Copyright 1999 The Washington Post
The Washington
Post
October 18, 1999, Monday, Final Edition
SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A19
LENGTH: 1003 words
HEADLINE:
We Must Fund The Scientific Revolution
BYLINE: Newt
Gingrich
BODY:
The highest investment
priority in Washington should be to double the federal budget for scientific
research. No other federal expenditure would create more jobs and wealth or do
more to strengthen our world leadership, protect the environment and promote
better health and education for all Americans. For the security of our future,
we must make this investment now.
When I became speaker of the House in
1995 and we began to work toward a balanced budget, we were prepared to cut
discretionary spending almost everywhere. At the request of Rep. John Porter, I
met with the research vice presidents of all the major pharmaceutical and
biotechnology firms. Even though they were overwhelmingly ideologically
conservative, pro-free market and profit oriented, they unanimously agreed that
the engine that was driving new medicines, new jobs and new profits was federal
investment in basic scientific research and that American entrepreneurs would
run out of new products and new services without that basic research. Because of
their convincing testimony, we protected scientific research. It became the one
area that grew consistently despite the pressures to balance the budget.
After four years of interviewing scientists, entrepreneurs, academicians
and business leaders, I now am even more convinced that we need a broad-front
approach to funding basic research and that our goal should be to double
scientific research throughout the federal government in the next five years.
Doubling the budget of the National Institutes of Health would be a good
start because of its potential to benefit all Americans directly. But many of
the most important breakthroughs that are transforming our ability to provide
better health and health care come from the National Science Foundation, the
Centers for Disease Control, the laboratories of the Department of Energy and
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
We are on the edge of
major scientific breakthroughs that will transform our lives. Consider a few of
the stunning possibilities:
The first computer with a transistor,
TRADIC, was built in 1955 with 800 transistors. Today's Pentium II chip has 7.5
million transistors. At Georgia Tech, scientists believe an experimental chip
will be built in 2000 with a billion transistors and, within 15 to 20 years,
there will be a chip with one trillion transistors. Imagine what a laptop 13,000
times as powerful as today's would be like.
Polio and smallpox have been
eliminated in the United States, and AIDS deaths are declining because of the
research and public health leadership of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. Now, with the increase in biological weapons, the CDC is researching
immunizations and formulating plans to combat epidemic outbreaks from
bioterrorist attacks. The comfort and safety we enjoy now will continue only if
scientific funding supports the CDC's ability to do prevention research.
Nanotechnology, the science of developing tools and machines as small as
one molecule, will have as big an impact on our lives as transistors and chips
did in the past 40 years. Imagine highly specialized machines you ingest,
systems for security smaller than a piece of dust and collectively intelligent
household appliances and cars. The implications for defense, public safety and
health are astounding.
The human genome revolution has just begun.
Francis Crick (the Nobel Prize winning co-discoverer of DNA) believes it will
take a century of research to understand and apply all the potential
breakthroughs this new knowledge makes possible. The implications for human
health, food production and the environment are almost incalculable.
New
instruments (largely a product of National Science Foundation grants) make
possible new measurements of the human brain while it is working (largely funded
by NIH grants). This synergistic investment in better knowledge through better
technology will prove that mental health parity is essential to
any health policy and will offer opportunities to cure
schizophrenia, bipolar disease, Alzheimer's and other current challenges.
These five areas only scratch the surface of the potential for greater
wealth, more jobs, a higher quality of life, greater national security and a
future of unlimited opportunity. Moreover, in this age of scientific
revolutions, many of the really big changes that will transform our lives will
come from unpredictable breakthroughs -- as they have in similar eras of our
history.
If this case is so self-evident, why is it so hard to get
Washington to double the budget for federal scientific research? The answer is
not logic but politics. I have found scientists and investors to be among the
least effective lobbyists and have watched more focused special interests
receive more money than they deserve while the future was starved of resources.
There will be a grand agreement between the Republican Congress and the
Clinton administration this fall. In that grand agreement, the budget caps will
be broken. At that time, Congress and the president should agree that a
substantial increase in all funding for scientific research should be part of
that deal. In light of our budgetary surplus, the American people will support
the broken caps for a combination of saving Social Security and Medicare,
cutting taxes and strengthening vital government spending. Science research is
vital to America's future and therefore is clearly "vital government spending."
Out of our sense of patriotism and our own enlightened self-interest, we
should lobby our representatives and senators and insist that federal investment
in scientific research be doubled over the next five years.
The down
payment of the first 20 percent increase in all areas of scientific research
should be made this month or next. Anything less will weaken the future for all
of us.
The writer, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute, is a former speaker of the House.
LOAD-DATE: October 18, 1999