But the collapse of the Soviet Union dispelled the underlying nervousness
that had driven the US to build up its colossal scientific establishment. In the
aftermath, scientists found themselves having to compete for funds and attention
with the poor, the veterans and every possible vested interest, and invariably
they lost out. Not until 1998, after years of minor increments and outright
cuts, did American science advocates pull off a big budget win. They garnered an
impressive 5.5 per cent rise for federal funded research and development, making
a cool $4.1 billion increase over 1997.

So how did they succeed when their earlier attempts had failed? By adopting
the tactics of every other Washington pressure group. “I guess we snatched some
pages from the National Rifle Association and the trade union books. Their
members have always been highly active, so they were good role models for us,”
says Mike Lubell, media director for the American Physical Society. Over the
past four years, 1025 volunteers from the APS have maintained regular contact
with their congressmen or women and senators on scientific issues. So far,
they’ve focused their efforts on items such as demanding funds for physics
research, and keeping copyright laws loose enough to permit the free flow of
technical information. Activists from groups such as the American Chemical
Society and the American Mathematical Society have all followed suit.

Once, scientists tended to fade from public view when the challenge that
pulled them into prominence had passed, says Mary Jo Nye, a historian at Oregon
State University. Now organisations such as Research!America
(www.researchamerica.org)—which agitates for increased medical
research—make it easy for them to stay in the limelight, by providing
draft letters to newspaper editors and various interesting statistics and by
organising polls showing that most Americans would be prepared to pay more tax
to medical research.

Medical groups have taken the lead through persuading celebrities to fly the
flag for nearly every disease—the sort of technique widely used by
traditional lobby groups. Former “Superman” Christopher Reeve now regularly
appeals in support of paralysis studies, actress Mary Tyler Moore does the same
for diabetes, and Olympic diver Greg Louganis calls for AIDS research. And it
works. The National Institutes of Health netted a 14.1 per cent increase in
1998.

Upfront scientists may be the shape of things to come. Private groups such as
the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association already ask
researchers filling in grant applications to detail activities that would sell
science to the public. Some experts predict that the National Institutes of
Health and the National Science Foundation—the two largest sources of
federal funding— will soon also require popularising suggestions from
their grantees.

“It’s critical that scientists get their message across to the public,” says
Lubell. “Politicians only do what their constituents want.” And it’s
particularly important this year, because President Clinton has decided that
scientists will now have to fend for themselves. His proposed budget for the
year 2000 features a $1 billion drop in research and development funding.
Most experts believe that, with their new tactics, scientists are becoming
sufficiently adept at activism to win the next budget battle on their own.

Legislators such as Republican senator Stephen Horn of California have joined
in. He recently gave the Clinton administration a “D” for its efforts to deal
with the millennium bug—the much-prophesied computer Armageddon.
“Releasing grades is certainly an effective way to get the attention of the news
media,” comments John Pike of the Federation of American ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s.

Yet amid this enthusiasm for instant grades, no one has seen fit to mark the
Washington institutions for their science savvy. Last year the federal bodies
provided nearly $62.7 billion for research and development, according to
the National Science Foundation, which surely merits some notice. As it turns
out, Washington harbours any number of opinionated people interested in science.
Conversations with a few of them, on and off the record, yield suggestions for
grading some of the federal agencies purely on their science payoff.

The National Science Foundation gets a grade A. “The heart of American
science,” Robert Park of the American Physical Society calls it. For just over
$2.5 billion every year—much less than 1 per cent of the total
federal budget—the US receives a model agency “that provides grants
through a peer review process that is the envy of other institutions and other
nations”, in the words of Republican Congressman Sherwood Boehlert of New York
(Congressional Record, 29 July).

But NASA gets an F. Useful uncrewed spacecraft such as Galileo or the Mars
Rover make up a small portion of the space agencies’ budget while it
haemorrhages money on the scientifically dubious space station and space
shuttle.

Good but not great is the verdict on the National Institute of Standards and
Technology, which gets a B. Things have changed at the institute, where an
interest in science has replaced the ethos of service to industry that dominated
at the beginning of the decade. Physicists in particular value the institute’s
work with atomic clocks and measurement of values such as Plank’s constant.

