Dr. LENHER. Well, that is a difficult question. I think I would assign to the National Science Foundation the job of setting priorities. Now, the implementation of priorities is the responsibility of branches of the Government other than the National Science Foundation, but I would think that the National Science Foundation has been and would be in the future in an excellent position to exercise discrimination between fields, not to be able to implement fully that discrimination, because this is the responsibility of the executive and legislative branches of the Government, but to indicate what priorities they think are most important.

This brings in another role in expressing points of view. If OST, to follow your suggestion, had this role, I am afraid there might be only two points of view considered-OST and the legislative. This may be all right, but I would suggest that a third agency, of more presumed independence, could express an opinion without it being determining.

Mr. DADDARIO. Dr. Lenher, you also stressed the importance of the Government doing a great deal if not most of its basic research in the universities.

Dr. LENHER. Yes.

Mr. DADDARIO. I wonder if you might have some comment about how we develop and maintain the kind of financial support necessary for the universities, with the proper mix of Government as well as industrial and private donations. At a time when it appears that Government participation, as heavy as it is, is not enough to keep up with the great growth and needs of the universities and at a time when financial deterioration seems to be setting in in an inordinate way, will chemical industry or industry generally, which has been a strong supporter of the universities through grants and fellowships and direct support, increase or decrease its support because the Federal Government has participated so heavily? What needs to be done in this particular area?

Dr. LENHER. Well, Mr. Daddario, my view is that the Federal Government should give strong support to graduate schools in the universities and should give strong support to long-range research. Research and teaching are really coupled together, but research as a support of high-quality teaching, of excellence in our universities. I think this is a role in which the Federal Government should play the major part. I think industry, private individuals and foundations can supplement that support, but I believe in our culture that this is a major responsibility of the Federal Government for supporting higher education.

I would separate that, perhaps to anticipate a further question, from support of teaching and of undergraduate work. But I think for advanced work, which can look for support from very few sources, the Federal Government is an important source to be looked to in the future.

I think the support the Federal Government has given this work in the past decade was largely responsible for the great surge forward in science in this country, which we are seeing. I think that support in the future would be wisely adjusted to a level which could be met over a period of years without wide fluctuations. This perhaps is diffi

cult to accomplish, but I think that level of support would be better stabilized at a lower level, rather than to come up to some high level and then be reduced because of the press of other necessities in the whole Federal budget.

With regard to support from industry, I think industry support of the universities has continued on, at least from the chemical industry, with steady but modest increases in the face of the increased Federal support of science in the universities, and I expect this will continue. I would be surprised if industry support of the universities would not substantially increase should the Federal Government find it impossible to increase support of the universities, particularly in the graduate schools. But this is speculative.

We are so strongly dependent on highly trained technical people for the strength of an industry, that I am sure in enlightened self-interest industry would increase its support of higher education.

Mr. DADDARIO. In one place you talk about the need to support the young graduate student. Is this in keeping with the idea that you have to have both short-range and long-range goals and the young graduate students are the ones on whom we must depend in the future?

Dr. LENHER. Yes.

Mr. DADDARIO. For the continuation of our science effort.

Dr. LENHER. Yes, indeed.

Mr. DADDARIO. Is that part of your reason for supporting the idea not only that the Federal Government ought to be heavily engaged but it ought to be heavily engaged in a continuous and somewhat predictable way insofar as support of education is concerned?

Dr. LENHER. I think you put it very well. Yes, that is my view.
Mr. DADDARIO. Mr. Mosher.

Mr. MOSHER. I am a little troubled, Dr. Lenher, about the comments you just made, your emphasis on support for the graduate schools. You aren't implying that excellence in the graduate schools can be neatly separated from excellence in undergraduate schools, are you? Dr. LENHER. I didn't intend to imply that, no.

