The Decline of Unfettered ResearchThe Decline of Unfettered Research Andrew Odlyzko AT&T Bell Laboratoriesamo@research.att.com Revised Version October 4, 19951. IntroductionWe are going through a period of technological change that isunprecedented in extent and speed. The success of corporations andeven nations depends more than ever on rapid adoption of newtechnologies and operating methods. It is widely acknowledged thatscience made this transformation possible. At the same time,scientific research is under stress, with pressures to change, to turnaway from investigation of fundamental scientific problems, and tofocus on short-term projects. The aim of this essay is to discuss thereasons for this paradox, and especially for the decline of unfetteredresearch.What do I mean by unfettered research? In the discussions of federalscience policy it has also occasionally been called"curiosity-driven." It is exemplified by the following reminiscencesof Henry Ehrenreich [Ehr]. When I arrived at the General Electric Research Laboratory at the beginning of 1956, fresh from a PhD at Cornell, I was greeted by my supervisor, Leroy Apker, who looked after the semiconductor section of the general physics department. I asked him to suggest some research topics that might be germane to the interests of the section. He said that what I did was entirely up to me. After recovering from my surprise, I asked, "Well, how are you going to judge my performance at the end of the year?" He replied, "Oh, I'll just call up the people at Bell and ask them how they think you are doing."In this style of work, the researcher is allowed, and even required,to select problems for investigation, without having to justify theirrelevance for the institution, and without negotiating a set ofobjectives with management. The value of the research is determinedby other scientists, again without looking for its immediate effect onthe bottom line of the employer. The assumption that justifies such apolicy is that "scientific progress on a broad front results from thefree play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice,in the manner dictated by their curiosity." (This quote is from thefamous report of Vannevar Bush [Bush] that formed the cornerstone ofU.S. federal funding for research after World War II.)Unfettered research is not a boondoggle, simply indulging scientists'curiosity. There were good historical reasons for Vannevar Bush toadvocate it. Many of the stunning scientific and technologicaladvances that have shaped our world have come from unfetteredresearch. A good recent example is the invention of public keycryptography by Diffie, Hellman, and Merkle in the 1970s. Their workwas funded by Hellman's NSF grant in information theory. Since thegrant terms were flexible, without negotiated work plans ordeliverables, they were free to work on an audacious idea that was notmentioned in the grant proposal, and that formed a foundation stonefor the information society.The unfettered research that Ehrenreich encountered at GE in 1956 isalmost universally taught at universities as the only real research.However, this type of research is now almost totally gone fromindustrial and government laboratories, and is under pressure even inacademia. Industrial leaders stress the need to "focus on customers'needs." The pressure is to do work with quick payback, and to justifyeverything that is undertaken on the basis of its relevance to thecorporation [Coy]. The trend is not confined to the U.S. For example,the Canadian Finance Minister introduced a proposed new budget withthe stipulation that "[i]n the future, [Canadian] science andtechnology efforts will be concentrated more strategically onactivities that foster innovation, rapid commercialization andvalue-added production ... to stretch government's science dollarsfurther and more effectively."Today researchers, even when they are not working on well definedprojects, are increasingly required to submit plans for theirresearch, and to explain not just how their work might help theiremployer, but what steps they are taking to ensure their results areutilized to the fullest. Scientists are in effect asked to becomeengineers, where the term engineer is not used in a derogatory sense,but, in the words of Vannevar Bush (as quoted in [Zachary]), describesa person who is "not primarily a physicist, or a business man, or an inventor, but [someone] who would acquire some of the skills and knowledge of each of these and be capable of successfully developing and applying new devices on the grand scale."Much of the distress experienced by scientists is caused by thispressure to understand and justify how their work fits into a muchlarger setting. At a time when growth in knowledge requires moretraining and much greater specialization, they are being asked tobecome generalists, and to deemphasize leading-edge work in theirfields.Many of the popular explanations for the decline in unfetteredresearch are unsatisfactory. Short-sighted management is oftenblamed. However, the decline has been going on for a long time, anddifferent companies have followed varying policies, so that iftraditional unfettered research were the best method for acorporation, its superiority should have become evident by now. Thathas not happened, and most of the rapidly expanding high-techcompanies appear to do little long-term research, unfettered or not.Another explanation that is often proffered is that the end of theCold War has cut back funding for R&D in general. Again, though, onemight expect that reductions in military-related R&D would have led tolower demand for scientists and engineers in general, and therefore tolower salaries, which would have made civilian R&D cheaper and thusmore attractive. Thus this explanation also seems to be inadequate.