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Neal Lane
Dr. Daniel: Welcome everybody! It's great to have you here. I am David Daniel, the University's president, and it's just a tremendous honor for me to welcome you to this conversation and celebration of dual purposes today; and indeed, there are two reasons to celebrate. One reason is that this year marks the 25th anniversary of the publication Issues in Science and Technology, our main point of the celebration; but it also happens to be our 40th anniversary year at UT Dallas, and we sort of have two birthdays to celebrate. We are so pleased to have all of you with us. But this focus is about Issues and subjects relevant to Issues. Issues is a quarterly magazine, published jointly by the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine and UT Dallas. What published jointly means is that we all write checks for that, and if you didn't get a copy of Issues there are many copies on the credenza outside. Kevin is that the one that is hot off the press?
Kevin: Yes.
Dr. Daniel: This is how important you are. Most magazines would give away the older copies, but you get the stuff that's hot off the press. It focuses on the exploring and explaining matters of policy affecting science, engineering and medicine. And we are very pleased, of course, that the University has had a role in such an important publication and thought provoking publication. And for those of you who are sort of traditionalists and worry about where your classic, thoughtful, beautifully written, wonderfully illustrated publication that you can actually physically take with you might be: well it's still alive and it manifests itself, at least in that relevant today, to the publication issues. We are joined today by Mr. Kevin Finneran, who is the editor of Issues, and who in a sense is issues, and of course our guest speaker Dr. Neal Lane, former presidential science policy advisor. Neal, we are so honored to have you with us today.
Mr. Finneran will be introducing Neal Lane here in just a minute, but I want to tell you just a little bit about Kevin Finneran. He's been with Issues almost from the beginning. The magazine was founded in 1984, and he joined the staff in 1987. As I said, in a sense he is Issues, and if you've ever watched him work, you know why that's true; and if you wonder how it is that we have such gloriously, well-qualified writing letters to the editor and so forth, it's because Kevin gets on the phone and says, "How would you like to comment about global warming? Do you have any opinion about that?" And lo and behold, one of the thought leaders of science and technology in the nation is writing a piece for that. Just a few months ago, the members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS as we refer to it, honored Kevin through the AAAS fellowship in the organization's section on societal impacts of science and engineering. These fellows are awarded to those whose efforts, on behalf of the advancement of science or its application, are scientifically or socially distinguished. In fact, it's that intersection between science, engineering and medicine in public policy and ramifications for our way of life here on the planet that are the focus of Issues.
We are just extremely pleased, Kevin, that you were honored by being named a fellow, and, although this may have come as a surprise to you, it came as no surprise to those of us who work with you and know you. We're also very proud, not only of Kevin, but his two full time colleagues: managing editor Bill Hendrickson and circulation director Sonja Gold as well as their assistant Carolyn Hall, all of whom work to put together Issues in such a wonderful way. Let's give these folks a round of applause for our appreciation. Now it's my pleasure to invite to the podium Mr. Kevin Finneran, who will make remarks and introduce your speaker. Kevin.
Kevin: Thank you, Dr. Daniel. As a long-distance employee of UTD, it's a pleasure to be on campus for a change, and to be able to thank the University in person for its generous support of the magazine. It should be clear that we would not be celebrating our 25th anniversary and entering into what I call senior citizenship for print publications, were it not for the support of the University; so I'm delighted to be here, and I'm delighted to be associated with the University. I actually believe that sponsoring a forum for the national discussion of science, technology and healthcare policy is really illustrative of UTD's Archer evolution as a university and its evolution into becoming a great university. Creating high-quality undergraduate programs and expanding the research portfolio have been essential steps, but the University's leaders recognize that the University has a civic responsibility to participate in the nation's intellectual and political life. Its sponsorship of Issues is one of only many ways that it's doing that, but it's the one that I'm most aware of, and it's the one that really extends beyond the boundaries of the campus and the state and really beyond the boundaries of the United States.
Issues does have international readership, so UTD is making its presence felt. In that spirit, I think it's particularly appropriate that our guest speaker today is Dr. Neal Lane. Dr. Lane began his career as an educator and a research physicist working at Rice University. That's also where he started his warehouse collection of awards for teaching, research and, now, for his service to society. He became provost at Rice. He was also a Chancellor at the University of Colorado, and eventually he answered the call from Washington to become the director of the National Science Foundation. It's the nation's, and I would think the world's, premier funder of the physical sciences. As NSF director, he played a key role in what we call "policy for science," building the strength of the research enterprise. Just before he reached the end of his term at NSF, President Clinton tapped him to become his personal science advisor and the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. With this move, he expanded his mission to include what we called "Science for Policy," identifying the ways that science and technology contribute to the nation's over arching goals: national security, public health, economic development, environmental protection.
Neal Lane has become the epitome of the civic scientist, so it's no surprise that earlier this year, the National Academy of Sciences added to his impressive list of honors and achievements by giving him its most prestigious award, the Public Welfare Medal. We could not ask for a more experienced, or more perceptive guide to the Obama Administration's S&T policy challenges and opportunities. It's an honor and a pleasure to introduce Neal Lane.
Neal: Thank you very much, Kevin and President Daniel. I'm delighted to be here. Is this mic working for me? Can everyone here me to the back? Thank you very much. Yes, you could find a more experienced and perceptive person, but I'm what you got today, so we'll carry on. I'm delighted to be here to celebrate with you the 25th anniversary of Issues and the 40th anniversary of this fine university. I think many of us in the room, and that certainly would include me, believe that the best is even yet to come in the case of UT Dallas. The state needs this institution to move forward even beyond where it is now, and it has made enormous progress in the time that I've been following activities here, and I have many colleagues here, but this city and this state are very much looking forward to leadership of this campus, its administration and the students who are graduating from here. So, it's wonderful to be with you for this 40th birthday.
Now, I was asked to talk about science in the Obama Era. I don't have any profound information here, but one thing I learned in Washington, as Kevin certainly understands, is not having anything profound to say does not encourage anybody to not talk. So, I sort of caught on to that, and I'll spend a little time, at least, sharing some experiences, some comments based on scars and bruises, I guess, is what you would say. So here's how I'd like to organize the talk: I want to try to set a little bit of context for the discussion by talking about the last 60 years. We won't be able to spend time on each year, but we'll kind of do a broad brush treatment. Then, I'll move to a few challenges that I think we're facing as a nation and therefore science and technology faces because it is so closely coupled with the future of this country and our ability to cope with these challenges. Then, I'll talk about the Obama era and maybe we'll talk together about the future: where we think we might go from here.
