HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Rudenstine Promotes Federal Support of Research

Forum brings together senators and representatives of education and industry

By John Lenger

Gazette Staff

President Neil L. Rudenstine joined a group of U.S. senators and other academic and business leaders from across the country last week to again discuss the importance of continued government funding for university-sponsored scientific research.

The event -- the Senate Republican Conference Issue Forum on Science and Technology -- brought government, education, and industry to the table for candid discussions about the country's need to maintain its investment in research at the same time that it attempts to balance the federal budget.

Sponsored by the Republican leadership in the U.S. Senate, such forums have allowed legislators to better set the agenda for future action by taking the time to discuss issues in a more comprehensive way than would be allowed in, for instance, a hearing on an appropriations bill. The topic for the forum was suggested by Rudenstine and Harvard's Vice President for Government, Community and Public Affairs, James H. Rowe.

Last week's forum was chaired by Sen. Bill Frist, a renowned heart surgeon who graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1978 and was elected a senator from Tennessee in 1994. Last year, Frist was one of the Senate leaders who advocated stronger government funding of basic research, the type of curiosity-driven research that starts with investigating basic processes and then can quite often lead to remarkable scientific breakthroughs and technological applications.

Frist had previously discussed research funding, student aid, and graduate medical education issues with Rudenstine during last year's congressional debate. At the conclusion of the conference, Frist requested that Rudenstine alone summarize the general principles arising from the discussion.

Setting a Platform

"One of my purposes, selfishly, is to get as much information as we can, not to clearly come to consensus, but really to set that platform" for future discussions, Frist said, noting that funding decisions made today are really about setting priorities for the future. "What we want to do is look where we are today and how we can best position ourselves, not just for the next four years, but on into the next century."

And senators were straightforward about the challenges they face in trying to balance the federal budget. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska expressed dismay at the fact that only about 30 percent of the federal budget is under the control of Congress, with about 55 percent going to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare and the rest going toward interest on the national debt. "How do you set the priority for R&D [research and development] in view of the increasing demands we have for so many things for scarce dollars?" he asked.

Complicating the picture is the fact that funding for scientific research comes from what's known as the "discretionary nondefense" portion of the budget, which is only 16 percent of the total budget, and that growth in entitlements has risen at an astonishing rate. Frist noted that entitlements were just 30 percent of the federal budget in 1965, and that if they keep growing at the same rate they have been, in the Year 2010 entitlements and interest will be the entire budget.

Conference participants including Rudenstine and M.I.T. President Charles Vest agreed that universities must cut their own costs, and that research spending must be accountable. "We can and we must keep cost-cutting and economizing," Rudenstine said. At Harvard, "we've taken $42 million out of the base of our budget in the last five years, and we expect to do the same in the next five years." The President also noted that Harvard is investing $50 million in a new administrative data processing system, "partly so we can be much more responsive to government audits."

Some at the conference also noted that university researchers work to find the answers to some of the country's most costly problems, in a way that is complementary to, but will never be replaced by, R&D efforts within private industry.

"We're ballooning on the basis of health care costs, which will reach a trillion dollars a year, and that is a major entitlement in the United States," said Roy Vagelos, former chairman and CEO of Merck & Co. Inc. and now chairman of the Board of Directors of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. Only new advances in medical treatments will help offset those staggering costs, and the best place to look for those breakthroughs is from the "machine" of university research, Vagelos said.

"What we're talking about is investing today in the machine that has been proven to be productive in the past," Vagelos said. "Alzheimer's disease, that's over $100 billion a year; cancer, over $100 billion a year; and cardiovascular disease other than coronary heart disease, also in that ballpark. So we have these mega-diseases that require additional investment. We can put it off and just keep paying, watching those entitlements go up, or we can invest where we know it'll do the most good."

M.I.T.'s Vest cautioned that the machine of scientific research "cannot be turned on and off at will, and I think that's a very important message. Science and the infrastructure that supports it requires continuity of effort."

Vest also emphasized the point that research and development funding is an investment. "Scientific research, we all believe, is an absolutely essential investment in our future," he said. "Now, I do not use the word investment lightly. We need to think about the return on our investments as a nation . . . and we simply have to pause to think that today's technology, today's health care, today's industries, today's military are the result of past investments in research and in advanced education."

And new and frightening challenges are always presenting themselves, said Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Iowa. "The thing I'd like to remind us all about is that right before the AIDS epidemic hit there was a big article in Science magazine [saying] that 'We've seen the last worldwide epidemic. We've conquered it all' -- because we thought we had conquered smallpox . . . and there wasn't going to be anymore. And a couple of years later we were faced with this enormously terrifying worldwide epidemic."

Measuring Success

To sum up the conference, Frist asked Rudenstine to outline the major points made, and to discuss, in particular, ways to measure the efficacy of research.

"We heard a good deal from industry that suggested that the roles of the universities and of industry are more complementary than they are parallel, that they're not likely to duplicate each other very much in terms of what they turn to in research," Rudenstine said. Also, "the best university research is increasingly interdisciplinary and interdependent, and that therefore the agencies, however we organize them, ought somehow to be aligned for the interdependency. And the present system that we have of multiple agencies, a lot of competition, a good deal of accountability, and so on, does seem to work well, at least for fulfilling this particular part of the task."

Also, the President noted, "The training of people at advanced levels cannot be done any other way except in conjunction with research."

Regarding measuring success, one way is by recognizing "the generation of important new ideas for long-term exploitation," Rudenstine said. A second way would be the successful transfer of ideas from universities to industry, and then into society as a whole -- and the President cited biotechnology, computers and other information technology, and materials science as good current examples of successful spin-offs.

A third measure of success would be jobs creation, and a fourth would be the effect of university-based research on everyday life.

By all those measures, Rudenstine said, government-supported scientific research at universities has been incredibly successful. "It's an extremely cost-effective system," he said.

In wrapping up, Frist noted that what was gained through the discussion was "a platform that we can all work on together at this crossroads in our history as it concerns science and technology. What we will do immediately is take a lot of the thoughts which you summarized very well and share that with our colleagues" in the Senate, he said.

Many of the conference participants were brought together by The Science Coalition, a university-led alliance that was formed last year to make the case that consistent funding of university-based research is a national priority. With the active backing of Rudenstine and Provost Albert Carnesale, Harvard Vice President James H. Rowe proposed the creation of The Science Coalition, and Harvard became a founding member.

Among others who attended the forum were Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico; Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa; Sen. Frank Murkowski of Alaska; Sen. Mike DeWine of Ohio; Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma; Ralph Snyderman, chancellor for health affairs and dean of Duke University's School of Medicine; Will Happer, professor of physics and chair of the university research board at Princeton; Rick McConnell, director of research for Pioneer Hi-Bred International; Forest Baskett, senior vice president of research and development and chief technology officer at Silicon Graphics Computer Systems; Edward Fort, chancellor of North Carolina A&T State University; Michael Brown, director of the Center for Genetic Disease at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and co-winner of the 1985 Nobel Prize in Medicine; Martin C. Jischke, president of Iowa State University; and Pace VanDevender, president of Prosperity Institute.