Untutored in science and often proud of it, politicians have soaked up the myth that physics is pretty well played out as a field of discovery and that the coming century belongs to the biological sciences. That they're confused and wrong wouldn't matter, except that the recent flow of vital government money into the sciences reflects that misunderstanding and could seriously impair the scientific enterprise, including the health sciences.
That's a strong possibility now that President Clinton has declared his vision of the scientific future. The past 50 years, he recently told the New York Times, "will be seen as an age of physics and an age of space exploration." The next 50 years, he predicted, "will very likely be characterized as an age of biology and the exploration of the human organism."
Self-fulfillment of that prophetic line has already been established in the federal budget, with money for medical research booming, even in these hard times, while support for the once-reigning physicists is slowly shrinking. Congress, reflecting the public's demand for cures, gave the National Institutes of Health a rare 7.1 percent budget increase for this year, raising the total to $13.2 billion -- atop similar increases for the previous two years.
Backed by lobbies organized around particular diseases, medical science is the easiest sell in the federal research portfolio. Meanwhile, money for physics (which is usually packaged with chemistry and mathematics) has, at best, been maintained at a constant level of purchasing power. The Department of Energy, the mainstay for physics, has about $670 million this year for the "basic energy sciences," a 2.8 percent increase, while money for atom smashing is virtually unchanged at $680 million.
Dethroned by the end of the Cold War from their long role as the top scientific advisers to the White House, physicists suffered another blow with the political termination of the Superconducting Super Collider in 1993 -- after $3 billion had been spent on their dream project. To maintain an advanced position in the kind of research the ill-fated SSC was designed for, the United States is contributing more than $500 million to a powerful accelerator under construction at Europe's atom-smashing center, near Geneva.
The U.S. involvement is in the best internationalist tradition of science -- but it's also a humiliation for the home team. No wonder the physicists view the future with gloom and incomprehension.
Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate in physics, has publicly deplored what he regards as a downgrading of physics research for the benefit of the politically popular medical sciences. D. Allan Bromley, the physicist who served as President Bush's science adviser, has expressed concern about the health sciences' granting legitimacy to "alternative medicine," which he regards as quackery, abetted by government research money.
If the issue were merely new toys for previously overindulged scientists, we could all rest easy with their deprivation. But the great progress to date in the health sciences and the hopeful prospects cited by the president are based on sophisticated instruments and research techniques that originated in physics and chemistry laboratories.
Lasers, computers, superpower microscopes and analytical methods based on nuclear techniques are the indispensable tools of medical research. And all were imported into medical research from other fields of science.
An elaborate structure of expert advisers is supposed to fend off political whims in government support of science. In the past the system has worked reasonably well. The scientists would agree on what's important and worthy of support. And the politicians generally would go along with their recommendations.
But with money tight and the bandwagon rolling for medical research, the system is undergoing dangerous distortions. By pandering to the earnest, but misguided, health lobbies, politics may ironically impede the pursuit of cures.
Daniel S. Greenberg is editor-at-large of Science & Government Report, a Washington newsletter.
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