Dr. John H. (Jack) Gibbons is Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, as well as Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. An internationally recognized scientist, Dr. Gibbons received his Ph.D. in physics from Duke University, spent 15 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory studying the structure of atomic nuclei, and 12 years as Director of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. He was appointed by President Clinton to his present position in February 1993. We caught up with him just as he was returning from a trip with the President to attend a Midwestern economic summit held in Columbus, Ohio in mid-October 1995.
ER: So how is the meeting going?
Gibbons: It's going very well. I left when the President was only halfway through the first of two big panels, but we had some very good sessions earlier this morning with some industrialists, educators and the like. People sometimes wonder at first just why we go outside the Beltway and have these regional meetings, but eventually they come to realize that this is the best way to find out what you're doing right and what you're not doing right and what you ought to do to make things work better.
ER: Was the response at the meeting fairly positive?
Gibbons: Extraordinarily so. I was quite frankly more than pleasantly surprised at the amount of understanding of the need to get kids better educated technologically and of the role that all of us - public and private sectors - must play in enabling our schools to prepare young citizens for the future.
ER: Well, speaking of the future, you said in your editorial in Science a couple of months ago that you were concerned over the possibility that the work of generations that has put us at the forefront of world science and technology could be undone in a few budget cycles.
Gibbons: Exactly. I'm very seriously worried about that possibility, because a majority of Congress is now choosing - for obscure and, I think, unnecessary reasons - to try to reverse a very long-term, almost half-century, bipartisan, strong, consistent support of research and education and turn it around, and within a few years wipe out a third of it at the same time the Japanese, for example, are doubling their R&D budget.
ER: What's the position of the Clinton Administration?
Gibbons: What the Administration is trying to do is to make government work better. The President wants the move to a balanced budget conditional on maintaining investments in the things that will enable our economy to continue to move ahead, which are education and research and technology. If you knock them out just because they represent "more government," you are destroying the seeds of the future growth that will enable us to pull ourselves out of our deficit hole. That kind of thinking is convoluted. We are worried about the danger in which it places fundamental research, and even more so about the enormous resistance by the new Congress to the idea that somehow the public sector and the private sector can go into a variety of kinds of co-venturing partnerships for the good of both - to achieve "win-win" results. Opponents mis-label such ideas as "corporate welfare" and obfuscate the extraordinary advantage of moving this way. This was strongly reconfirmed for me today in Columbus by business people from all over the Midwest - namely, the fact that these kinds of partnerships are extremely important complements to our support of education and basic research.
ER: How do you explain to people the role of politics in science and science in politics? In that same Science editorial, you said we have to balance science funding with funding for hospitals, education, police, housing, environmental protection and so forth. So just how do you get that balance? And how does the political process either help achieve the balance, or make achieving it more difficult?
Gibbons: Well, I think what you just spelled out is the extraordinary challenge to political service: to mete out our resources in a way that best reflects the needs of the nation. And I have profound respect, independent of party or perspective, for people who choose to take on that mantle of responsibility. For example, if you look at a congressional committee such as the one that oversees HUD, you'll find that it has a kitty of money assigned to it by the Budget Committee and that within that kitty the members have to worry about everything from housing to the National Science Foundation to EPA to NASA; in other words, there are social and long-term research and education programs all in one package, and they have to stay in that package. It's a so-called zero sum game. If you put a dollar here, you've got to take it away from somewhere else in the same kitty.
So the committees have an enormous job in front of them. But our position is that special protection needs to be given to those things that are going to enable the sorts of futures that are desirable. With that in mind, the President has built fences of protection around education and around research and technology, because he sees those as the engines that will drive our economy and our opportunities in the future. As a result, he's going to be a lot more resistant to budget trimming in those areas than in areas that don't have that kind of high leverage for our future. Of course, there's no area that should escape the scrutiny and discipline of tight money - that's not the point; the point is that there are some things that are more valuable to us as a nation than some other things.
ER: As an ex-director of the Office of Technology Assessment, you must not have been very happy that Congress voted to close it down.
Gibbons: Yes, it's terribly sad. Obviously, OTA's demise doesn't save any significant amount of money - it represented less than one percent of the money Congress spends for its own purposes. I have to interpret it as an action of people who think that analysis doesn't matter. I suspect that when these people get a little more experience in what James Madison called "the power that knowledge gives," they're going to realize the foolishness of their action and turn around and want some of that kind of help again.
ER: Let's talk about your view of national technology strategies. Compare us to Japan, for example.
Gibbons: One point of comparison is that we depend very strongly on entrepreneurship for our long-term economic future, and Japan envies greatly the capability of the U.S. entrepreneurs to leave the comfort of a large corporation and strike off on their own. It's that kind of constant, spinout investment of productive risk-taking that has made us great and that is producing millions of jobs. On the other hand, Japan has done a much better job of providing low-cost capital to people who are investing in business, and that is a key factor in their own success. In the face of their long-term recession and economic tough times, the Japanese are doubling their R&D budget rather than cutting it as we are. And that says that they are maybe a little smarter than some of the rest of us in understanding that investments in research and in education are the very things that will drive us toward the future, and that if a nation doesn't make these investments it's going to lose.
ER: Do you have a rule of thumb for what an R&D budget should be?