So, a little background: before WWII, the federal government was interested in two things that had to do with higher education and research and development — agriculture and mechanics. They had in mind the needs of the farmers and the needs of industry for educated people to advance the cause of America in both of those realms. The Moral Acts, one during the civil war and one right after the civil war, and other legislation. Combined, they gave rise to the land-grant colleges, to the agricultural cooperative extension centers, and a long really quite impressive history of a relationship, really a partnership if you like, between the federal government and higher education.
Based on that success, I would say, when the second world war came around it was necessary for the federal government to try to mobilize universities in industry, universities to train men and women to fight the war, but also to carry on the research that was otherwise not going to be done because we didn't have all the national laboratories that you might need to do things that the government needed for its war fighting capability. So, that strengthened the partnership between the federal government and the universities, and a lot of money flowed to universities from federal government: not just agriculture now, but to physics and chemistry and engineering and other departments in the university.
After the war, that successful effort that the people began to point was the navy, were worth some sustainable arrangement established a partnership, an ongoing partnership that continues today between the federal government and universities. So, you pay your tax money, you'll pay more tax money when the time comes, you'll pay tax money, federal government uses some of that tax money to fund some of the faculty on this campus and students to do research, which we publish in the open literature and is available for use by government and mainly by the private sector. The individual who is often credited with getting this idea established in post-WW2 time is this guy named Vannevar Bush. Vannevar Bush was an MIT engineer. Analogue computing was his game. He then became president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and advised the Roosevelt White House from that position for a number of years, but when war broke out, Roosevelt tapped him to come over to the White House and run the US Government's establishment in research and development. That mainly meant butting hips together, getting the defense agencies to work together and to work with non-defense agencies, building relationships with universities; so that if this money did go to the university to work on the war effort, that actually happened.
Manhattan Project was an example of the kinds of things that he did during the war, but after the war, he told Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt after Roosevelt's death in 1945, he told Truman through this report, called "Science: The Endless Frontier", that the science that worked so well in winning the war is also going to be effective in peace time. It is going to be important to the future of this country, and so the government needs to continue this partnership with higher education, needs to continue to provide money for basic research, indeed the government should take on what I call "new responsibilities" here. I'm sorry this will be impossible to read from the back. The government should accept new responsibilities for promoting the flow of new scientific knowledge and the development of scientific talent in our youth.
So, right away, in 1945, it was recognized that the government needed to continue this partnership and was going to be valuable not only the fund research that would produce papers and knowledge, but to actually help fund the education, especially the graduate education of young people because they were so important to the nation. Here's the rest of the history, so we won't spend a lot of time on each president, but here are all the presidents from Roosevelt through Obama, and we'll spend a little more time, clearly, on Obama toward the end, and here also are their science advisors. Now, science advisors are...The concept is a little bit complicated because the nature of those jobs changed as we go through this list. We could have a whole lecture on each one of these presidents and their relationship, but what I want to do with this list is try to suggest some general principles that I think we can pull from the experiences these people have. One thing to observe is that from Truman until through Regan, we were in a Cold War with the Soviet Union. So, this peace time that Vannevar Bush talked about was not really peace time at all, in the sense that the world...it was a Cold War in the sense of the word. A Cold War with the Soviet Union, and out of that came Korean conflicts early on, then the Vietnam War, and lots of problems along the way.
So much of what occupied the attention of the President and the people around him in that entire period, had to do with the Cold War. Along the way then, science advisors came and went. For the most part, they were very good, as far as I know. All of them were quite good at their jobs, but their success depended on circumstances, often over which they had no control. So, if there were a hot issue like Sputnik, so the Soviets launched two Sputnik satellites a month apart in 1957 that was on Eisenhower's watch. The country panicked, we lost the space race and if nobody got the message. Kennedy was getting ready to run for President, and he reminded the country that under Eisenhower we'd lost the space race. So, it was a big political deal, but more than that, it was a serious issue of national security. So Eisenhower beefed-up the spending in defense spending but also spending in research and development, including the space effort, and then when Kennedy was elected, very shortly after his election he gave two speeches that are notable in this regard. One to a joint session of congress, the other to Rice University in the stadium on a very hot September day, which he had said, "We're going to send a man to the moon and return him safely to Earth. We're going to do it within a decade."
He challenged the nation; and he said, "We're going to do it, not because it's easy, but because it's hard."
That happened. The moon landing occurred, first moon landing in 1969. Kennedy was assassinated of course and did not live to see that happen, but it was the beginning of NASA, formed in 1958, and it began our space program. That period...in that period, the science advisors under Eisenhower: Robbie, Killion, Castillakowsky were very influential. They were very focused on Cold War issues, they were focused on the arms race, they were focused on the space race, but after NASA was formed and Jerry Weesner came in with Kennedy, science advisor was not so necessary anymore, not so much needed to carry out the policy. NASA was there, the job was to go to the moon. We started with Mercury, John Glenn's flight, Gemini, and then Apollo. So, Weesner was not so influential. Johnson did not care much about science. Johnson was for great society programs: Medicare, Medicaid, Civil Rights, Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, which he signed. He had very little to do with his science advisor. Besides that, as the Vietnam War heated up, and as we out on the campuses I remember well, because I'm very old, out there with our protests and our plight, but Johnson did not care for any of that, and it drove a wedge between Johnson and the science community. He identified with the academic community, so science advisor had a hard time during that period.
Nixon — well, what should we say? Nixon had a lot of problems, some not of his own making. He had an oil shock where there was an OPEC embargo against the United States on oil. The price of oil went up, supplies went down. He had a stock market crash toward the end of the time he was an office. He cared about a certain kind of science. He launched the war on cancer, that started with Nixon, and that began a long period that continues today of significant growth in biomedical research. He did not like his science advisors much for some of the same reasons Johnson did not. They did not like the things he was doing, and they were often outspoken about various defense strategies that President Nixon had in mind. Certainly, the Vietnam War, but not just the Vietnam War. Also ballistic missiles issues, and not ballistic missiles, but missile testing. Arms issues of various kinds. The supersonic transport plan was proposed during those days and killed, in part, by activities that could be associated with science community. Nixon finally had enough. He fired all of his advisors, sent them home, some got a chance to resign, others were just fired outright. People who had served on advisory committees, a David Junior who was a very distinguished scientist.