Legislators are no less fair game for grading. A handful of representatives
exert a huge influence on the shape of American science. And science advocates
agree that a few law makers deserve to be graded on their scientific
aptitude.

Tennessee Senator Bill Frist, the Republican chairman of the Senate
Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space is, however, the proud recipient
of an A. His Federal Research Investment Act would double funding for civilian
research and development over a 12-year period (Chattanooga Free Press,
2 August). A critic of dubious alternative medicine projects, he is the only
physician in the US Senate.

But it’s an F for Democrat senator Tom Harkin of Iowa. He was roundly
criticised for his sponsorship of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education
Act of 1994, which allows manufacturers of herbal remedies to make broad health
claims for their products without scientific review by the Food and Drug
Administration. Also drawing the ire of scientific purists, he was the driving
force behind the creation of the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National
Institutes of Health in 1993.

Meanwhile, Republican Newt Gingrich, the speaker of the House, has been
broadly supportive of science both in his speeches and on the House floor. He
gets a grade B+ (+ for effort). When one congressman recently sought to limit
the budget of the National Science Foundation, Gingrich reportedly asked him to
withdraw the amendment (The Post and Courier, 2 August).

Clearly, giving single grades is not to everyone’s taste. “Summing someone up
with a single-letter grade, whether they are a student or a politician, is
ludicrous,” claims Robert McClure of the National Education Association (NEA),
Washington DC. He notes that the current trend in education is to give students
specific instructions for improvement rather than single grades. But politicians
are not always the most apt pupils, and even McClure acknowledges that letter
grades are “efficient”. His own organisation must agree because the NEA issues
an annual report on Congressmen that grades them on a “pass-fail” basis.

Sanford’s stand against science was not aided by his claim that the
management of the NSF was slipshod. He noted that the agency was funding a study
on “ATMs” (the common abbreviation for the “automated teller machines” outside
banks) and “poker”, among other sins. What he had failed to realise was that in
this context ATM meant “asynchronous transfer mode”, the backbone of the
Internet, and poker was the nickname for a long-established branch of economics
known as game theory.

In the same vein, a number of his colleagues stood before Congress to
complain that the government was funding studies of “cheap talk”, “billiards”
and “dirty jokes”. What they failed to comprehend was that these efforts
involved, respectively, the economic costs of information, the trajectories of
particles under turbulent conditions, and an examination of the causes of sexism
and racism. Fortunately for scientists, the current trend of goodwill towards
research and the corrective comments of some better-informed members of Congress
led to the rout of Sanford’s amendment (Congressional Record, 29
July).

“He hadn’t done his homework,” comments Mike Lubell of the American Physical
Society. But as Lubell says, the amendment should warn scientists against using
cute project titles which only experts can interpret. In a democracy, Lubell
notes, scientists have to prove the worth of their efforts against many
competing interests, and they have to convince people who rarely possess a
technical background.

Ralph Wunder, a press spokesman for Sanford, explains that the Congressman
does not oppose science, but he believes that projects should have practical
goals and not merely explore areas of scientific curiosity. “You have to
understand, he is devoted to fiscal conservatism,” says Wunder. According to a
South Carolina newspaper, even the public pleas of a biology professor from a
university in Sanford’s own district did not dissuade him from offering his
amendment (The Post and Courier, 25 July).

While the antics of a few modern-day Know-Nothings shooting rubber bands at
science from Capitol Hill might seem comical, there is cause for concern about
many Americans’ ignorance of science. According to a survey in the NSF’s Science
and Engineering Indicators report, 75 per cent of American citizens do not
understand the nature of scientific inquiry well enough to make informed
judgments about research findings reported in the media. Results from the Third
International Math and Science Study (http://ustimss.msu.edu/) released
early this year by the Michigan State University, East Lansing, show that
American secondary school students’ grasp of subjects such as maths and science
is “profoundly disappointing” compared with the rest of the world’s.

Despite this ignorance, the American public supports government funding for
basic research by a majority of four to one. But this well of approval did not
prevent a slowdown in the growth of science spending during the lean years of
the early 1990s. An economic downturn and the hyperbole of a few cost-cutters
playing politics with science could reduce vulnerable parts of the US science
establishment to the status of the federal arts agency. This body now survives
on starvation funding while being forced to limp through a fusillade of
congressional criticism every budget season.

