February 26, 1971
Page 4111
INDIFFERENCE TO FATE OF SCIENTIFIC AND ENGINEERING COMMUNITY
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the column entitled "A Word for Science," written by Robert Bendiner, and published in the New York Times of January 15, 1971, be printed in the RECORD. Mr. Bendiner trenchantly argues the need for utilizing our vast scientific and engineering resources in the immense tasks that we have neglected so much at home, especially the problem of pollution. The column addresses itself to those who are indifferent or even hostile to the fate of the scientific and engineering community. I think of this problem more in terms of reorienting the investments we have made in research and engineering from space and military to domestic areas.
It is the same old theme of priorities. In this case, however, we are talking about research and engineering that must be completed before meaningful capital investments can be made. For instance, in the field of pollution control, 5 years of well-financed and highly directed research in the area of waste treatment might lead to the development of techniques which in turn would make past treatment processes obsolesent or even obsolete. The research must come first.
The costs of the Vietnam war and the misallocation of our resources have delayed and perhaps fatally weakened many of our domestic programs. Even more tragic has been the overwhelming use of our scientific and engineering communities in areas that do not benefit our domestic community. We can no longer delay in reorienting at least this sector of our economy if we are to attack our domestic problems in the future with any degree of sophistication.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
A WORD FOR SCIENCE – WHAT TECHNOLOGY HAS DONE TO THE EARTH, TECHNOLOGY CAN CURE
(By Robert Bendiner)
Until recently rich and revered as the great American faith, science has fallen on lean and hungry days. Some 50,000 assorted scientists and engineers are now walking the streets, driving taxis or running gas stations. Where industry recruiters once stood in line to snag fledgling physicists before they could even shed their commencement robes, nearly half the 1967 crop of PhD's in physics still had not found fulltime work in their field two years after graduation.
Research projects once welcomed by university presidents for the lush finances they attracted to their institutions are so thinned out by now that the president of the National Academy of Sciences talks grimly of the whole national research structure approaching a "shambles."
Government money, long since become the secret ingredient of scientific progress, has in some cases shrunk in absolute terms and in others failed sadly to keep up with inflated costs. And among students themselves the linking of research with defense, of progress with pollution, has so discredited science that it has a hard time competing with Taro cards and enlightenment by way of the Zodiac.
In this age of racial romanticism a certain denigration of science is probably inevitable. An electronic rock musician rates ahead of a physicist, rationalism is equated with insensitivity and science is blamed for all the sour products of materialism, instead of materialism being blamed for the misuses of science. Yet to all who want to right the wrongs supposedly fostered by science, particularly to those who want to clean the air, water and earth of this planet, it should be plain that there has never been greater need of the scientist, the engineer and the technician or less sense in their being unemployed for so much as an hour.
We need them, to start with a modest example, to develop efficient machinery for recycling waste. Here would be a triple boon to society: It would dispose cleanly of the rubbish that threatens to bury whole populations alive; it would yield materials better than many ores now being mined to the detriment of the earth above them, and it would preserve those same resources against the day when they might be desperately in demand.
We need scientists, engineers and technicians to develop fuels that can generate more electric power without fouling earth, sea and sky in the process. But why more electric power? Indeed, why not cut back on power and return to a simpler, less demanding, way of life? If only waffle irons and electric toothbrushes were at stake, the argument would be unanswerable.
But the fact is, we need more power to do the very recycling of waste that is so desirable. We need it to operate the vastly expanded sewage treatment plants that a growing population demands. We need it for that immeasurably developed system of mass transportation that our metropolitan areas must have if the automobile is not to make the human lung outmoded. We need it for the herculean clean-up of the nation's lakes and rivers. And, not least, we need it if all who are just emerging from dire poverty are to enjoy a standard of living we have so come to take for granted that many now hold it in scorn (or pretend to). Those who have yet to enjoy it, understandably prefer not to knock it till they've tried it.
To achieve these ends – and we are concerned here with keeping the planet livable – we are going to require sources of power that do not themselves add to the world's pollution. And here is opportunity for all the technique we can muster.
European cities, particularly Vienna, have made considerable progress in producing electricity as well as heat from solid waste. We are still not sure about picking the stuff up. Coal is the greatest power source we have, but it is dangerously dirty. Ultimately it will be converted to clean efficient gas – but when? Nuclear fuel promises equally clean and even cheaper power, but atomic plants are still in the Model-T stage. If time, talent and money were concentrated on the breeder reactor, the results could be enormously rewarding.
So it goes. Unlimited cheap fuel with no pollution whatever is the promise of controlled hydrogen fusion, which is thought to be some thirty years off. But need it be? Likewise off in the distance are such other great potentials as oil from shale and geothermal power.
The importance of all these sources lies in the fact that electricity itself is totally clean and nonpolluting. Let it at last be cleanly produced and cleanliness will follow in space heating, in industry, in transportation, in everything. The world will be so sanitized that we might almost miss the dirt.
On all these fronts – not to mention fields like biology, medicine and oceanography, which not even the most romantic rebel deplores – there is such great good to be done that funds, far from being begrudged, should be poured out as though our lives depended on it. They do.