Research Crisis: Cutting off the Plant at the Roots

Scientific activity cannot be turned on and off like a faucet.

--Richard M. Nixon

IT was a campaign statement, delivered in a speech on Oct. 5, 1968, and made a point that is no less true today. Yet now, in the near-unanimous opinion of U.S. scientists, President Nixon is ignoring what Candidate Nixon said. At a time when drastic, all-around budget trimming is obviously necessary --confronting the Administration with some painful choices--sensible scientists do not expect research appropriations to keep growing at the beanstalk rate of the early 1960s, but they have hoped to maintain reasonable, normal growth. Instead, they have suffered cutbacks and hold-downs for two years, and now the Administration has submitted a budget that, despite rising costs, will keep the level of federal spending for research virtually unchanged through June 1971. As a result, some important programs will be cut down severely or actually eliminated. The net effect, says Physicist Philip H. Abelson, editor of Science, has been harshly called a "mindless dismantling of American science."

According to Dr. Lee A. Du Bridge, the President's science adviser, the overall effect of the new budget, after allowing for inflation, will be to reduce net buying power for research by about 3%. Others think the reduction will be much greater--in some cases as much as 20% in areas of fundamental scientific research that offer no immediate, practical payoffs. This is generally called "basic research," a favorite target of administrators and legislators with little patience and less vision. Out of apparently aimless inquiries have come antibiotics and transistors, vaccines and computers, transplants and spaceships. Government budget makers who try to judge a program's worth by the crude criterion "How soon will it pay off?" are bound to be wrong much of the time.

So-called basic research in the U.S. mushroomed after the Soviets' first Sputnik in 1957. From 1958 through 1965, federal expenditures for basic research increased at an annual rate of 19%, climbing from $"1 billion to $3 billion. For the next five years, however, the average increase was only 5.5% --boosting the annual sum to its present $4 billion--and that has been barely enough to keep up with inflation.

For the coming fiscal year the percentage increase is near zero--hence the net loss after inflation. Some institutions hope to keep their key programs coasting on tighter budgets. Others will simply be shut down.

Breeder Reactor. One casualty is the Princeton-Pennsylvania proton synchrotron on the Princeton campus, which is used for basic particle research by 14 universities. From a recent budget of $5,000,000 annually, the synchrotron funds have now been cut to $3.5 million, and will be down to $2,000,000 next year. Beyond that the Atomic Energy Commission is cutting off funds completely--after a total investment of $30 million on a project that, according to Director Milton White, has not yet had a chance to reach its peak efficiency. Another important tool for probing the secrets of the atom, the Cambridge Electron Accelerator at Harvard University, is in jeopardy: its budget has been cut 25%. "This," says M.I.T. Professor Victor Weisskopf, "essentially means that it will go out of business." Budget cuts have already paralyzed a less costly but still formidable piece of hardware: a $35,000 electron microscope given by New York City to New York University's department of medicine. It is lying idle because operating funds expected from the National Institutes of Health will not, after all, be supplied.

At the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, Dr. Herbert Friedman, one of the world's foremost X-ray astronomers, estimates that budget cuts combined with inflation have reduced the effective level of his support by 40% in three years. Able to afford only half as many trainees as he had expected and with no new equipment,

Friedman has drastically curtailed his studies of X-ray galaxies. He has also reduced his work on quasars and pulsars, those mysterious sources of energy in outer space that promise not only a clearer understanding of the nature of the universe and of basic physical laws but also might provide clues for developing new energy sources on earth.

Although scientists complain that the Atomic Energy Commission, along with the Department of Defense and NASA, gets a disproportionate share of federal research funds, the AEC itself has had to shut down its molten-salt breeder reactor at Oak Ridge. The Bureau of the Budget simply did not release $3,000,000 authorized for it by Congress. This was especially dismaying to environmentalists, because the breeder reactor promises, eventually, to be the cleanest and most efficient fuel source for electric power.

Barnacles and Teeth. Until recently, the Department of Defense generously funded research projects that had no foreseeable military applications. That will no longer be possible. An amendment attached to a military procurement bill by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield requires that research must be "mission-oriented" if it is to win DOD support. Mansfield learned 1) that researchers were trying to ferret out the magically strong adhesive produced by barnacles, in the hope of using it to secure fillings in teeth, and 2) that the Navy was backing barnacle research. Actually, barnacle-tooth research at the University of Akron has been funded, at a mere $40,000 a year, not by DOD but by the National Institutes of Health. The Navy has spent probably twice as much on its own barnacle research, and with good reason: scraping the adhesive crustaceans from hulls and buoys costs the Navy, Coast Guard and private shipping interests $700 million a year.

Mansfield's action points up the interlocking of many facets of research. Advances in the design of nuclear reactors and of particle accelerators have brought progress in the treatment of cancer. Vitallium alloy, developed in the 1930s for dentures, later proved valuable for its heat resistance in jet engines. Immunology depends ultimately upon the study of reactions among protein molecules. Its applications extend from the obvious field of infectious diseases and vaccination to allergies, autoimmune disorders like some forms of arthritis, to cancer, heart and kidney disease, and most dramatically, to organ transplants.

