helps us to see into both the physical and the living
realms, and to probe their interconnections. Complexity
brings insight into many worlds, from artificial intelligence
to economics, from ecology to materials science, and
beyond. It gives us a perspective spanning all fields
and all scales-a richness across different orders
of magnitude. We now know that many systems, such
as ecosystems, do not respond linearly to environmental
change. Up to now, we have sought understanding by
taking things apart into their components; at last,
we have begun to map out the interplay between the
parts of complex systems.
Even more important than the ideas and the technologies
flowing from NSF's efforts are the lives enriched
by our activities. If we look back at NSF's very first
program budget, over a third went to predoctoral and
postdoctoral fellowships. E.O. Wilson, the twice-Pulitzer-Prize-winning
biologist who is at Harvard today, was a member of
what we call the "NSF Class of '52." He recently recalled,
"The announcements of the first NSF postdoctoral fellowships
fell like a shower of gold on several of my fellow
students in Harvard's Department of Biology on a Friday
morning...I was a bit letdown because I wasn't among
them, but then lifted up again when I received the
same good news the following Monday (my letter was
late)." I guess some things never change.
There are other measures of investment. In the last
25 years, we have funded 78 researchers who subsequently
went on to win Nobel Prizes in their respective fields,
with 27 in physics, 22 in chemistry, 13 in physiology
and medicine, and 16 in economics. Today, we estimate
broadly that nearly 200,000 people each year participate
directly in NSF programs and activities, including
researchers, postdoctoral students, undergraduates,
and K-12 students and teachers. In another growing
realm-that of informal science education-our support
flows to much greater numbers of people. Projects
we support at museums, science centers, and planetaria
touch about 50 million people. The figure doubles
to 100 million for the audiences of radio, television,
and film programs on science. Let's take just one
example-the children's television series called "The
Magic School Bus." In its heyday it was carried by
300 public television stations in the United States.
Over three million children watched the show weekly.
It was the top-ranked series among young people. It
was such a success that it's now being picked up by
commercial stations.
Other institutional approaches by NSF have had a measurable
impact on people. Our Engineering Research Centers-now
15 years old-span all areas of science and engineering.
From the very start they promoted a new culture of
integrated research and education; students have industrial
mentors, while industry representatives work within
the centers. In fact, the ERCs are now recognized
as the "flagship" of a new kind of engineering education.
The numbers of patents and inventions and spin-off
firms are impressive, but we've also conducted a number
of surveys of companies that partner with the centers,
asking them about the benefits they receive. Forty
percent of the firms said that one of the most significant
benefits was hiring students who gained experience
at the center-a finding that speaks to a much larger
result of basic research. Employers say that center
students understand industry better, get up to speed
more quickly, communicate better, and are more adept
at cross-disciplinary approaches.
A quite different but equally successful approach is
the Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation,
which targets the underrepresentation of minorities
in science and engineering. Begun in 1990, the program
links two and four-year educational institutions,
as well as business, industry, and government. There
are now 28 alliances across the United States. Key
features of their success are a summer "bridge program"
to help high-school graduates prepare for college,
as well as research experiences and mentoring. The
programs have made a real impact on the number of
degrees awarded to minorities in alliance institutions.
In 1990, before the program began, the degrees in
the first group of institutions totaled 3,914; by
1999, this had increased to 7,253. For all
the alliance institutions, the total by 1999 was 20,567
degrees. Overall, a very conservative estimate would
say that our alliance institutions awarded over
half of the total bachelors' degrees given in
science and engineering to minorities in 1997-a number
that is growing. That's success by any measure.
Now comes the hard part: These successes give us an
all-too-tempting invitation to rest on our laurels.
On the one hand, our surveys document strong interest
by the public in science. At the same time, we see
skepticism, sometimes outright anxiety, about a host
of areas-from genetically modified foods specifically
to technology generally. We see the popularity of
programs such as the "X-Files" and the adherence to
astrology. Just as disturbing is the fact that many
of those kids who climbed aboard the Magic School
Bus before kindergarten have climbed off when they
reach middle school.
All of these issues sketch the larger dimensions of
the challenge we face; the coming years will be anything
but business as usual. The global economy is changing
too rapidly for any of us to stand still; in this
new economy, information has moved to center stage,
and knowledge has become the currency of everyday
life. To date, we have managed to cope with these
changes quite comfortably by relying on imported talent.
Now, as a firm believer in the internationalization
of research, I have and will continue to voice my
support for cooperative activities and exchanges of
all kinds. I nevertheless believe that we should also
consider the words of Demetrious Papademetriou of
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In
a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, he reminded
us that our reliance on imported talent is at best
a short-term strategy. In his words, "...the rest
of the developed world is waking up to the fact that
America's cherry-picking of international tech talent
amounts to an enormous competitive advantage." He
further points out that other nations now compete
with us for top talent. We're also seeing the suppliers
of this talent base making greater efforts to keep
it close to home-all of which could spur us to changes
that are long overdue.
