Clough advises Congress on federal research funding

	From left, Hermann Grunder, Burton Richter and Wayne Clough address a Senate subcommittee on basic research in the physical sciences.

Last fall, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) reported that research and development funding was becoming dangerously imbalanced, and recommended that the funding levels for the physical sciences and for engineering be enhanced and that funding levels be brought to parity with the life sciences. Recently, President Wayne Clough, who chaired the Council, was invited to Washington, D.C., to address these findings.

Speaking to the Energy Subcommittee of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on July 29, Clough was asked to discuss the role of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science in supporting research in the physical sciences, an office that currently provides 40 percent of federal funding for basic research.

Together with Herman Grunder, director of the Argonne National Laboratory, and Burton Richter, a Nobel laureate in physics, Clough outlined three main points for a balanced “national investment portfolio” in research and development.

“If we want to maintain our standard of living and our position of world leadership,” he said, “it is crucial that we invest in long-term, fundamental research, which is conducted largely at universities and national labs; that we maintain a balance across the disciplines so that they move forward together; and that we pay attention to the education of the next generation of scientists and engineers. All of these things on which the well-being of future generations depends are essentially in the hands of Congress.”

One indicator that the United States is in danger of slipping in its global leadership role in science research is the decrease in the number of doctoral degrees awarded in these fields. The number of Ph.D.s awarded in the United States in the sciences peaked in 1998. Engineering Ph.D.s peaked in 1996 and had declined by more than 15 percent by 1999.

Federal funding of university research is seen by graduate students as an indicator of career opportunities. As the financial support erodes, so do the number of potential researchers in the United States.

“The federal government’s a key to sustaining the research that we do at universities and encouraging our collaboration with private industry,” Clough said. “The one single difference between the research private industry would do and research universities would do, other than what my colleagues have said, is we educate the workforce of the future.

“When we do research, we are educating young people, we’re preparing them to take important roles in society, and if we’re not doing that, you’re going to lose the seed corn for the future.”