WASHINGTON, July 25 (UPI) -- Funding strategies at the Department of Energy's Office of Science must improve if the nation wants to maintain its technological edge, witnesses and legislators alike said at a hearing on Capitol Hill Thursday.
The House Science subcommittee on energy met to discuss how the DOE science office's budget barely has kept pace with inflation over the past decade. In comparison, funding for the National Institutes of Health has doubled in the past five years, and efforts are underway to give the National Science Foundation an identical boost. Those increases are welcome, said Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., but more needs to be done.
"I am concerned that flat funding for the Office of Science raises serious questions as to the future of basic research in the physical sciences in the U.S.," Bartlett said. "It also affects our ability to educate the next generation of scientists and engineers in these disciplines."
Part of the problem in properly funding such work is a change in the country's mindset following the end of the Cold War, said Rep. Vernon Ehlers, R-Mich.
"When you build your premise for increased funding on competition with an enemy, and the enemy disappears, you have no cause for being," Ehlers said. "(The effort) has to be reorganized to reflect a higher priority on research of the type we're talking about. There needs to be a structural reorganization as well."
Although the office's current budget of $3.2 billion seems impressive, the science facilities it supports are dealing with a much larger number of researchers than they did in 1990, said Raymond Orbach, the office's director.
"We support as many researchers outside DOE as we do within the department," Orbach told the committee.
One basic science area requiring particular attention is supercomputing, Orbach said, pointing to Japan's recent announcement of a custom-built, "classic" supercomputer, far more powerful than U.S. versions relying on thousands of ordinary processors linked together. This development marks a "Computnik," demanding a response similar to U.S. action following the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in the 1950s.
"We must bring to the table the computer scientists, the applied mathematicians and those good at creating algorithms, together with the chipmakers and computer architects," Orbach said. "We cannot afford to be second or third in this pursuit."
Legislators need to set the office on a path to double its budget within a few years, said Jerome Friedman, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in that field. Because the office's funding also impact schools, failing to do so will harm more than just today's scientists, he said.
"Reductions in university support in the physical sciences and engineering have already prompted students to seek other career paths, causing our nation to become increasingly reliant on an uncertain flow of scientists from abroad," Friedman told the committee.
As to deciding a future direction for the office's efforts, the current societal addiction to fossil fuels provides the answer, said Richard Smalley, a chemistry professor at Houston's Rice University and winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in his field. The entire human race needs an abundant, non-polluting energy supply, he said.
"The principal mission of the Office of Science should be to nurture and cultivate the science base out of which this new energy technology will come," Smalley told the committee.
Enunciating such an overriding goal for scientific endeavor will help recruit a new crop of bright, inquisitive minds, Smalley said. "The biggest breakthroughs will come in some perhaps small lab, in some surprising way, perhaps made by a brilliant young black woman who is currently not even out of high school," he said.
The idea of increasing the Office of Science's funding does have support on Capitol Hill. The Senate, in its version of the national energy bill now in conference with the House, calls for a 50 percent boost in the office's budget over four years. Subcommittee member Rep. Judy Biggert, R-Ill., is introducing legislation in the House to achieve similar goals.