Cuts and Nibbles. Within medicine, research cannot be separated from teaching and treatment. Cuts in federal grants to medical institutions mean not only that research will be slowed down but also that fewer doctors will receive the specialized training that will enable them to give better care in the future. No fewer than 19 clinical research centers affiliated with major universities are due to be shut down. Among them: a small and always overtaxed unit at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, for children with severe digestive and metabolic problems; a twelve-bed center for acutely ill patients (including many suffering from burns) at Albert Einstein Medical Center in New York; a research institute at Indiana University, studying and treating patients (including children) with brain tumors and disorders of bone metabolism such as osteoporosis.

Prestige is no protection against the budgeteers' knives. Recent Nobel laureates in medicine, chemistry and physics have had their funds cut. So have most of the nation's great medical centers. Programs at Massachusetts General Hospital are "only being nibbled at" now, admits its tart-tongued director, Dr. John Knowles. "But," he adds, "we'll really feel it in a year if the cutbacks continue, and if they go on too long you are going to wing the country for ten years." One of the affected M.G.H. programs turned out technicians trained to read electroencephalograms (brainwave recordings). These specialists are in short supply at many hospitals. "When there's a shortage," says Dr. Robert Schwab, who runs M.G.H.'s program, "it doesn't mean that the EEGs are not read. It simply means that they are read by somebody who's no good. This is scandalous and dangerous." Another nibble victim, down the corridor, is Dr. Paul S. Russell, a top surgeon at M.G.H., whose research on antilymphocyte globulin (used to suppress the rejection reaction after heart, kidney and liver transplants) has been curtailed. Under current limitations, his staff can produce only 20% of the ALG it needs.

A lower budget forced Children's Hospital in Los Angeles to reduce the number of research beds from six to three in its genetic-disease unit, setting off a howl of community protests, including a petition to President Nixon with 20,000 signatures. (The cut has not yet been rescinded.) In many cases the drying-up of funds means not only that progress will be slowed but that money already spent will be wasted. M.D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute in Houston, which lost $1.5 million of its $8 million in federal funds, cannot add a needed and long-planned 350-bed unit. After spending years and $1,752,000 of N.I.H. money raising monkeys in an almost germ-free environment and injecting them with cancer material and viruses, Bionetics Research Labs at Bethesda, Md., expected some to start developing tumors. Then the budget ax fell. At first it was thought that the 320 monkeys would have to be destroyed, because each costs $3 a day in upkeep. Then the monkeys were reprieved and shipped out in batches to other primate centers. Whether the experiment has been ruined because of changes in their environment is not yet known.

Heart-artery diseases are America's No. 1 killer, and the No. 1 research project on their cause has been the Framingham Study. Since 1947, more than 5,000 residents of the Massachusetts town have been given regular examinations. The results, almost but not yet quite conclusive, indicate that smoking and high blood pressure and cholesterol are the most important factors in increasing the risk of early death from heart disease. The study is to be terminated June 30--to the despair of heart researchers all over the U.S.

Radical Surgery. Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research proclaims in its very name that it meets the Government jargon specification of being "mission-oriented." That has not saved it from radical budget surgery. Five years ago, says Director Frank L. Horsfall Jr., the Government supplied 51% of S.K.I.'s income. In 1968, with a federal cut and inflation, S.K.I, went $1.2 million in the red. Next year the deficit was $1.8 million, and was met by dipping into capital. Faced with still deeper federal cuts and a probable deficit of $2.6 million for 1970, the trustees have set a deficit ceiling of $1.6 million and required expenditures to be cut by $1,000,000. As a result, seven out of 69 laboratories have had to be closed, while nine others have taken cuts of 20% to 30%. Both professional and technical staffs have been reduced and further curtailment next year is inevitable.

In Buffalo, Roswell Park Memorial Institute's director, Dr. James T. Grace, has had to abandon a five-year study designed to show whether adenoviruses are a cause of cancer in man as they can be in animals.

Cancer may eventually be conquered only by a crash program along the lines of the Manhattan Project. It is equally possible that vital cancer clues will come from some seemingly unrelated "basic" research in biology. Yet the likelihood of this discovery is reduced by the decrease in the number of investigators in all the life sciences. That is where the budget cuts are hurting, and inflicting wounds that will not heal for years. The National Institutes of Health are losing valuable experienced investigators, as are the complexes of hospitals, medical schools and research institutes.

By the later 1970s, the effect on medical research could be disastrous. It is the younger men who are being dropped in the economy wave and there are no funds for replacing them next year or the year after. Says Dr. Russel V. Lee, founder of the Palo Alto Clinic: "The principal loss, to my mind, will be the great discouragement in recruitment of young men for medical research. We are cutting off the plant at the roots." Virtually all the men responsible for directing research in both the life sciences and the physical sciences share that view.

Thus there is a crisis in research that today imparts even more urgency to words spoken only 16 months ago: "In the name of economy, the current Administration cut into muscle. The U.S. must end this depreciation of research and development in its order of national priorities." That demand was made by Richard Nixon.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.