(In addition, this explanation leaves open the question why the ColdWar should have spurred unfettered research in the first place. Whyweren't all available resources put into building more tanks andsubmarines?) Novel management theories (cf. [RSE]) are often blamedby themselves, but as is true of most management theories, they tendto be derived from observations of what companies perceived to besuccessful are doing, and only systematize and justify suchprocedures.Competition and pressure for quick financial payoffs are often citedas causes of the decline in unfettered research in industry. However,Wall Street can be remarkably sensitive to technological advances andextremely patient in waiting for profits. This is demonstrated by therecent initial public offering of Netscape Communications, Inc. A company that had been in existence for less than two years, had rackedup total sales of less than $20 million, and had only losses and noprofits, was suddenly judged to be worth $2 billion. The reason wasthat the Netscape Navigator browser that Andreessen, Bina, and theircolleagues built won the popularity contest among Internet users.Several companies were pursuing the same strategy as Netscape, ofgiving out their browsers for free. It was Netscape's technicalsuperiority that won the contest (even though this superiority wasslight, and much of the programming was of poor quality, as was shownby the security flaws that were discovered in the Netscape program).It will be a long time (if it ever happens) before Netscape earnsenough profit to justify its initial stock market valuation. However,the prospects of leveraging control of the most popular World Wide Webbrowser into control of Internet software were sufficiently enticingfor Wall Street that it was willing to assign an outlandish value tothis company. Thus in cases where there is a clear connection betweentechnical excellence and market applications, financiers can tempertheir demand for profits. Hence financial pressure alone does notexplain the cutbacks in unfettered research.This note proposes a somewhat different explanation for the decline ofunfettered research. I feel that it was caused primarily by internaldevelopments in the world of science and technology, not by arbitraryoutside decisions. There seem to be three main (and closelyinterrelated) themes that help explain the turn towards short term,directed research:(a) dramatic increase in volume of research,(b) steady and rapid progress in all areas of technology,(c) unprecedented opportunities in applying existing knowledge.These themes arose from the success and growth in research.I am not implying that research is finished as an important activity.I do not share the opinion of a former head of the U.S. Patent Office,who resigned a century ago and recommended that his position beabolished, since "everything that can be invented has been invented."Nature has a limitless supply of secrets to be explored and exploited.I am convinced that research is important to society's economicwelfare, will continue to advance human knowledge, and can be anintellectually rewarding career. This note is not even intended as anattack on unfettered research. My intention is to explain why thistype of research is on the decline, and so I concentrate on thenegative side. I am not attempting a balanced treatment of the roleof R&D and the optimal level or form of support for research. Most ofthis note is descriptive, not prescriptive.It is necessary to emphasize that R&D spending as a whole, and evenresearch by itself, have generally been going up at a steady pace.There is a sense that cutbacks might come, and that the relationshipof science to society might have to be reexamined (cf. [ByerlyP]),but no substantial cuts in overall R&D budgets have materialized sofar. Even within U.S. industry, there has been growth [Coy], withcutbacks at some corporations more than balanced by growth in others.Worldwide, even unfettered research is probably increasing, withuniversities in the rapidly industrializing countries expanding theirfaculties. The only area where there is a clear decrease is inunfettered research in industry. This type of research has never beena large part of the total R&D budget. However, it has been the mostvisible type of research, in that it tended to garner public attentionand Nobel prizes. That is one reason for discussing its decline.Another is that the decrease in unfettered research is symptomatic ofa general shift in R&D towards much more directed and shorter-termtype of work. Not all directed investigations are short-term (theinvention of the transistor is a good example of successful long-termdirected research), and the correlation between unfettered researchand long-term one is not perfect, but there is a correlation, so thatthe decline in unfettered work serves as a measure of the how far intothe future one looks. The turn towards short-term work is aphenomenon that has occurred at most industrial laboratories, eventhose that had never engaged in unfettered research [Coy]. Is this atrend that will continue much further? Will it spread to research atuniversities? An examination of the reasons for the decline inindustrial unfettered research suggests that the answer to bothquestions is yes.2. Research as a commodityThe basic reason the role, style, and image of research are changingis that there is much more research than a few decades ago. Thereused to be much less competition, and the intervals between inventionand marketing of a product were long. As an example, xerography wasinvented by Carlson in 1937, but it was only commercialized by Xeroxin 1950. Furthermore, there was so little interest in this technologythat during the few years surrounding commercialization, Xerox wasable to invent and patent a whole range of related techniques, whilethere was hardly any activity by other institutions. This enabledXerox to monopolize the benefits of the new technology for over twodecades. Xerography was not an isolated case. When the transistorwas invented by Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley at Bell Labs in 1948,several years elapsed before other laboratories acquired enoughexpertise in the semiconductor area to make significant contribution.Had AT&T not been prevented both by its culture and by regulation fromexploiting this dramatic discovery, it could have erected a patentbarrier around its discovery that would have allowed it to keep mostof the profits from commercial developments. Today such opportunitiesare extremely rare. For example, when Bednorz and Mueller announcedtheir discovery of high-temperature superconductivity at the IBMZurich lab in 1987, it took only a few weeks for groups at Universityof Houston, University of Alabama, Bell Labs, and other places to makeimportant further discoveries. Thus even if high-temperaturesuperconductivity had developed into a commercially significant field,IBM would have had to share the financial benefits with others whoheld patents that would have been crucial to developments of products.The era of extensive unfettered research started only after World WarII. Until then, "curiosity-driven" research was practiced atuniversities and a few academies and research laboratories, but it wasdone on a small scale. During the last century universities developedthe view that research is one of their main missions, along withteaching. However, their resources, while adequate for small scaleand low-overhead work in theoretical areas, could not cope with theincreasing number of researchers and their ever more costly equipmentin experimental areas. (Recall