Gibbons: There is a lot of discussion about this. If you look across the whole planet at the industrial nations, you find that typically the non-military investments that they make in research are on the order of two to three percent. And three percent we have proffered as a straw figure for countries such as ours that are now in the knowledge age and increasingly dependent on knowledge for our future. But I don't think there is any specific magic number, because it's not so much the input to R&D that counts, but its output; and its output depends not only on the money put into it but the kind of climate that it's in and how well new ideas move toward the marketplace.
And that's another concern we have about the constraints that Congress would put on us. The idea that the federal government ought only to invest in fundamental research and then somehow magically expect the marketplace to come take it from there is simply not realistic. There are a lot of very important technologies, for example, that are so broadly applicable to industry that no individual firm can capture profits from investing in them; and yet they are enabling technologies that allow all of industry to move forward. Those are cases where the public has an enormous payoff in risk-shared or cost-shared investments in these pre-competitive technologies and in areas [that do not attract private investment] such as pollution reduction technologies where public benefits are high.
ER: Doesn't that get the government into picking winners and losers?
Gibbons: Not at all, because all of these activities are cost-shared and are based on industry and consortia proposals, and are worded on the basis of merit and peer review. And that in no way can honestly be interpreted as picking winners and losers.
ER: What about the federal support for flat panel R&D? That's been controversial.
Gibbons: Yes, well, the flat panel issue has been sort of controversial, but it also very much relates to our defense technology capabilities and our ability to have an assured supply of flat panel displays for our national defense without having to depend on foreign sources. That is one aspect and the other is that the basic technology and capability for flat panel underlies an enormous part of the future markets in telecommunications and electronics and computers, which in turn is a hell of a big chunk of our economy. So we have both civilian and military needs to assure that we have some of these capabilities and are not overly dependent on foreign sources.
ER: Let's turn to the subject of higher education. How do you feel about the role being played by colleges and universities in the country's research?
Gibbons: You know, it's interesting. There was a CEO this morning who said, "Look, we may talk about the K-12 education situation, and that's terribly important, but the entry-level job in my business demands a master's degree." So that reminds us of the role of higher education as a requirement in the marketplace now - increasingly in those industries we are dependent on. But in addition to that, higher education provides sort of a dual output - advances on the frontiers of knowledge and well-educated people who have versatile and well-developed skills and who can go enter the industrial marketplace or into education or research. The President wants to reinforce the notion of strong support of our higher education as well as K-12, but our research universities need to remain the strongest in the world. And although we need private sector investment, we also need public investment, as Thomas Jefferson understood 200 years ago.
ER: As you look back over the last two or three decades, do you see any changes in higher education? Are American universities getting better, or worse, or staying the same?
Gibbons: I think our research universities are getting relatively stronger. I was talking with some people in Beijing two weeks ago - some people from the Asian Pacific who were talking about where they send their best graduates these days. For instance, Singapore offers the top couple percent of their graduates scholarships to go abroad to study. And they told me they always used to send them to England. Now they are sending them to the States. Why? Because they've looked at American universities, their capabilities in computers and telecommunications, their classrooms, their research, and they've decided the U.S. is now the center; this is where their best students ought to go. So that is an external measure that our universities are strong.
At the same time, we have to understand that universities are under extraordinary financial pressures and that they are having to streamline their curricula as well as their administration. They are realizing that they more and more need to be a part of our industrial economy. About two out of five industrial research papers, I believe, have university co-authors, and that's a signal that the universities and industry are beginning to work better and more closely together. That's a good development. I think what we are finding is a rediscovery of the value of partnerships and consortia between various entities in the public and private sectors, and I just hope the lawyers will stay out of the way on this one because there are a lot of things to be done here that 20 years ago you couldn't do because of all sorts of antitrust laws and the like. I think we are moving in the right direction.
ER: Do you see information technology as playing any special role? Obviously computers and telecommunica-
tions . . .
Gibbons: Oh, absolutely. Not only computers and communications. I just came a couple of hours ago from the American Chemical Society's big center in Columbus, so let's take Chem Abstracts as an example. The ability to collect and then rapidly and widely distribute and provide access to detailed information using the Internet and the national information infrastructures is extremely important to us. And it's now becoming a global Net. Chem Abstracts's busiest time of the day is 4:00 AM when the Europeans are using it. And so I think that's the important way to go.
But there are other things. Some of the people in the meeting today in Columbus were from an industry that builds sensors. Now that's a piece of information technology where you have various kinds of sensing apparatuses as part of industrial processes connected to computers which in turn feed back to the process. And whether you are making cardboard boxes or cars or chemicals, this particular kind of technology that senses, analyzes and feeds back in real time can result in enormous gains in energy efficiency, lower waste in the product line, and a higher quality product. So when we think of information technology, it is more than the computer, it's what the computer and the rest of these systems that are so ubiquitous now in our economy do, and it underlies an enormous amount of the big productivity gains we've had in the last decade.
ER: One more question. We know you have to run now. What is absolutely at the top of your administrative agenda in the next year or so?
Gibbons: What I hope is that, with the very powerful and important set of priorities that the President is insisting must guide the manner in which we move along the path toward a balanced budget, we will end up with a resilient economy and a knowledge base and an R&D infrastructure that allows us to go on from there. The balanced budget should be the beginning, not the end. That's the most important thing. We've got the consensus that we need to balance the budget. That's not the problem now. The issue is how do you pace the process around that track, and where do you build fences around your key investments as you go around that track. The key word is "investment."