Mr. MOSHER. I hope you wouldn't. Because I think the Government has considerable responsibility to support and encourage excellence in the undergraduate schools, too, for the very reason that you can't have excellence in graduate work without feeding into the graduate schools excellent students.

Mr. Chairman, Dr. Lenher has certainly given us a fascinating exposition of the way one very distinguished and successful corporation operates in the area of science and of research and development, and obviously we, as he suggests, are going to have to make judgments as to what we can learn from the way this corporation operates and apply it to Government, and I suppose that means that right from the start we have got to decide where the goals of the corporation and the goals of the Government differ. That leads me back to a question that I think was the first question that the chairman asked, or similar to that.

Dr. Lenher, you say, starting at the bottom of your page 13, "It is possible for a research question to be original and fascinating but not worth the cost of answering. Unless we," that means the corporation, "have some reason to believe that the answer would take us in a direction we want to go we do not undertake such a quest.”

Later on page 19, you say "To merely assert that a research project will expand basic knowledge is not enough. Project proposals should not only explain technical content but also should contain a justification related to potential uses of the findings."

I am sure we all recognize that the history of science is replete with situations where a researcher discovered something he couldn't conceivably had anticipated and that applications developed that no one could have anticipated. I can understand where a corporation has to be much more careful about this, in managing its science, but shouldn't Government and the essential interests of society and of the Government and of the scientific community, shouldn't these require that Government rather generously support research merely for the sake of expanding basic knowledge, without any certainty that it is going to lead to some application? Isn't this one basic difference between a corporation's goal and the Nation's goals that we have to keep in mind?

Dr. LENHER. Oh, I think it is a determining difference.

Mr. MOSHER. Yes.

Dr. LENHER. Our scientific program and our technical program, I tried to point out as sharply as I could, have to be narrower than that of the Government. Our scientific and technical work has to be related to what we think is the corporate interest. Our goals, while we try to set them and have them followed clearly, must be entirely different, I think, from those of the Federal Government.

Mr. MOSHER. Yes.

Dr. LENHER. I think the Federal Government's goals should be very much broader. But I think they also should be understood, if possible, defined, recognized, and worked against, whether this be supporting research in the broad area of high-energy physics at one particular time, and perhaps in biology or genetics, at another time, or all three of those concurrently but in varying amounts. I think it is desirable to have a discrimination among those and that is all I am suggesting, that the Government might draw an analogy from our industry.

Mr. MOSHER. But at some point, and I assume this would be in the National Science Foundation, shouldn't we rather generously support science that doesn't immediately give evidence of supporting an end goal? Probably our discrimination there should be a matter of discriminating between men of quality and excellence as well as abilitygiving money to support scientists who obviously have ability and genius and let them have their own head and search for knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself.

Dr. LENHER. I would think in the future, as I read the past of the National Science Foundation, they should support talent where they recognize it.

Mr. MOSHER. Yes.

Dr. LENHER. There should be funds there coming from the Federal Government. The amount certainly will have to vary with the level of the national economy, but with the high level of prosperity in which we have been living for the last few decades, I think money should be found for that purpose, Mr. Mosher.

Mr. MOSHER. I won't take more time at this point.

Mr. DADDARIO. Just one question before I turn the time over to Mr. Brown, following Mr. Mosher's question. It was my understanding that although you felt that there should be this definition of objectives both in Government and out, that you did feel that research of all kinds ought to be supported and this ought to be done as a whole through Government and this should be through the kind of support that you recommended we give to the universities, and that we develop our researches within those institutions rather than primarily in-house. It was my feeling that you were recommending to us, too, that although your industrial departments had had this fine line of definition as a responsibility, that they should and were allowed to do a certain. amount of basic research, even of the most esoteric kind, to develop quality. When we did discuss the national laboratories, and your prepared statement touches on this, that there ought to be some flexibility in this area of research.

Dr. LENHER. Those are my views.

Mr. DADDARIO. Mr. Brown?