the years that Einstein spent workingin the Swiss patent office, before he could obtain a universityposition.) During the period between the two world wars, scientistsand engineers were devoting an inordinate effort to chasing after thefew funding sources that were available [Burke].After World War II, support for research expanded tremendously, firstin the United States, and then, as their economies recovered ordeveloped, in other countries. Science and technology had played avital role in the war. The Bomb was the most famous development ofthat period, but there were many others, such as radar, plastics, andjet engines. There were also striking advances in non-military areas,such as the almost total (for a time, at least) conquest of infectiousbacterial diseases by penicillin and other antibiotics. Thetechnologies and products that captivated the public's attention werethe results of concentrated development efforts. (The ManhattanProject was more of an engineering than a scientific enterprise,although many of the best physicists, chemists, and mathematiciansspent their full war-time careers in it.) However, they werecorrectly perceived to be the culminations of the unfettered researchcarried out in the preceding decades. The nuclear era, for example,is often traced back to the serendipitous discovery of radioactivityby Becquerel at the end of the 19-th century. The policy makers andthe general public responded with an unprecedented increase in supportfor scientific and engineering research. Governments proceeded tofund extensive research and development in all areas, not only inuniversities, but also at their own laboratories and through industry.Universities vastly expanded their own commitment to research,decreasing teaching loads, and placing more emphasis on scholarlyachievement than on teaching. Industry also proceeded to build up R&Dstaffs. Under the leadership of people like Vannevar Bush [Burke],who had bitter memories of the lean years between the wars, policymakers allocated substantial fractions of available funding tounfettered research, in the belief that scientists would themselves bebest able to select the most promising direction for their work.To get a graphic appreciation for the growth in the researchestablishment, it is instructive to look at pictures of participantsat any of the Solvay congresses held between the world wars. Thereare only a few dozen people in any one of these pictures, but theyusually contain most of the creators of modern physics, scientistslike Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg. Today, a typical physicsconference has hundreds or thousands participants, and there are manymore conferences than before. When we talk of the decline inunfettered research, we should remember that there would be nodifficulty in providing an unfettered research environment forEinstein today, were he still alive. The difficulty is that there arenow thousands of theoretical physicists who would like to be treatedlike Einstein.The growth of the research establishment is not a new trend, but itaccelerated after World War II. The number of scientists has beenincreasing at an exponential (in the strict mathematical sense of theword) rate for centuries. The number of scientific papers publishedannually has been doubling every 10-15 years for the last twocenturies [Price]. With the spurt in funding after World War II, therate of increase rose. For example, the number of abstracts inChemical Abstracts just about doubled every decade from 1945 to 1985,when it reached about half a million per year (and has increased at alower rate since then). The volume of technical publications today ismore than 10 times what it was at the end of World War II. Althoughthere have been frequent complaints about the inadequate level offederal government support for science, the U.S. National ScienceFoundation has doubled the number of researchers it supports in thelast 20 years. It was always clear that this rate of increase couldnot be sustained indefinitely, but it continued for a long time. Now,however, there are clear signs of a leveling off, at least in thedeveloped countries. The end of the era of exponential growth appearsto have arrived, and this all by itself may be responsible for many ofthe complaints about poor job prospects and low morale.While exponential growth had to stop at some point, why did it have tohappen now, and not after another doubling in the population ofscientists and engineers, say? There does not seem to be anypersuasive answer. Nobody even has a good theory of what the optimalrate of investment in R&D should be. As an empirical matter, noadvanced industrial country invests more than 3% of its GNP in R&D.The prospects of going above that figure seem dim. Cutbacks in R&Dspending are talked about more frequently than boosts.To maintain some balance, we should mention that the traditional imageof unfettered research is not completely accurate. Research hasseldom been totally unfettered. Ehrenreich's experience at GE, citedin the Introduction, can be ascribed to GE's interest in the thenbrand new field in semiconductors, where almost any research waslikely to be of commercial value. Had Ehrenreich suddenly decided toswitch to genetics, he would surely have found his freedom much morelimited than it seemed. Even university researchers are much morefettered than is popularly imagined. Except for tenured professors intheoretical areas, almost all researchers depend on grants orcontracts in their work, and to get them, they have to survive peerreview scrutiny that sharply limits what they can do.Cocke's invention of RISC (reduced instruction set computers) is anexample of unfettered research, in that IBM allowed him to work onwhatever he chose. However, Cocke had already made valuablecontributions to the design of IBM mainframes, and was working oncomputer architectures, which were of obvious relevance to IBM. Thusit was not surprising that he was given the freedom to pursue "thefree play of free intellect." Industrial research laboratories havebeen giving such freedom to a few select individuals for a long time(Steinmetz at GE over a century ago may have been one of the earliestones) and surely will continue to do so in the future. What isremarkable about the era of unfettered research that is ending now isthat even brand new Ph.D.s were being offered such freedom in largenumbers. The purpose of this essay is to explain why less freedom isbeing offered today.The general decrease in support for R&D and for unfettered research inparticular are surely strongly connected to the rapid growth inresearch. Whatever the optimal level of R&D spending is, even if itis twice the present level, we