So these, and then so far through the years. Ford came in after Nixon's resignation. Ford reinstated science in the White House. He went to congress and said, "Not only do we want science in the White House, science policy in the White House, we want it in law." So, a law was passed, the Office of Science and Technology Policy was created, and the first director of that was Guy Stever. Guy Stever, I think, beyond that did not have a lot to do with the administration's policies. Carter came in with Frank Press. Carter had problems. He also had another big oil shock in 1979. He had inflation with stagnated economy, so stagflation as we learned to call it. He had the Iranian revolution; he had the Iranian's capture of hostages, US Service Personnel. That hostage situation lasted 444 days and was part of the undoing of President Carter. So, one can understand that he may not have worked as closely with his science advisor during some of these happenings as other times. Reagan came in interested in downsizing parts of government; he certainly killed several of NSF's programs: education, social sciences. His advisor was Keyworth. Keyworth was not really able to work very closely with Reagan. I think Reagan has another unofficial advisor named Edward Teller, and Edward Teller sold him on the idea of the Star Wars missile defense shield.
President Reagan announced that, somewhat surprising his science advisor and the rest is history. Bush succeeded Reagan and now we have a break because the Berlin fall came in 1989. The Cold War was no longer such a threat as it was, but also no longer such a rationale for strong federal research funding, and research and development as it had come to be all through these years. So, Bush agenda then was much broader, but suddenly the focus was clearly on issues like the environment and health and economic competitiveness, and with great concern in that period about the US ability to compete, as there is now, in an increasingly competitive global marketplace. So, Allen Brumley was his science advisor. Allen Brumley was a very effective science advisor but he was effective, not just by being a smart guy, but he also was able to coordinate different parts of government to deal with these broad issues that ran across agency lines. No single agency like NASA could take this problem and go do it. It required the working together of several agencies. Promptly, in fact promptly said, in his writings that's what he felt his chief accomplishment was, getting these agencies to work together. Finally that brings us to Clinton and George W. Bush. When I was in NSF, when Clinton was a president and George W. experienced a wonderful agency they moved over to the White House in 1993 following Jack Gibbons.
Clinton had many of the same sorts of strategic issues that his predecessor George H.W. Bush had, was much broader agenda, and was not about the cold war, it was about health and education and environment, climate change and the case of Clinton and Gore, and the other sorts of issues. So the ability of the science advisor to coordinate agencies remained very important. And Jack Gibbons, my predecessor in the White House is very good at doing that. First of all, Clinton was very positive about science, in fact he was positive about a lot of things, and they all cost money and so he wanted a smaller class size, well that's going to cost couple of billion dollars, he wanted more cops on the street. There was a crime build, and that's going to cost a couple of billion dollars, and that was, in part, his undoing with political support also. He was favorable towards National Institutes of Health, cancer research, those budgets did well. I felt that my budget in NSF did not do as well as it should, given the obvious merit, but the arguments, strength and character of its director, but none the less, that's the way the game is played in Washington. Towards the end of the Clinton administration — I was in the White House at that point — Clinton became convinced that the physical science in particular, in fact every area of science, except biomedical research has really been underfunded. And the country was probably beginning to pay a price for that.
Hal Varmus, who was the head of NIH when I was in Washington, even talked about that issue that medical research needs the tools, matter physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, all of fields of engineering, so if you underfund those, even the medical researchers do not have what they need to do their job well. Hal Varmus has always stopped short of saying, "Therefore, you are wasting your money on us," so, I never heard him say that, and I don't think he believed it.
So in fact Clinton's later budgets were always extremely good. The only budget I had a chance to advise him on was for the fiscal year 2001 — that was one of the best science budgets that we have had in recent history. NSF nearly doubled, he requested nearly as double largest increased foundation had ever gotten, I wanted to sort of be back at NSF rather than the white house. Clinton also launched the national nanotechnology initiative at that time. He launched it at about 500 million dollars, he liked it, he thought it was funny. He said, "This is my tiny, little initiative of nanotechnology," and I said "Yes, Mr. President, it's a tiny, little initiative, but it's going to cost us 500 million dollars," and so he said "Okay" after some careful thought.
That initiative is now a billion point six, so President Bush was very supportive of it, it had bipartisan support on this, and it's doing quite well. So, what about our most recent President, George W Bush? I would say that it's a mixed message on science. George W. Bush, very soon after coming to office, was met with an unprecedented challenge this country has had, namely 9/11, and that pretty well set the agenda for the remainder of the term. The decision to go into Iraq was not popular across the country, and, therefore, the division continued and that got in the way of a lot of the domestic agenda that was very important. On the science front, on the positive side, President Bush had supported NIH in the early years, continuing a doubling amendment congress had made. He could have pushed that back, but he did not do it. It was a republican initiative and he supported it, signed the bills, but then after NIH had doubled, he cut their budget every year from then on by essentially holding it flat and so losing to inflation. Toward the end of that period, he also recognized that the physical sciences needed more help. That, I think was a result of famous to us, some of us anyway, report out of the national academy "Rising Above the Gathering Storm," which I'll talk about, and also increasing interest in congress about the concern about competitiveness.
What is the government doing to be sure that our industry is able to compete with other industry or more of the world. On the negative side, some people in his administration appeared to put politics above science and did some things that caused the community to come out very vocally against those continuing those kind of activities, sort of in the context of integrity of science. No one ever accused the President of not respecting or appreciating the value of science. So another way to look at the history is money — how is the money spent. Again, I'm sorry in the back, this is very hard to see. What this plot is, if you're able to see it, is a — on the vertical axis is billions of constant dollars, on the horizontal axis is years, and it is federal spending on defense and non defense research and development. So this is everything anybody might consider to be related to science. In the case of defense, which is the lower gray stuff here, the defense money is mainly development, is mainly large weapon's development and testing: new battleships, new aircraft, new aircraft carriers, and so forth, and the missile defense program down here.
For most of the research is up in the non-defense area, the red part, and one can see some of the things I just talked about on this graph. 1957 was the launch of Sputnik. Sudden big jump, this is just R&D, this is not the total defense budget, the sudden jump in R&D spending in the beginning of an increase in civilian R&D spending and much of that was in space. We'll see that clearly in a minute. Then we go over to President Reagan, we see another big military buildup in part the missile defense programs, the Star Wars programs, and then we come to President George W. Bush and the other military buildup in connection with the wars and Afghanistan and Iraq, but this is just R&D funding, this is not funding necessary to fight the wars. Many of us talk about a golden age during this period; we think back "Ah, remember the golden age in science, back when I was a young little bitty physicist just going for my first grant?" If you're going to start a golden age, it probably started with Sputnik because, while President Kennedy may not have paid a lot of attention to science, the Apollo project excited thousands of Americans, many of whom wanted to be scientists and engineers. Many of us got our start during that period; also a great deal of money flowed through agencies like NSF as well as NASA and others.
