#9 The bureaucratization of science.

[Eugen Tarnow <tarnow () netcom com>]

The bureaucratization of science. 
By Eugen Tarnow, Tarnow () netcom com , submitted to the New Mexican
     --A successful scientist is somebody who sits isolated in a
little office at Harvard University and suddenly comes up with the
most extraordinary idea. Right?
     Wrong!
     If it ever used to be that way, the current climate of
bureaucratization of science has changed the situation completely.
     Scientists no longer succeed by being interested primarily in
science. Scientists need to be extremely skilled in office politics,
in pleasing granting agencies, in salesmanship of their work. In
addition, senior scientists manage large pools of junior scientists
who do a lot of work that is later attributed to the senior
scientists.
     In short, a successful scientist with permanent employment is
usually a full-fledged bureaucrat with all the faults that follow.
     --So let me try again: A successful scientist is one who works
his way to the top politicking and manages a factory of hundreds of
people? Whose ambition to get a Nobel Prize exceeds everything
else, including telling the truth? 
     Right. Carlo Rubbia. Who sells a new subatomic particle,
completely irrelevant to everyday society, as the secret of the
Universe. Nobel Prize in 1984 for the discovery of the W and Z
particles. Read the book "Nobel Dreams," by Gary Taubes.
     --And I guess you are saying: A successful scientist is one
who when the granting agencies say, "work together with industry,"
says that his work with industry can yield the most intriguing
results, be relevant to air pollution, to AIDS perhaps, why not
throw in overpopulation, and to solving other problems of the
Universe?
     Now you've got it right. That describes most of us who survive
in the field.
     --Hmm. How about the young and the innocent? Isn't a
successful junior scientist one who is very creative and works in
the newest and strangest fields?
     Wrong. A junior scientist is one who works on what his senior
boss says is important, gets little credit, and, today, often
becomes unemployed. The problem of unemployment after an
excruciatingly long education has surfaced again after twenty years
of absence. It was created by a system that encouraged university
professors to recruit many graduate students. They found out that
the more laborer they could get, the more grants and fame they
could obtain. The result: the number of graduating doctorate
students has become far too many for the job market.
     --What does a senior scientist say when he hears about the
demise of his junior colleauges?
     That the privilege of continuing a career as a scientist is
not to be expected and besides they will make excellent plumbers. 
     --What about scientists in politics - do they give politicians
good advice that they can trust?
     Yes. And then they get fired. The former director of energy
research at the Department of Energy, William Hopper, was dismissed
for trying to be scientifically, and not politically, correct. He
questioned the immediate need for large-scale mitigating measures
to fill up the ozone hole. He suggested that we first see if the
first part of the green-house effect--the heating up the earth--
actually takes place. He wanted to set up a network of instruments
to measure whether the uv-B radiation is increasing or not. Vice
President Gore, who had a stake in a best-selling book, was not
happy.
     --But Einstein never got fired! 
     True, if somebody is "an Einstein" his dissent can be
tolerated, if not followed. I do not think it was by chance that
the important but trivial O-ring problem in the NASA shuttle
disaster had to be pointed out in public by the Nobel Laureate
Richard P. Feynman. The report committee he was a member of
relegated his writings to an appendix.
     I have a keen sense of what is fair and when that is violated
I really get going. To paraphrase Franklin Scott, I think the
scientific endeavor is becoming "the art of the possible, frankly
unheroic."
     Science is inefficiently driven in incompetently laid-out
directions. Scientists adopt the outlook of the granting agencies as
to what scientific problems are important. The granting agency people
are often not active scientists and they are driven by struggles for
power and influence. Having politically motivated lay persons decide
what direction science should go in is not in the best interest of
science. For example, a Washington conversation between a "general" or
"other important character in the army" and the physicist Richard
Feynman:
     "...could I work out a way in which we could use silicon
dioxide - sand, dirt- as fuel [for a tank] --- He thought it was a
great idea, and that all I had to do was to work out the details."
(from Surely You Are Joking, Mr. Feynman", R.P. Feynman.)
     Since the politics is so important, dissent among scientists is
strongly discouraged. This inhibits progress and also makes for
inefficient science, since dissent is essential to the scientific
process. The lack of dissent and the mixing of politics and science
caused the famous Lysenko affair in the former Soviet Union. It set
back the biological sciences there several decades and cost the public
large sums of money in lowered agricultural yields.
     --What? We are certainly not to be compared to the Soviets!
     Am I too extreme? It is unlikely that an American Lysenko affair
of the same dimensions would occur. But how do we think about Star
Wars? The thirty-two billion dollars (What's New, 5/14/93) of wasted
efforts to create what most scientists understood was impossible? And
the Space Station? And are we not close to approving eleven billion
dollars for the Superconducting Super Collider on reasons of pure
political pork?
     --Come to think of it, I remember an article that appeared
recently in the Wall Street Journal about a major government
scientific installation: "'We spend $400 million of people's time
chasing a $6 million project,' says one department head." (WSJ,
7/15/93)
     Yes, the scientific inefficiency reaches grand scales. How
long will it take for scientists to start to speak up? For the
public to try to reorganize the science machine? I am not holding
my breath.

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