are surely much closer to it now thanwe were three or four decades ago. With the large current communityof scientists and engineers, the public and the decision makers are nolonger dealing with a few souls laboring in obscurity in their ivorytowers, but with a large community that can easily be seen as justanother "special interest group" looking for its "entitlements."The growth and increasing competitiveness of any field can easilyaffect the public perception of that field. In sports, for example,it is common for commentators to talk of how some famous figure ofold, such as Babe Ruth, was the greatest player of all time. Suchassertions are made only about sports such as baseball or boxing,where teams or individuals compete against each other, and there is noobjective measurement that can be used to compare performance overtime. In sports such as swimming or running, where the clockdetermines the winner, such assertions are never made, since theevidence there is clear, that the performance of the top athletes hasbeen steadily improving. The explanation for this phenomenon is thatthe performance of the best athletes has been improving in all fields,and the reason Babe Ruth stood out so much among his contemporaries isthat he was the best from a smaller, less selective, and less welltrained crowd. Today, the variation in performance among the leaderstends to be much smaller. Similar phenomena appear to operate inother fields. In science, Einstein attained a degree of publicreverence that has not been accorded to any other researcher.However, if we could resurrect Einstein and clone 100 copies of him,the public would not treat each of these individuals with the samerespect they accorded the original.It is not only the public perception of research that has changed.The very nature of research has changed. A few decades ago,independent individual investigators or at most small labs were thenorm. Today we are dealing with elementary particle accelerators thatcost billions of dollars, and require teams of hundreds of scientiststo operate. Even in mathematics, there is much more collaborativework, with the extreme example being the classification of finitesimple groups, a great achievement of modern algebra that requireddozens of researchers to work for several decades, and took 15,000journal pages to document.Large research projects are hard to fit into the traditional model ofunfettered research. Just how much freedom to pursue "the free playof free intellect" (in the word of Vannevar Bush [Bush]) does ascientist working on dampening vibrations for the $300 million laserinterferometry gravitational observatory have? The entire project maybe aimed at unlocking Nature's deepest secrets, and may be without anyforeseeable practical application, but isn't she just as fettered asan engineer developing a new air bag?The gap between leading researchers and the general public has widenedin most areas, with scientists pursuing topics that are increasinglyesoteric. On the other hand, the gap between what researchers can doand what is available to the public in areas that the public seesfirst hand has narrowed considerably. As recently as 20 years ago,the best computational device that was widely available was anon-programmable pocket calculator, whereas researchers at leadinginstitutions had access to supercomputers. This was a gap incomputational capability of 8 to 10 orders of magnitude. Today, thePentium processor in a home PC is not all that much less powerful thanthe fastest computers available at supercomputing sites, with the gaponly two or three orders of magnitude. The Pentium PC is often morepowerful than the workstation that a typical engineer or scientistuses. Similarly, in speech or optical character recognition, all thatexisted 20 years ago were research systems, available only in a fewlabs. Today, in contrast, one can buy much more capable "shrink-wrap"software for a PC. What is most remarkable, though, is that thissoftware does not differ all that much in performance from the mostadvanced research systems. The time between invention and acommercial product has shrunk dramatically in many areas, so thatresearch is not far ahead of the rest of the world, and therefore hasfewer advanced toys to impress the public with.The main justification for unfettered research was that scientificdiscoveries could not be predicted, and that allowing researchers tofollow their intuition in selecting problems to work on was the bestpolicy, one that would result in enough significant new results thatsome of them would pay off handsomely for the sponsoring organization.Roentgen's discovery of X-rays and Fleming's of penicillin are twoexamples of such unpredictable discoveries that both had great impact.For that argument to be valid, though, many significant scientificadvances have to occur, a large fraction have to be of interest to thesponsor, and there have to be opportunities to exploit them. Theseassumptions are no longer believed by industrial R&D managers, and arebeing questioned by national policy makers.The change in the role of research can be summarized in severalinterrelated points.a. There are few big "hits"Neither unfettered research nor any other kind has been producing thekinds of striking results that truly impress the public. Jonas Salk'srecent death led to recollections of the dramatic impact his vaccinehad in defeating polio 40 years ago. Today, in spite of tens ofbillions of dollars spent on the "War on Cancer" over the last twodecades, we have yet to see any treatment for cancer that can comparein its definitiveness to that of the Salk vaccine. Our knowledge ofcancer has advanced tremendously, and current techniques are far moresophisticated than anything that Salk had at his disposal, but no"Magic Bullet" has been produced. The nice easy solutions havelargely been found already. The problems we are facing are muchharder. Therefore the payoff from investment in research is lower.There are great successes across the whole spectrum of scientificknowledge, from Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem to theelucidation of the functioning of aspirin. However, they are hard toexplain to the public.b. Better technology does not always winThe world does not always beat a path to the door of the inventor ofthe better mouse trap, as Dvorak and other inventors of keyboards moreefficient than the traditional QWERTY one have found out. In videorecorders, VHS beat the Beta format in spite of Beta's technicalsuperiority. Nobody seriously claims that the Intel x86 chiparchitecture was superior to that of RISC microprocessors, whichtypically had twice the performance with much smaller developmentefforts than Intel processors