So, this certainly was a golden age; it wasn't just about space, I put Apollo up here because it cost a lot of money, so much of this bump is the Apollo program, but it was the exciting period for everybody in science, engineering, math; we all wanted to do more and study more. In Reagan's period I put Star Wars in here just to remind us of where we are and then Iraq, of course, is a big issue. So where do you stop the golden age? Many people would stop it, pretty much, after Apollo. They would say it really tailed off after Apollo. All the excitement died down, and it never got generated again. I don't know whether I would put — sometimes I give a talk where I stop it at 9/11, not that I know 9/11 has put an end to the golden age of science, but it was such an extreme event, such an unprecedented event that it changed the whole American psyche and it reset policy. So, at least, you could ask the question about how science is going to fair after 9/11. You take away the defense part, which has all these big ships and aircraft carriers and so forth, and just look at non-defense research and development, this is mainly research, it's the same idea, it's billions of constant dollars on the vertical axis and it's time across the bottom: from 1953, in this case, to 2005 or 6 or 7. So, this tells you a different message consistent with what I just said. The space program really expanded with Apollo and then went down and it's never been the same since.
We've done a lot: shuttle program has been very successful, planetary missions, space station, and it all costs money, but it was not this early space period. Meanwhile, biomedical research has grown steadily all the way through here until now, funding for NIH is half of all the federal government's spending on research. So, if you say, "Well, how much does the federal government spend on research?" Well, it spends about 50 billion dollars. Half of that, or a little more, all goes to NIH; so, again, it raises a policy issue: is that the right balance? I don't think so. It's not the right balance, and it's a policy issue to deal with. So, let me try to draw some lessons: some of the things I've forgotten to say, but let me say that I would conclude from the history of these presidents and also from the way the money has flowed. So, the first lesson is two forces have driven science policy and the money, I would argue. The first is threats to our national security, and the second is threats to our health. Second, and now from a perspective of the science advisor thinking about "How do I serve my president?", the President wants advice on is top priorities, whatever they are.
They might be urgent issues: wars, disasters, crises; or his agenda: the economy in this case, health care, education, whatever it is. If you, a science advisor, cannot relate to the President's issues that are on his mind and of all the people who surround him, you're not going to break through. You're not going to be very effective, and science, then, is not going to look like it's playing a very important role. Of course, people know science is about fundamental knowledge. More knowledge is better than less knowledge. It's part of our culture. It's important to our civilization. Generally, those things the public thinks of in terms of decades, centuries, millennia. Here, the science advisors think about next year's budget, so it's very important to keep in mind what the President's thinking about and how you can connect. It doesn't mean you do bad things. It doesn't mean you spend science money on things that shouldn't be spent on. It just means this is where you need to make your connections. Third thing, policy decisions weigh factors other than science and the political advisors who are closer to the President in every administration than everybody else, don't bow to science. Their job is not science. Their job is to watch the President's back, think about how many electoral votes in California, and how news is going to play on a particular policy issue the President's going to have to deal with. So, if you don't work with them, you don't understand how they function, and you also can't be effective.
I would say throughout the history of science advisors, some got that point and some did not, and it influenced their effectiveness. In some cases, they just got caught between a rock and a hard place and nobody could have done anything better than they did. So, a few challenges. Well, one way to think about these challenges, and I'll use a slide loaned to me by the late Rick Smalley: Rice University faculty member, Nobel Laureate, co-discoverer of Buckey Balls. You could say invented it because he actually built a model in his kitchen, but it's a feature of nature and he won the award with Rice's Bob Kearl and Harry Kroto of the United Kingdom. Rick, especially after he won the Nobel Prize, he went around the country talking about problems and how science can be brought to bear — science and technology could be brought to bear to solve these problems. He put at the top of his list of problems, energy. He didn't mean the others were necessarily less important; his point was if you can't deal with energy, you're not going to deal with the world's need for water or food or the environmental challenges or poverty or terrorism or war. They all relate in one way or another, in different ways, but they all relate to energy, and his belief was we needed new breakthrough technologies to crack this energy problem. I think he's right and still right today. No existing technologies, if you straight lined them into the future, convince me, anyway, that we've solved the energy problem and the 10-20-30-50 year future.
The world's expanding; we could have eight to ten billion people on the planet by 2050, and, since something had to be done, there was some urgency to this issue. He would say, and I certainly believe, that nations that expect to lead in this environment, are going to need innovative approaches and new tools, and that means science and technology. Here's another way to think about some challenges: these are challenges, in a way, that we will need to overcome if we're actually going to be a leader in the world's markets. This was Tom Freedman's book in 2005, and these are all not new things with Freedman, but he summarized the globalization issue, I think in an interesting way. So he says, ok, there are these 10 forces that have leveled the playing field between the developed nations and the developing nations, so how it that India can compete head to head with the United States in various software issues, how is it that China, not just now, but several years in the past was able to compete head-to-head with developing technologies producing quality merchandise and so forth. And he said: These are his ten forces. One of them is to follow the Berlin wall which opened up the world to be competitive; so prior to that countries like China, Brazil, India were in a different position. The rest of these have to do with technology. The technological developments, they really all came out of Moore's Law, if you would like, and the innovative talents of engineers to make things out of that.
So Netscape was the first web browser in 95, for closed software, where you can send anything over the wires except material people, but voice and video and so forth. Open sourcing: Linux, an open source operating system. Outsourcing of jobs to India, so Y2K came around, we were all worried our machines and programs were going to crash, that we didn't have enough computer scientists, nobody know COBOL anymore, but there were people in India who did, and they were smart and they were capable and they turned out the products. We took an enormous amount of work to India; we also had cheap fiber optics communication of this. Off shoring — so we not only take software jobs, we take factories to China, we take R&D facilities to China, very different way of doing business. Wal-Mart, the idea of supply chaining, cut out the middle man by using the information technology to do real-time inventory processing so forth. In-sourcing, UPS, they don't just deliver packages, they cook pizzas, they did anyway. They cooked Papa John's pizzas and they put it on their air planes and they take them, and that cuts out one leg of transportation. But they have to make sure to talk to Papa John's, to make sure Papa John's doesn't care and shares the profits and stuff. Very different kind of business model. Informing: well that's Google. And the thing that Freedman points out is the steroids that drive all of this that are really digital, virtual, mobile and personal; and I simply said, "Moore's Law."