Released in July, the US National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Science and
Engineering Indicators report details of how publicly funded research is
increasingly creating economically important inventions. An NSF-sponsored study
of 100 000 US patents found that 73 per cent cited work emanating from academic,
government, or other publicly funded institutions as the basis for their
innovations. The NSF study reported that the number of US patents based on
public research has nearly tripled since 1988. Furthermore, in the words of the
report, “… public science cited in these references was at the basic end of
the research spectrum.”

Some of the responsibility for this explosive growth lies fairly and squarely
at the door of the information age, which has enabled extensive and rapid
electronic searches of research articles. But there is more to the trend. “We’re
seeing indications of the whole science and technology infrastructure changing,”
says Jennifer Bond of the NSF, one of the report’s authors. Partnerships of
every sort—between industry, academia and government labs on an
international scale—are becoming the norm. In today’s economy, science has
become too big an enterprise for any one company to master all the facets needed
for modern production. And with tight research budgets in most companies,
academia looks like a low-cost source of collaborators. Corporations also value
the perceived independence of public institutions to validate their
research.

In Bond’s view, there has also been a shift toward academics being interested
in problems of industry. Nations like the US and Britain, she suggests, which
have long histories of scientific collaboration with industry, are more
competitive than countries such as Germany, where the rift between the two is
more pronounced.

CHI Research, the New Jersey consulting firm that conducted the patent
research for the NSF, reports one more bombshell from a continuation of its
analysis: companies that give the highest returns on the US stock market are
those that cite public science most often in their patent applications. Across
chemical, electronic, biomedical and other industries, a statistically
significant link between long-term stock performance and use of science
citations emerges. Conducted with Baruch Lev of New York University (in a nice
example of corporate-academic collaboration), the study has not yet been peer
reviewed, but CHI released the raw data on its website on 5 August. If
confirmed, it will prove definitively that basic science is crucial to economic
advancement. ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s’ reactions to the news of their increasing importance to
industry vary. Optimists see the trend as unmitigated good news, arguing that
increased corporate awareness of its reliance on scientists can only lead to
increased funding. Taxpayers’ support for basic research will only come, they
suggest, if the public view basic research as something that puts consumer goods
on store shelves, and not as the irrelevant scribblings of eggheads. Some say
the only real predicament is a shortage of scientists interested in industrial
problems.

Not everyone feels so sanguine. “My greatest concern over so much emphasis on
science being good for the economy is that we won’t support looking for
knowledge for its own sake,” says Robert Park of the University of Maryland, who
also writes about science for the American Physical Society. Who pays for
astronomy when every project is viewed through the lens of corporate payoff?
Park also points to the potential for ethical conflicts in universities setting
up their own corporations to capitalise on basic research.

Increased industrial funding of science looms as a double-edged sword for
researchers. But if public science receives clear recognition as the engine of
economic progress in the global economy, the forecast for research budgets can
only improve.

Variations in the platinum-iridium brick have grown in past decades. And
NIST, along with the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington and a Swiss
group, among others, are racing to establish a reliable electronic measure
instead.

Described at the Conference on Precision Electromagnetic Measurements in
Washington DC, NIST’s version of NPL’s “watt-balance” device comprises an
electromagnet nearly three metres tall with a scale on top. Each side of the
balance holds a metal pan attached to a metal coil.

A standard weight is placed in one pan, and the electromagnet is powered up
while current runs through one coil. The coil current creates a force that
opposes the weight. The scale is balanced by varying the current. From this, a
value for the mass is expressed in current measured against the force of
gravity.

Next, the weight is removed and the coil is unplugged. Then the coil is moved
through the magnetic field, which creates a current. A computer measures the
velocity at which the coil’s voltage equals the result from the previous
experiment. From this, the team derives an expression for the basic unit of mass
in terms of velocity and voltage, which, like gravity, are both based on
universal constants.

Setting their two expressions equal allows them to cancel out the influence
of the weight in the first experiment, leaving behind an “electric”
kilogram.

But NIST still has to reduce its experimental error by one order of magnitude
before it can match the Paris kilogram.