of the same period. Similarly,Microsoft Windows (3.1, 95, etc.) operating systems are only nowbeginning to catch up to where the Macintosh systems were severalyears ago. However, Intel has the lion's share of the worldmicroprocessor market, and Microsoft of the operating system market.One way to interpret this observation is to say that the basictechnology is not the crucial issue, and that interoperability andrelated problems are. What that means, though, is that even abrilliant invention in chip design or operating systems is unlikely tomake a big impact unless it is incorporated into either the Intel orthe Microsoft products.Even in the scientific and technical marketplace, tools requirepolished interfaces, so that it is often said that a tool forprofessionals will sell if it has a nice GUI, no matter what the basictechnology is at the back end, whereas a wonderful new invention thatrequires the user to work at mastering it will be neglected. Thisagain shows the decreasing importance of basic technology, a result ofthe greater competition in research that leads to competing productsbeing close to each other. In contrast, there were few people whoopted to consult witch doctors in preference to taking the Salkvaccine.c. There are many ways to skin a catWith the huge growth in research, there are many competingtechnologies that can be used for solving most problems. A decadeago, Narendra Karmarkar invented interior point methods for solvinglinear programming problems. This was a great advance, since it mademany more resource allocation problems accessible. However, hisdiscovery spurred researchers working on the traditional simplexmethods to improve them so that today they are competitive with theinterior point methods on most commonly encountered problems.Twenty years ago, the most common modems were 300 bps ones, withacoustic couplers. Ten years ago, 9.6 kbps modems showed up. Now, asa result of improvements in microelectronics and in mathematicalcoding algorithms, 28.8 kbps modems are common, and 33.6 kbps ones arebeginning to show up. There is work on modems that might get evencloser to the absolute limit of 64 kbps that is imposed by centraloffice equipment. If the 64 kbps limitation were truly absolute, eachadvance would be hailed as fantastic progress. However, for thecustomer, each advance has to be judged in light of otherpossibilities, and there are alternates to the use of modems. ISDNalready offers 128 kbs, coax from cable TV companies promises severalmegabits per second, and optical fiber will eventually provide severalhundred megabits per second. Thus advances in modems are valuable,but cannot be judged alone, and have to be compared to what othertechnologies offer.d. It's a complicated worldIn most situations, a new product or service has to interoperate withothers. This severely limits what can be done, and in particularlimits potential profits for the inventor. A new coding scheme thatleads to higher speed modems has to be accepted as an industrystandard before consumers will buy it. Similarly, most controlschemes for ATM networks have to be adopted by the whole industrybefore they can be used. Therefore the company that comes up witheven a great invention can usually only obtain profits from licensingthe patents and from a slight lead in marketing a new product.e. Incrementalism winsIncremental improvements have been much more important than strikingnew inventions. For example, commodity microprocessors have killed(at least for a while) the high performance computers based on exoticparallel architectures. Also, over the last two decades, there hasbeen a series of predictions that progress in silicon integratedcircuits was about to stop, and that new materials and devices had tobe developed. Yet silicon still reigns supreme, while work onchallengers, such as Josephson junctions or gallium arsenide (of whichit has been said that "Gallium arsenide is the material of the future,and always will be") is languishing. Formidable technical obstacleshad to be overcome in silicon technologies to bring them to thepresent state, but at least to the public, this work appearsincremental.Incremental improvements have probably always been more important thannew inventions in economic growth. Watt's contribution to steamengine development is famous, but it was dwarfed in effectiveness bythe cumulative impact of many other inventions in that area. This isa common phenomenon. To quote from p. 199 of [Schmookler], a carefulstudy of this subject, [d]espite the popularity of the idea that scientific discoveries and major inventions typically provide the stimulus for inventions, the historical record of important inventions in petroleum refining, paper making, railroading, and farming revealed not a single, unambiguous instance in which either discoveries or inventions played the role hypothesized. Instead, in hundreds of cases the stimulus was the recognition of a costly problem to be solved or a potentially profitable opportunity to be seized; in short, a technical problem or opportunity evaluated in economic terms. In a few cases, sheer accident was credited.However, at least until recently, this was not understood properly.Great credit was given to the perceived breakthroughs. Today, though,there is much more evidence on the subject, and much more stress isplaced on incremental work [Gomory, FloridaK].f. "Moore's Law" and the predictability of scienceOne form of "Moore's Law" says that microprocessors double incomputing power every 18 months. This "law" has been followed closelyover the last 20 years, and experts assure us that it will hold for atleast another 10 before we encounter any serious barriers to furtherimprovements in processors. (The main barriers seem to be moreeconomic than technological, with the costs of fabrication facilitiesincreasing rapidly.) Tremendous progress has to be made on a range oftechnologies, not only in devices but also in circuit designs,architectures, and software to continue this rate of advance.However, what we should note is that all large companies have beenable to keep up with the progress predicted by Moore's Law. TI hasdone it, Motorola has done it, and so have Intel, IBM, Toshiba, andothers. Further, not a single one of these companies has been able toget far ahead of others for an extended period. In addition, it isunderstood what resources are needed to keep up this rate of advance.As long as no big mistakes are made, anybody with enough money canhire enough knowledgeable scientists and engineers to produce state ofthe art microprocessors. This goes against the popular image (thatfits in with the justification for unfettered research) of a loneinventor having that one