Now the reason why Freedman said we have a reason to worry here in this country is because of these three dirty little secrets. Secret number one is numbers gap, the baby boomers, who became scientists and engineers are going to retire soon, if the market gets better, and if you look at the pipeline behind us, there some young wonderful people there, but not enough. Not enough to match with the needs of the nation really going to have in the future. Labor department agrees to that. Secret number two is the ambition gap. Sometimes when the companies went abroad to get their job done, they not only got it done cheaper, they got better quality work. They found people who were more anxious to do a good job at different work ethic than they sometimes experience in this country. Secret number three is the education gap. No secret, the education we deliver to many of our young group of people is substandard and does not prepare them for any kind of reasonable job. So we said unless we deal with these, it is not clear how we actually are going to compete in this new world. Now the science engineering community been talking about this and working with congress, to see what congress really ought to do and in particular there are two members of congress, two senators went to these national academies and said "Could you tell us ten things that we could do to address these challenges right away, and we will do them".
That was Lamar Alexander, Republican from Tennessee, Jeff Dingmann a democrat from New Mexico. Now let's put this together, chaired by Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin, a well regarded person on the hill, both sides of the isle with the very diverse committee, Peter O'Donnell, from Texas, was on this panel, Lee Raymond, was a head of Exxon at that time, was on the panel, and at least one other Texan on the panel and people from industry and mixed parties, republicans and democrats. They issued this report, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm," they gave only 10 recommendations, but a lot of sub recommendations. And the congress said "Wow, that's what we wanted, we are going to do this" and they passed something called American Competes Act. They passed it and sent it to President Bush, he signed it into law and it still stands. And it did a lot of the things that we are talking about, all that needed to happen was the actual money to get appropriated through the annual budget cycle. That did not happen. We were very close to getting the increases in science that this proposed in a fiscal year 2008 budget.
Congress was for it, President Bush was for it, right up to the last minute, and I mean the actual last few minutes where the staff are down in the bowels of the capital hammering out an agreement between the President and the Congress on the bill and the President wanted lower numbers than the congress did and did not have too much time, except go through the red line a lot of stuff, science lost all the increase. So there is really important message there. Everybody was for it, already was talking about science being really important, the congress was on record, even had a bill that has been passed, signed into law, the President had its own American competitiveness initiative, its spoken out about importance of science, in the end, nothing happened. And it not that science suddenly became negatively viewed, it just lost in a fight. So it is one of my messages today, when we talk about the future, depending on a lot of things that had nothing to do with science, science will do well or will not do well, unless somehow sciences move much higher in a list of priorities, so that either the President or the Congress will say "when push comes to show, you can take all the rest of this stuff, but you cannot take science". Science has to get its funding, has to be number one. It has never happened before, so we will see what we have to do to make that happened.
Here is Neal's list, Neal is so called "flat world." I have a view about science and so I have written down a few forces that I would say are leveling the plane field between scientific knowledge and opinion. Money for science is too little, and I've already indicated I thought that it was out of balance. If the public only thinks of money for science in terms of a new drug, a new medical procedure, somehow we missed the whole point and that's not a very sustainable position among you. Sometimes it's hard to cure diseases and hall of science should not rest on that. People and science and, I don't mean just scientists and engineers; but people who know science have enough skill and knowledge to be able to do something with it. Many, many, too few, and that's coupled with the education program, understanding of science too little, half of the American people know how long it takes the earth to go around the sun. More than half know that it does, which is really good news okay. Now I don't know how long they think it might take. I am not sure that question was asked. But it's also that half of the American people believe that humans and dinosaurs lived all at the same time.
Remember the cartoon, human's dinosaurs. Now it sounds like I am making fun of the American people, but how would people know more about the science and what exactly — people are very busy with their lives, they've got families to raise, think of how they are getting their news, think about how the newspapers covers science, how they spend their time, what kind of science course did they have in school. A lot of parents are now learning their science from their kids, because many of the young people get much better science teaching down and learning experiences than their parents. So we got a job to do there. We can't afford to have that continue. Ideology — it's too much. I think if you don't understand science and you have strong belief in things, when questions come up that challenge your beliefs, you are going to go with your beliefs. You know, I learned that from my mom and daddy, or the church, or somebody I trust, because I don't understand how science works — I don't see why I should believe a scientist on this rather than somebody else. So I think we have a job to do. Politics: it's been too intrusive, too much using politics I think too, to even mislead people on scientific problems. Public confidence: I just asked the question on how fragile is it. Well I don't know, but if people don't know anything about science and if they do have strong beliefs despite of not knowing anything about science, just continue to let that go, I think we are headed for trouble.
Because the rate at which the scientific discovery and technological innovation is pushing people close to home is increasing. Medical research is getting very close: what is the origin of life, what happens at the moment of conception. All these kind of issues - many people feel very deeply about. We could just let it go and hope that somehow the message will get across. But I think we are a great risk. So the Obama era: what do I think? Well, the first sign that president meant what he said about science being very important that he was going to reinstate it as a high priority is the distinguished appointments that he has made. And you will know some of these people or some of them you may not know. John Holdren is his science advisor and is assistant to President — that means John reports directly to the President, not through anybody else. It's the same position as Allen Brumley had with George Bush Senior and that Jack Gibbons and I had with President Clinton. Harold Varmus and Eric Lander — well Harold Varmus and Eric are co-chairs of the President's Advisory Committee on Science and Technology. Harold is a Noble Laureate, former director of the National Institute of Health, Eric Lander — leader in Human Genomics. Steve Chu, another Nobel Laureate, secretary of energy — credible precedent setting moves. Steve Koonin, undersecretary of energy for science. Steve Koonin is a former Provost with Caltech, distinguished nuclear theorist. I think theorist is good...distinguished nuclear theorist. Also he is a former chief scientist of the British Petroleum, knows a lot about energy, very effective administrator. Jane Lubchenco, very distinguished marine biologist — administrator of NOAA. Francis Collins, who ran the whole "Human Genome Project" through a very successful history, is now the director of NIH. Nina Fedoroff, a distinguished scientist, is science advisor to the secretary of state. Charlie Bolden is an administrator of NASA. Now Charlie Bolden would not say that he was a scientist. He came out of the military, was an astronaut, but he did study electrical technology when he was in school and he knows a lot about science.
