Appendix 1 – Communication from Lyle Schwartz
From: Lyle Schwartz
Date: February 1, 2013, 3:09:54 PM PST
To: “Narayanamurti, Venkatesh”
Subject: Issues Article
Venky, I want to congratulate you and your colleagues for the excellent article in the latest Issues in Sci. and Tech. The subject of your concern has been at the forefront of many of my issues with congressional funders and industrial collaborators during the last nearly 30 years I’ve been in DC. While at NIST, while heading AFOSR and while participating in more than 3/4 dozen various NRC reports and Boards since retirement, the inappropriate language used to describe what it is we do has always worked to the disadvantage of understanding. The range of Federal activity in technology development is so broad that it further complicates the discussion.

In your article you used the words “research” as well as “applied science”. Then you defined and used the terms invention and discovery. In DOD parlance, “research” is designated specifically as 6.1 (basic) and 6.2 (applied) funding while development begins at the level 6.3. I believe that some clarification in your definitions is necessary, as I think invention is quite common in stages of innovation that are properly designated as development and higher (and so does the patent office which allows for patents on processes, etc.). I’m inclined to interpret your article as targeted at 6.1 and 6.2, especially since you identified only the Nobel prizes as markers in your diagram. However I would be hard pressed if it were suggested that all innovation were constrained to what we do in the “research” stages. Similarly, I’d have to look quite a bit more broadly than Nobel prizes to characterize the critical steps.

Consider these circumstances I lived:

The NIST laboratory does science and engineering with the target of improved measurement and standardization. They have nurtured four Nobel prize winners and numerous members of both NAS and NAE. However, no one in the administrative staff, our Congressionally mandated visiting committee, or our NRC organized assessment panels had any doubt that the programs we engaged in needed to be judged not only for their technical quality, but for how effective they were in achieving the desired mission goal of improved measurement and standardization. When questioned, we would often say that our portfolio contained 10-15% “basic” research designed to support the more applied activities, but fortunately we didn’t have to formally put all of our work into such crude “bins” as basic or applied. We did struggle with the very improper linear model of R&D and in one beautiful lecture some time in the late 1980’s, I recall a great lecture by our then Director, John Lyons, showing the linear model with many feed-back and feed-forward loops superimposed. Most important, many of these loops extended well into the development stages and some feed-back even beyond into Test and Evaluation). Lyons and many others for many years recognized the inadequacy of the language in common use and were thrilled when Stokes’ book appeared. We embraced our location in Pasteur’s Quadrant.

The DOD S&T system does use bins for R&D. The 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3 categories rather rigidly constrain how much money can go to work of different degrees of “advancement”. Furthermore, this work is characterized by readiness “levels” first instituted by NASA, Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) and more recently, for development and beyond, Manufacturing Readiness Levels (MRL). I directed AFOSR, funded almost exclusively by 6.1 money and therefore, supposed to do “basic” research (TRL 1-2) . Of course, AFOSR was also supposed to be an integral part of the Air Force Research Lab which meant that ~30% of our funding was to be spent within the lab by AFRL scientists and engineers. This meant that in planning our portfolio of activity, in executing at the lab, and at universities in the U.S. and abroad, and in evaluating the impact of our work, we needed to describe our work in terms that would enable our senior leaders to appreciate why they were spending these dollars. This meant linking our funded work to possible implications if successful and properly transitioned to the next level of activity. We were, of course doing Pasteur’s work.

Actually as I’ve now had the opportunity to look at Federal R&D more broadly, I’d say that with the exception of rather small portions of activity and funding within the Federal Government ( a bit of Bohr, notably at NSF and DOE), its all Pasteur’s quadrant with some leaning a bit more applied and some more basic. Unfortunately, our history, our language, our institutional definitions and the fact that most people haven’t read or even wish to read Stokes have all prevented the transformation of our inapt terminology from even seriously beginning to stick its nose under the tent here in bureaucratic DC. I applaud your effort at still another view, but am quite pessimistic about change.

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Lyle

 

 

Appendix

List of interviewees

Art Gossard
Dave Auston
David Clarke
Debasis Mitra
Eric Betzig
Evelyn Hu
Federico Capasso
Gerry Rubin
Harald Hess
Herb Kroemer
James Langer
Jim Merz
Joe Campbell
John Bowers
Lloyd Harriot
Mark Philip
Matthew Tirrell
Michael Witherell
Pierre Wiltzius
Rod Alferness
Sean Eddy
Tanya Tabachnik
Tim Harris
Tsung-Li Liu
Ulrike Herberlein