critical insight that changes a whole area.Management is not telling a researcher, "You are the best we couldfind, here are the tools, please go off and find something that willlet us leapfrog the competition." Instead, the attitude is "Eitheryou and your 999 colleagues double the performance of ourmicroprocessors in the next 18 months, to keep up with thecompetition, or you are fired." An extreme example of the view ofwhat research has evolved into was expressed by a distinguishedresearcher, Jay Forrester [TR]: "... science and technology is now a production line. If you want a new idea, you hire some people, give them a budget, and have fairly good odds of getting what you asked for. It's like building refrigerators."3. Racing against a moving escalatorThe idea of technological progress is only a few centuries old.Before then, all the way through the Renaissance and even a century ortwo after, there was an astonishing respect and nostalgia for theancients. In the end, it seems that it was only the IndustrialRevolution that led to a transformation in the mindset of most people,so that steady improvements in technology are now expected. However,until recently, such improvements were perceived as discrete steps,such as the invention of the Hall process for extracting aluminum orthe discovery of penicillin. Today, in contrast, we are living in aworld of constant, rapid, and to some extent predictable progress.Microprocessors double in power just about every 18 months, inaccordance with "Moore's Law." This helps explain phenomena such asthe continued dominance of the Intel x86 architecture. In a morestable world, with only occasional discrete steps forward, RISC chips,which used to have double the performance of Intel x86 CISC ones for acomparable price, would have displaced the latter ones, just as jetplanes displaced propeller-driven ones. However, in an environmentthat is governed by "Moore's Law," Intel chips, just like RISC ones,doubled in performance every 18 months, so that by sticking with theIntel architecture, a customer only gave up 18 months, less than thelife cycle of computer equipment. (The distinction between x86 CISCchips and RISC ones is narrowing today, but there used to be a sharpdistinction.) This allows other factors, such as compatibility, toplay the dominant role in determining what products to use.The IBM acquisition of Lotus can be understood only in this light.IBM paid $3.5B for Lotus Notes. Now Notes is an innovative andimportant product, and no competitor has yet been able to produce apackage with all the features of Notes. In a more stable world,though, it would not take long to develop a competitive product, whichwould limit the profit potential of Notes. What IBM has bought for$3.5B is a place a bit ahead of everybody else on the movingescalator, in the hopes that this will enable it to dominate an areathat will likely be a crucial one for the information society we aredeveloping.The idea of constant change and having to keep up with the competitionhelps explain why there are so many bugs in commercially successfulsoftware products. The speed of delivery of new features is moreimportant than quality. (Cf. [StalkH].)The idea of rapid technological progress is deeply embedded in theminds of managers in high-tech areas. Several leaders of advanceddevelopment projects have told me, when asked what the main technicalbarriers were in their projects, that they did not see any. Thoseviews were not entirely true, in that those managers could not go tomarket with the technology that was available then. However, theywere taking for granted that microprocessors would get faster, andvarious other advances would be made. It's just that they were sosure these improvements would be available, they did not have toconcern themselves with them.What this means for a researcher is that much more effort is requiredto have an impact. A 25% improvement in some process is alwaysvaluable. In a static world, it might be a breakthrough that couldlead to great payoff. However, in a world governed by "Moore's Law,"a 25% improvement is just 6 months along the technology curve. Hencethe researcher who has an innovative way to save 25% or speedsomething up by 25% has to find a way to incorporate this improvementinto all the other systems that are involved without delaying theproject by more than 6 months. In effect, radically new ideas have tocompete against the relentless progress of other technologies.4. The digital revolutionThe final theme that appears to play a major role in the decline insupport for unfettered research is that of the information revolution.(Just as the previous theme, it is reminiscent of points made by AlvinToffler in his books [Toffler1, Toffler2, Toffler3].) The examples oftechnological developments that have been cited so far, as well asphenomena such as "Moore's Law," are drawn largely from the computingand communications areas. This reflects to some extent my ownbackground, but I believe it also reflects the reality that thoseareas are the ones that drive technological, economic, and socialchange today. The 21-st century may well be dominated by biology, buttoday it is computing and communications that appear to be mostimportant, especially since they pervade all other areas.(Interestingly enough, while most technological forecasts have beenincorrect, primarily because of overoptimism, the one area where theseforecasts have consistently been too conservative has been incomputing [Schnaars].)The developments in communication and computing are leading to afundamental transformation of human life. The technologicaldevelopments that make this transformation possible, the fruits ofextensive research, have been going on at a steady pace for a coupleof decades. However, they have now reached a critical point wherethey are having a revolutionary impact. For example, the Internet hasbeen growing at a steady pace for the last 25 years. It has caughtpublic attention only recently because it became large enough to benoticeable and because its usefulness increased dramatically as morepeople got involved. Similar threshold effects operate in otherareas. Information storage, retrieval, and processing are now rapidlypassing performance levels that make more and more tasks doable in newways. Automatic teller machines eliminated many bank clerk positionsa decade ago, relatively primitive word-spotting voice recognitioneliminated most telephone operator jobs a few years ago, andmiddle-management jobs are increasingly being squeezed out through newinformation systems. This Schumpeterian "creative destruction" isbound to continue for a long time. Technology takes a while todiffuse through society. It took several