It's just these and others are just incredible appointments. The President also went over to the National Academy of Sciences in April to the annual meeting to give a talk, a very good talk. In it he said, what probably occurred to a lot of people, "At such a difficult moment, there are those who say we cannot afford to invest in science, that support for research is somehow a luxury at a moment defined by necessities. I fundamentally disagree. Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security, our health, our environment and our quality of life than it has ever been." And he made some commitments, things that he was going to do in this year's budget and it doubled basic research not one year, but between now and 2016 of NSF, DOE's office of science and NIST, which is within the department of commerce and NIH's cancer research program. It can triple the number of NSF graduate fellowships; it's going to make an R&E tax credit program permanent, it used to be called the R&D tax credit. It is the tax break that companies get for investing their own money in long term research and development. It needed to be made permanent; it's been kind of temporary measure for years. It invests 150 billion dollars over 10 years of the renewable energy and energy efficiency and created a new agency RPE. RPE is patterned after ARPO, which was a very successful agency within the defense department, and RPE was the recommendation of Norm Augustine's "Rising Above the Gathering Storm" report.
He is going to increase earth observations, science and math education, change the direction for NASA, we don't know yet how, but we know he put together a commission to advise him. Norm Augustine would chair that commission and they would have written their preliminary report and now writing their final report. Maybe their final report is not quite out yet. Anyway, we know what their recommendations are, that's good. NIH funding for stem cell research, president said he would expand that. Be fare to President Bush, he was the first president to allow NIH to support stem cell research on embryonic stem cell lines. President Bush had a cut-off date; that the lines were not in place, not created by August of 2001, they could not use them. What President Obama did was he removed that deadline and finally President Obama has said that his policy decisions are going to be evidence based and that often means science based. Another indicator that he meant, what he said about science, is the stimulus funding. So here are just some of the science agencies and the bar chart is in billions of dollars very critical and its different agencies along the bottom.
So the first on this NIH and NIH gets 10 billion new dollars out of the stimulus bill. NSF gets 3 billion new dollars, department of energy office of science gets a billion or two. NIST gets a small amount, but it's a very small agency, so it's very significant. NASA gets a billion, DOE's Energy program — much more applied research and development gets over 2 billion dollars. This is a huge amount of money to be spent over a couple of years, much of it on science agencies. If you want to see the percentages, to just see the base numbers for fiscal year 2008, I will just pick one of them. Let's just pick NIH, since that's what I usually pick on, NIH has a budget almost of 3 billion dollars in 2008, they get 10 additional billion dollars to spend over two years with 35 percent increase. Well that's one time money so what's going to happen in the future is the real question. Here are thoughts of different science agencies back since 1995 up to the present time and so I will just say 2 things about this. Blue is NIH, the red is NSF, the purple is defense research and green is NASA. This is just research funding. So here is the big bump for the stimulus money. Money all came in one year, but they will be able to smooth out the spending. At President Obama's request, well of course he is not requesting as much as the stimulus money, but his request is quite respectable given the previous year that you would compare it with. You can see it marked clearly when he says what he plans to do.
When the president submits his annual budget to congress, he has to tell congress what he plans to do in the future years. So when he sent his request over for 2010, for NSF the red, DOE Science and the NIST laboratory, he said this is what he wants for 2010 and then he said "this is what I plan to do over the years between now and 2016". And the point is if you look at the totals here, he plans to double the funding of these agencies. Not shown as a cancer research, but these are just physical sciences and engineering. That's what he said he was going to do and that's what he has told congress he is going to do. Now, it's not over yet, it's not easy to do these things, so suppose you didn't have to deal with congress, well there is a thought. Let's dwell on that for just a minute. Okay, suppose you didn't have congress to worry about, he does have all these agencies, he has a lot of mouths to feed, they all have missions, they care about what you are doing and they want more money. Inside the white house and what's called the Executive Office of the President, there are all these advisors, they all have views, they all work for the president, they all believe what they are doing is in support of the President's agenda but it's not all they agree on precisely what that means. One of those offices, is the Office of Science Technology Policy, and this is John Holdren, who is a science advisor and the head of that office.
So you can bet that John is going to be advocating for more research funding, but other people will have different views. Now you do have to worry about the congress, and let's say you have the President here and you have the Congress, 2 houses, 500 and something people they probably don't agree on anything, but if you are going to get the budget out, they have to agree with the president and how you are spending the money. President has all these agencies, and he has a Congress to deal with. Well here is how the money goes. So suppose you are a head of National Science Foundation, that cushy job with big 12 floor office you know, good job. You in the fall say "Mr. President I need 7 billion dollars next year and here is why" and you make a case that is absolutely flawless, nobody can possibly poke a hole in your argument. The president though gets similar requests from all these different agencies. Then inside the white house, with all the advisors that I just showed you, there is what I would call a competitive process. I have scars, you know. It's everything short of fisted cuffs. It's a very tough process, everybody wanting a good thing somehow in the end, but they all don't agree on what it should be. Finally the president says, "Okay, Neal asked for X dollars, I am going to request Y dollars at the congress".
So they send this budget in February over to congress, Y dollars, big pile of budget. As soon as it gets to congress, congress takes it all apart, sends pieces of it to 13 different appropriation committees and sub committees and each of which gets a bottom line number to spend. And they do the trade off process and if they can agree in the committee then they come together to the appropriation committee, if the appropriation committee buys off, goes to the floors of each of these, they vote on it and if there are differences, they go to conference, work all that out, come back to the president with NSF having Z dollars and Z dollars maybe more or less than Y dollars, but I can assure you they aren't more than Neal's X dollars. So, that's the process. It could work but there's all this stuff going on, so we have got all kinds of interested parties and this is a free society and they're everywhere and some of them are very well funded. There are consumer groups; the media thinks they run everything. Industry has its own views. Universities don't always put science at the top of their list. They care about student aid; they have other issues that they worry about. The physicists sometimes come in and say give us more money and cut the chemists and vice versa. It's a really friendly community, the science community.