Mr. BROWN. Well, I would like to say that I feel that Dr. Lenher has made a very real contribution in his analysis of the experiences of his own industry. I would just like to ask one or two questions.

You say on page 16, at the bottom of the page, that "Federal research with short-range objectives and research with an engineering or technological content have little to gain, and probably as much to lose, from centralized control."

I presume that you mean that research activities carried on by a mission-oriented agency such as the Department of Defense should not be subject to a Government-wide coordination but that as long as it does have a definite relevance to their mission that they should be more or less at their own discretion as to how they carry it out.

Dr. LENHER. Yes; that is my view, Mr. Brown. But what I was trying to bring out there was to focus attention on the question of centralization of Federal science, rather than Federal technical work. I think there is an important distinction between scientific work and technical work. I think the technical work should almost take care of itself. If its purpose is well defined, its limits should be quite clear. They are practical, they are engineering, and they are easily comprehended. Scientific work, I think, requires very much more careful study and thought as to whether it ought to be centralized or left alone. But the short-range technical work, it is clear to me, I would leave where it is closest to its sponsor.

Mr. BROWN. Well, we have the experience, as I am sure you well know, that a good deal of the support for research of various kinds, whether you call it basic or applied or whatever, has been funded or sponsored by the Department of Defense.

Dr. LENHER. Yes.

Mr. BROWN. This has caused some real problems within the last year or two or three. For example, in high energy physics, the relevance of this to the immediate mission of the Defense Department seems not to have been crucial and therefore-and this is only one example-they have tended, when they face a budgetary stringency, to slough off this particular kind of research. Now, from what you have said I would

feel that possibly they should not have been engaged in this full gamit of what we might call strictly theoretical or basic research since it apparently did not bear a close relationship to their immediate mission. Dr. LENHER. I don't want to make a judgment with regard to the last part of your question, Mr. Brown, as to whether they should or should not, but I do have the view that, if that type of work is undertaken in the interest of the Department of Defense and it is purely scientific work, to raise the question wouldn't it be better sponsored by the National Science Foundation and with that work supported by the National Science Foundation wouldn't the work itself be in a better posture opposite the Nation as a whole, particularly with the spectrum of political and social opinion that Federal science has to face in the way of criticism-wouldn't that support come better from the National Science Foundation than from the Department of Defense, even though it is exactly the same project?

Mr. BROWN. Yes.

Dr. LENHER. I would say it would come better from the National Science Foundation.

Mr. BROWN. Well, apparently the Department of Defense felt this way also since it in effect suggested that some of this work go to the National Science Foundation. The problem was that the National Science Foundation faced the same or even worse budgetary restrictions at the same time that the Department of Defense did. So in a very real sense, we would have been better off if the work had originally been placed with the National Science Foundation.

Dr. LENHER. I think so.

Mr. BROWN. Rather than with the Department of Defense, which of course at one time was an agency where funds were relatively easier to obtain than they were for the National Science Foundation. But this problem has bothered me.

The Defense Department does engage in some very worthwhile research of a fundamental nature. The Office of Naval Research has an excellent record in this regard and other similar agencies.

Dr. LENHER. I know.

Mr. BROWN. The real question, it seems to me, is are they appropriately funding the full range of the job that they are doing or through some form of overview have they been limited to activities which bore more directly upon their specific mission? This may be very difficult to determine.

On page 17, following on with your reasoning, you have stated that this long-range basic research be subjected to more centralization, and I presume you are thinking in terms of the responsibilities for the funding of this research primarily rather than through the direct control of the direction of the research itself. We have heard a number of statements to the effect that it is best not to try and exercise to close a control over the content of basic research from a centralized agency, but I want to make clear in my mind whether you are saying that we should attempt to dictate to the basic researcher, or whether we should merely seek by the processes of funding to establish a degree of priority or order of magnitude of the work that is going on.

Dr. LENHER. My thought there was to help in establishing priorities to support the work that was considered in several views, from several