decades before theintroduction of electric power to factories led to big productivityimprovements, since entire manufacturing processes had to bereengineered. Change is faster today, but it still takes time todevelop the organizational framework that takes full advantage of thebest information technologies. Even if all progress in integratedcircuit technologies stopped, we would still experience rapid andfundamental change in our lives. However, progress in all the crucialtechnologies has been steady, and is widely expected to continue forat least another decade. Thus we are bound to experience at least twodecades of turmoil, as new technologies are absorbed by society.Neither new fundamental physical phenomena nor dramatically newmathematical or software tools are needed to make this possible.Rapid advances in science and engineering mean there is a high returnon investment in new technology. (This does not have to mean asustained increase in profitability of corporations, even though WallStreet seems to think it does. Earlier eras of large investments innew opportunities opened up by novel technologies, such as those ofthe canals, then the railroads, then cars, did not lead permanentincreases in profits. Competition saw to that. However, the penaltyfor failure to adopt new technologies has been, and continues to be,severe, as companies such as Wang Labs or Smith-Corona havedemonstrated recently. In that sense there is a high return on newinvestment, as it provides a chance for an organization to survive.)This would seem to argue for greater investment in long term research.Paradoxically, though, it seems to have just the opposite effect.Research is an investment in the future. It therefore requires beliefthat there will be a future. A farmer will not engage in croprotation and other soil conservation measures if there is a highexpectation that a flood will carry all the topsoil away next year.However, that farmer will also not invest in improving the land (oreven in cultivating it at all) if a risk-free bank deposit will earn aguaranteed 50% return per year. High current returns mean that futurepayoffs have to be discounted at high rates to get their presentvalues, and therefore even ventures that are expected to be veryprofitable won't be attractive if their returns are far off in thefuture.The high returns that are obtainable from building products andservices based on present knowledge lead decision makers todeemphasize research on basic knowledge, and to ask the R&D communityto "just do it." This phenomenon also seems to explain the paradoxthat while it was clearly primarily the work in the physical sciencesthat gave us the computing and communication capabilities that arecreating the digital revolution, research in those sciences isdeemphasized. Even Intel, the prototypical hardware company, isincreasing its efforts in systems and software, since it sees the mainbarriers in those areas. Although the gap from basic insight to amarketable product is short in some areas, in others, especially wherean entire new infrastructure is required, it is often still 15-30years. Optical amplifiers took around 20 years from concept todeployment. Combinatorial chemistry, which only now appears to becoming into widespread use, is about three decades old. In fieldswhere such delays are common, it is hard for managers to justify basicresearch.5. Future prospectsThe factors listed in the preceding sections have led to a shifttowards short term, directed research in industry. These factors areall operating, and seem likely to continue to be in force for severalmore decades. They are also affecting research in universities andgovernment laboratories. The question is whether this is good or bad,and what should be done about it.The decreasing number of "big hits" is not necessarily a good argumentfor cutting back on research. The story is told that somebody onceasked Einstein, "Professor Einstein, where do you get all yourwonderful ideas?" That sage replied, "I don't really know, I haveonly had two or three in my life." There simply aren't that manybrilliant new insights to be had, and the easy ones have probablyalready been found. Much greater effort may be an unavoidable priceto pay for technological progress. Some of the negative argumentsabout research can be interpreted as arguing for greater support ofrelatively unfettered investigations. For example, Section 2discussed the evidence that in many of the areas of greatest interestto society, research is not far ahead of the marketplace. Does thisnot argue, though, that in those areas much more research is needed?Also, Section 2 argued that research results often are difficult toimplement because of the need for industry standards, interoperabilitywith other systems, and related concerns. However, since this is so,and because technology choices have such a huge impact on society, andonce made, continue to have an influence for extended periods, it isimportant to do as much as possible to ensure good selections.Industry estimates [Stewart] are that running a PC with the MS-DOS orWindows 3.1 operating system in a business environment for 5 yearscosts at least $5,000 more than a Macintosh one, which results inunnecessary total costs in the tens of billions of dollars per year.Does this not argue for much more research to enable better choices?R&D spending as a whole has been increasing, and even spending onresearch itself has been increasing. Even when some companies orcountries cut back, others more than pick up the slack. There seemsto be little danger of a wholesale retreat from technology any timesoon. It is true that China in ancient times repeatedly turned awayfrom promising technological and economic developments. However,during those periods China was run by a centralized government thatcould exert tight control over society. Today's world is broken upinto many nation states that compete economically, a situationreminiscent of Europe during the formative stages of the currenttechnologically oriented Western civilization. The success ofgovernments is measured by the rate of growth of their economies.Further, economies of scale require participation in the world market.Therefore even though the changes that technology is bringing aresocially disruptive, they are tolerated, as the primary goal is tomaintain or increase international economic competitiveness. SinceR&D is crucial for success in this environment, it is unlikely todecrease. However, the subject of this essay is the form of R&D thatis undertaken, and especially how much of it will be D and how much R,and what form of R is to be favored.To what extent is today's decline in unfettered research a passingfad? Trendy policies