So, anyway, this is all going on all year long and they're influencing the agencies, they're influencing the white house, they're influencing congress. It is quite remarkable that a budget ever gets out and some years it doesn't get out. Now, I think there's reason to be worried about this science budget. I believe the President when he says he's going to make those requests. I think that's what he intends to do, but if we get serious about spending, there are going to be some pressures. Here is a pie. This is all the money the federal government spends in a year that's on the books, anyway, always a little something extra. All the things with the Xs in them are non-discretionary. They're bound...those expenditures are bound by laws other than the annual appropriations. Here's social security. It's a big chunk. Yes, you can take my social security away, but I dare you, so there are strong feelings about it. Medicare: same way. These are indexed. It depends on how many people need it and, some of these, how many people are out of work, how many poor people are there? So, that's Medicaid. Defense retirement and other sorts of non-discretionary payments. We have to pay interest on the national debt or people will get very angry at us. So, it's only this 2/3 of the budget that they fight over every year in the appropriations process. I'm over-simplifying a little bit, but I think not too much. That is the idea. Half of this is defense. Okay, so what's going to happen?
The president asked for 3.6 trillion dollars in fiscal year 2010. Well, and we saw what he was asking for, at least for science, for future years. There may be efforts to change Medicare and Medicaid, but, in the near term, I don't see any of these slices getting smaller. More retirees are getting older, we need more Medicare, and we need more social security. There is certainly interest in helping poor people because if poor people go to the emergency room for their health care, that runs up our insurance premiums. It costs all of us if we don't deal with people who do not have insurance and so forth. So I think some of these Xs are going to expand and then the question is "Are we going to control overall spending or not?" I believe the opposition party, opposition to the current administration, will really start hammering on this. They've got a grassroots movement of angry people who say "This is absolutely ridiculous and you've got to change." So if somebody wants to get elected to the Republican Party, they're going to need to pay attention to this issue of fiscal responsibility. The President has talked about that. He has a plan to cut deficits as well, but it all depends on who within the congress can agree on their spending plans. Finally, the future, and I'm about done, I'm sorry.
Future...I'm saying that it's up to us, and what do I really mean by it's up to us? Well, I said we had these two — looking historically, there were these two drivers of spending on science, and I mean science broadly: threats to national security and threats to our health, but there are other issues to worry about. So, might one of these other issues become major forces comparable with these other two? Threats to our jobs and economy: that's what Tom Friedman's talking about, that's what "the gathering storm" is all about. Threat's to our energy security: well, that's a big deal, no question about that. Threats to climate and the environment. Threats to other things, and you would put other things on your list. Might it turn out that one or another of these rises to the level that it influences budgets and policy, not just of one year but into the foreseeable future? I think that should happen. I don't know which it should be, or what combination it should be, but my point in putting this up here is not to tell you what I don't know, but to say that in order to sort these difficult decisions out, scientists, engineers and technical professionals of all kinds need to be at the table when the discussion is going. These issues are too complicated to deal with just sound bites and so forth. So, how will President Obama do? I think it's clear that he intends to stand by commitments. Will he be able to do that?
It depends on how well he's able to work with the congress. It doesn't look real good right now; I mean he's just looking for the sixtieth vote on healthcare. Well, that's not exactly being able to work with the larger congress. I'm not really encouraged there, but depending on how that goes, that will bode well or ill for science. If the President is able to do what he says he wants to do, then science will do well. If political reasons or surprises that we don't see coming get in the way of that, then science will not do well. We need to be involved. We needed to be involved for a very long time and years ago, some of us knew this gentleman, Congressman George Brown from California. He was a great champion of science. He sadly died when I was still in Washington. When he was asked how scientists should have been involved, he just sort of said the obvious thing: "Be more involved with the political process and the needs of the broad society. In other words, be more effective citizens." And we thought he had lost his mind, because we were all back in our laboratories and so forth, but he was dead right. There are many people who are doing this. I could make a hundred slides like these; these are people that I call civic scientists. They exist on this campus, they exist in my university, they exist all over the country, people I put up here, people I had to work with recently at one thing or another. We have three Ph.D. physicists, who are in the congress now, two democrats and one republican. I put Rick up, I talked about Rick before, Bruce Alberts recently visited my campus.
All these are people who had careers, very successful careers, establishing themselves in science, engineering, technology and then they stepped aside from that to do something else, either to engage the public in a dialog, talk about the importance of science, education. Sally Ride is very involved in pre-college education, getting young people particularly girls interested in careers as science engineering. We do a Sally Ride festival on our campus every year and Sally visits us regularly. We at Rice, have something called a "Civic Scientist Lecture", we bring somebody in every year to do that. Arden Bement, who runs NSF, did it one year; Bruce Alberts was there last year here to give the talk and Shirley Jackson who is the president of RPI and former chairman of Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the list goes on and on. My point is simply there are lots of people who are engaging in these activities along the public policy lines. Here are some things I'm suggesting we could do. For young people, get the best education you can get. You'll be more powerful, more influential, if you want to save the world, that's terrific, but there's going to be time to save the world. We will not have dealt with all the problems and you've got to have the education. If you decide to go on for the Ph.D. terrific. The more credentials you have, the more likely you're going to be to influence policy. Scientists, engineers and other professionals should become more active in the political process. That's George Brown's message.
There needs to be a dialogue, and it needs to be two way. It cannot be Neal telling the church group how science is and how it works, Neal has to be engaged. I have to hear what people don't understand, or what's on their minds, or even if they don't like me, I've got to be there for them, and the science community doesn't really have that kind of image right now. Faculty should encourage the universities to play a larger role in public K12; I just believe public K12 education is not going to make it in this country without some institution like higher education taking more ownership. The students come in our doors, come from these schools, and we have the responsibility to do so. It's very hard, very tough of a political system. The science and engineering community should support the notion of a civic scientist and partner with professionals in all fields. See, I think — I keep talking about the 'science community' and I mean the science and engineering professional community. We're not a community. We're not viewed as a community. The physicists are over here, more money for physics. Every time NIH gets an extra dollar, somebody grumbles.
A dollar into NIH is not a dollar away from NSF, but the way the budget process, once it gets to the hill, NIH competes with the labor department. NSF competes with the justice department for their money. There is not a competitive process, at least not at the level of congress. So, we could work closely together, and I think we should, and one thing I think we might be able to do is to find a common message that all of us could agree on, and I've just put some thoughts up here, but I haven't thought much about it. These are fairly simple ideas, and each would have a subtext. Science provides benefits to society, well that's not hard for us, but it's hard for many people in the general public, because they remember science as a science class they had in middle school. Well, what good does that do them? So, this seems simple, but it is not simple. Second, progress in science comes from research. Most people don't know what research is about, what's the discipline, or why do we believe the results and not other results, what happens if several papers contradict one another in the literature, doesn't that mean science isn't any good? These are complicated issues. Scientists understand them, the public does not. Much important, science is interdisciplinary. So, it's just a fact, and it's increasingly true.