For starters, we can begin to weave together the different
levels of our educational systems. I've heard this
called the "K-through-Grey" approach; it supplants
the antiquated notion that knowledge is gained in
so many semesters-and that only after completing certain
prerequisites are we pronounced to be educated. What
is called for is a system of never-ending, life-long
learning that promotes versatility and flexibility.
It's tied to the notion that we need more than a highly
trained workforce; we need a highly trainable workforce-and
retrainable workforce. A university or college graduate
in 2000 can expect to change careers four-to-seven
times before retirement. We know that information
technologies have created this dynamic. They also
supply the tools and means to embrace it-as they bring
resources for learning to anyone, anywhere. We know
our universities and other educational institutions
face the challenge of reinventing themselves for a
seamless system of learning over a lifetime, cradle
to grave. Here I must add that this is one area where
NSF is practicing what it preaches. If you've been
following some of our newest investment priorities-such
as the Graduate Teaching Fellows Program and the Centers
for Learning and Teaching-you'll see just the kind
of positive change we are hoping to foster at all
educational levels.
All of these changes-the transformation of science,
the pace of technological change, the glimmerings
of public dissatisfaction with new technology, the
remaking of the world economy-all of these currents
raise challenges enough for the next fifty years and
beyond. Yet I would like to take us one step further.
The sciences and engineering enrich our lives. They
are part of what defines us. Science connects with
the humanities and the arts in a way, that for the
first time in generations, creates hope for us to
transcend, at last, the "two cultures" of C.P. Snow.
I was recently captured, in fact, by the limited vision
expressed in an article in the Washington Post
Magazine that was authored by the essayist Henry
Allen. Even a cultural critic of Allen's erudition
talked about the "gray lives" given to us by "our
dead world of science." Such a lament suggests to
me a poor exposure to science. I would counter it
with Richard Dawkins' words from his book Unweaving
the Rainbow: "The feeling of awed wonder that
science can give us is one of the highest experiences
of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep
aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music
and poetry can deliver."
Our new capabilities give us new ways to explore the
intersections between art and science. Some of the
wealth of the world's art is already available to
anyone with a computer. Mark Levoy and others at Stanford
University use three-dimensional scanning techniques-based
on fundamental mathematics-to create a digital collection
of Michelangelo's statues. The team records a thin
sheet of laser light as it sweeps over a sculpture,
transcribing the data as a grid of points in three-dimensional
space and producing a mesh of triangle images. The
detail is fine enough, says Levoy, "to capture the
chisel marks of Michelangelo." Such records could
transform methods of archiving and the study of sculpture
and architecture. In fact, University of Washington
computer scientists are actually reproducing replicas
of statues. Even viewers of the actual statue can
look at it in a new way using a nearby computer, zooming
in on parts difficult to see from the ground-transforming
art-viewing from a passive to an active experience,
as Levoy points out.
Another embodiment of the intersection of art and science
is the modern sculptor Helaman Ferguson who is also
a mathematician. He creates mathematical formulas
in stone with a chisel guided by computer, expressing
the duality of both art and mathematics as universal
languages. Still another artist who merges art and
science is Marty Quinn who has written a "Climate
Symphony" based on the oscillations of climate change.
A new work by Quinn will capture the experience of
an earthquake as music-simulating the reception of
earthquake waves at different times around the world.
We are now recognizing an urgent responsibility to
transform how our society thinks of mathematics. We
want to change its reputation from an object of incomprehension
and fear; we want, instead, to inspire appreciation
of its poetry and recognition of its utility in helping
us to sort out the complexity of our world. As K.C.
Cole writes in her book, The Universe and the Teacup,
"Mathematics seems to have the astonishing power to
tell us how things work, why things are the way they
are, and what the universe would tell us if we could
only learn to listen." Or if we could only learn to
see: the photography of Felice Frankel, artist-in-residence
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has
captured beautiful scientific images of such unlikely
subjects as vials of nanocrystals, patterns of bacterial
colonies, a hologram of plastic, and a peeled polymer.
"Too often the visual beauty of science research seems
to be kept secret," Frankel believes. "Scientists
are trained to be suspicious of visually stunning
displays...and thus remain largely unaware of the
value of the visual poetry of their own work..."
Many of us in science are drawn to the words that end
the poem of T.S. Eliot called the "Four Quartets:"
"We shall not cease from exploration/ and at the end
of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/
and know the place for the first time./ Through the
unknown remembered gate/ When the last of the Earth
/ was left to discover/ Is that which was the beginning."
These are magical words for they draw us back to the
wellspring and nourish our inspiration. Bill Carey
helped to tap this wellspring. For the sake of scientific
discovery-and to continue to nourish our economy-it
is now up to all of us to sustain it.
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