Science is not just a matter of opinion, I talked about that earlier, science advances engineering and technology and vice versa. It's not just the scientists that somehow give all the technologies and the great discoveries to the world. If the engineers are not there, it doesn't happen, and the things the engineers do feed back into science and make it possible for us to do things we could never do before. The human genome project is a really good example, but it's true everywhere: computing, for example; the impact that it's had on all fields of science, like fast computing and MRI imaging and the ability to look at real time brain activity. Finally, science engineering careers are for anyone who has access to quality education. That should be everyone. Why shouldn't everyone have a chance, have a shot at, being a scientist or an engineer, or at least having a better job than the one they have now.
So, I think it's worth a try. I think we ought to be able to do this, and I think the science side should be able to get together and think about some common message, it doesn't have to be this, but along these lines. Baker institutes, unsolicited commercial. We work on a lot of these issues. Here's a dirigent, bipartisan guy, because he served a republican and democratic president as ambassador, Jim Baker, unashamedly a republic, but a very distinguished diplomat and honorary director. He works in a lot of different areas of policy as well. So, my final message is why are my grandkids smiling? Well, I like to think it's because I'm there granddad, but I think it's not that. I think they're smiling because they have a lot to look forward to and I think it's because of young people in this room, young people I meet on campuses like this one all over the country, Rice and elsewhere.
You have such enormous advantages. We have given you a world that's much more complicated, in many ways, than the one we came into, although I think I was born in the great depression, actually. I find young people today are smart, much smarter than I was in sort of every way you might define that: more savvy about what's going on in the world, much more familiar with technology and able to use technology to command information that didn't even exist when we were young people. Young people today are also very accustomed, very comfortable working with other young people from different cultures, born in different parts of the world, different beliefs, different disciplines and so forth.
We were very homogenous in my school; I'm ashamed to say, many, many years ago. I think, finally, young people know that this country will great, not by going it alone, it will be great in the future. It will be a leader in the world in the future by example and by partnering with other nations. I think young people get that, and, with those, I believe, I have reason to be optimistic. Sorry, I kind of ran over my time. Thank you very much.
Dr. Daniel: We have some questions, Dr. Lane, if you'd like to answer them.
Neal Lane: Sure.
Questioner: Unknown
Neal Lane: I think so. The question was about the Jefferson program, and it's not been going all that long, I think. Do you remember what year it started? Yeah, I think it started as an initiative. I don't know whether Norm Newrider started. Norm Newrider was the first science advisor, some of you know him. He was at Texas Instruments for many years. He was the first science advisor to the Secretary of State, Secretary Albright and then Secretary Colin Powell. I think it came out of his early initiatives. The idea is super, I think it just takes a long time. He himself would tell you, as would Nina Fedoroff, breaking into the state department is very, very difficult. So, getting people's attention on science, I think, is probably harder than the White House getting people's attention on science is very difficult. I can't. I favor the idea. I think the arguments for it are very good. I can't comment on its success. I hope it is successful. I hope it expands because the state department desperately needs it. I didn't say much about international, but, clearly, international cooperation in science and science as an institute of diplomacy are very popular ideas now. I think they have a lot of merit, and this country has long been benefited from substantial international cooperation.
Questioner: Unknown
Neal Lane: Does it have a marketing program?
Questioner: Unknown
Neal Lane: And jet propulsion lab does have a marketing program.
Questioner: Unknown
Neal Lane: Well, I think it's a very good question. I appreciate it, and we'll talk. There has to be a there there. I mean, somebody has to do it, and I think many scientific societies consider marketing as a part of their activity, but they're marketing is...I think, not so broadly focused yet. Yeah, I think that's right. Of course, this country doesn't do anything strategically. The closest we...It's not our form of government. It's not how we work. It's not how people think, as you well know because you had experience in marketing, that our government does not think strategically. It does not have long range plans. It does not have goals that anybody expects it's going to meet in, say, ten years, unlike Japan. You can ask who's working out better, who's doing better. So I'm not criticizing our approach. On the concept of strategic thinking, we really have a lot of work to do. An organization like AAAS is a place where you might imagine, at least, some convening to occur. The national academies can do that, maybe even better, because it represents science, engineering and medicine, but they're bound by certain statutes, and AAAS can do whatever it wants to as long as it doesn't violate lobbying laws. I think there needs to be some kind of organization that takes on the convening task. Well, first of all see "Is this crazy? Well, we don't care. We don't think it's very important. We're not going to do it." Or, if there's some substance to it, what would the next step be? Clearly, marketing the product.
Questioner: Unknown
Neal Lane: Well, I couldn't agree with you more. I think there are more scientists talking about the fact that we don't So, at least, I think there's some recognition that we have nothing like a mechanism. Right. Thank you.
Questioner: Unknown
Neal Lane: Well, my opinion is that we're the way we are because we're the way we are, essentially. I mean, you think about what I said about government, and I say it's government. How else would you govern these fifty states and these 100 million people with diverse political views and so forth? I don't know a better way. I think that that's a trade off that we've made, but there are exceptions. The national nanotechnology issue, now, has been alive since 2001. That's not a twenty year timeframe. It has a strategy. It's not tightly regulated like the Japanese plans tend to be. It's not the detailed in that way, but it's something. The US Global Exchange research program is older, and it's had a coordinating activity, a very strong international activity, because of what's at stake in the case of global warming climate change. So, there are a few places where the US plays a role, but I would hope that in both the case of marketing and this idea of coordinating research and sharing information, we can figure out how to take advantage of the technology and technological tools that we now have at our disposal. Maybe a qualitative change is in the air, and we can do something better.
Dr. Daniel: This talk, Dr. Lane, was so appropriate for Issues. It was informative, interesting and important in terms of our policy issues. Ladies and gentleman, please join me in thanking Dr. Neal Lane for joining us. And now it's my pleasure to invite everyone to join us for a reception in the back of the room, in the living room area, and continue this conversation and develop a marketing strategy and thank Kevin Finneran and all of the Issues staff for 25 great years. Let's look forward to the next 25, and the reception begins!
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