do change, and forecasts are often wrong. Aswas mentioned in the Introduction, a century ago the U.S. patentcommissioner thought that no significant discoveries remained to bemade. Around 1940, it was widely thought that the nature of researchhad changed. A U.S. government report (quoted on p. 17 of[FloridaK]) stated that in "large industrial laboratories ...research has itself become a mass-production industry." (Compare thisto the Forrester 1995 quote from [TR] at the end of Section 2.) Evensuch perceptive observers of the economic scene as Joseph Schumpetershared this view. Yet the following few decades saw the greatestflowering ever of industrial as well as university unfetteredresearch. Are we likely to experience something similar in thefuture?The current trend towards directed, short-term research can be thoughtof as a triumph of the Japanese style of R&D management. It was Japanthat perfected the incremental improvement approach to technology. Byadopting the quality improvement approach pioneered by Shewhart atBell Labs, and extended by Deming and Juran, the Japanese blurred thelines between R&D and production, with even assembly line workerscontributing to quality and efficiency gains. Their research wasextremely goal-oriented, and usually would have been called advanceddevelopment in the U.S. There were close ties between R&D personneland production and marketing groups. This approach triumphed in themarketplace, and gave Japan a lead in producing high-technologyhardware, a lead that is still growing, as is shown by trade figures(provided those are adjusted for Japanese exports of production toolsand sophisticated components to other Asian countries). (For moreevidence of this lead, see [Hamilton], which shows that most of thepotential bottlenecks in the manufacture of PCs are in Japan.) Thisapproach is also what was adopted by the rapidly industrializingcountries, and is what American and European firms seem to be strivingfor. However, the Japanese were cognizant of their borrowing of basicscience from the West, and during the 1980s were making plans forincreasing their investment in research, including the unfetteredtype. These plans seems to have been shelved during the 1990s, andthe question is whether this was a result of a reassessment of theirneeds, or of the recession and deflation of the Japanese financialbubble. Even though their profits have plummeted, Japanese companieshave not decreased their R&D efforts (which already account for alarger fraction of GNP than in any other country), and the Japanesegovernment is increasing its commitment to unfettered research[Normile]. The question is what will happen when the Japanese economyrecovers. Japanese companies might be more inclined than Western onesto invest in long-term research. They tend to concentrate on theproduction of goods (where the lead times between initial ideas andmarketplace applications appear to be longer than in systems andservices). Also, their keiretsu structure makes its easier to justifylong-term work, since the probability that some company in a groupingwill be able to benefit from some unforeseen technological developmentis much easier than if just one narrowly focused company wereinvolved. However, so far what little information there is seems topoint towards greater focus on short-term work even in Japan.In American and European industry, the prospects for a return tounfettered research in the near future are slim. The trend is towardsconcentration on narrow market segments. Two decades ago, the harddisk market was dominated by vertically integrated manufacturers suchas IBM and CDC. Today, leading firms, such as Seagate, basically doonly system design, assembly, and marketing of their disks. They buytheir disk controllers, motors, and other components from outsidesuppliers. The reason they can do this is that technology is widelyavailable, and any basic research results are likely to beincorporated by the suppliers into their products and be available foranyone to buy.Ford's River Rouge plant was the embodiment of vertical integration,with "iron ore and coal coming in at one end, and Model Ts rolling outthe other." There was justification for this integration, sinceoutside suppliers could not be relied on to provide the necessaryquality and consistency of supply. Today the atmosphere is entirelydifferent. The head of a business unit of a large corporation, whosedivision competes in a market where at least temporarily everyoneappears to be losing money, mentioned publicly his efforts to persuadethe other business unit heads to subsidize his division, to haveassurance of supplies in the future. They were not interested, andeven told him that they felt if his division went out of business, theother competitors would become stronger, and would therefore be able,through economies of scale, to lower their prices. This attitude isextreme, but apparently not uncommon.At this point it is worth stating again that this essay is not meantto be a balanced account of research policies. It is intended toexplain the reasons for the decline in unfettered research, and theturn towards more directed work. Therefore it emphasizes thenegatives. There are valid arguments to be made for unfetteredresearch, even in industry. I will not devote much space toexplaining them, but they do include public relations, maintenance ofties with university researchers, and recruiting. Probably the mostimportant reason is the need to have a window on future technologicaldevelopments, to anticipate new threats and promising new directionsfor a company to pursue. All these reasons will presumably preservesome unfettered research in industry. However, these reasons havealways been valid, and therefore in view of the negative developmentslisted in previous sections, they are not likely to lead to a reversalof current policies.The arguments for taxpayer support of unfettered research are easierto make, since the benefits of wide-ranging undirected inquiry aremore likely to be exploited someplace in a large economy than in asingle corporation. However, even there the issue of "free-loaders"or "the tragedy of the commons" arises, since basic scientificadvances diffuse rapidly around the world, and the taxpayers in thecountry funding a long-term project in basic research may not benefitmuch from it. Questions are also being raised about the rationale forgovernment support of all basic research. I will not deal with allthe issues that arise in this context (see [Armstrong, ByerlyP, NAS1],for example), but will assume that government funding will beprovided, and will concentrate on the issue of what type of researchshould be supported.Universities are still a stronghold of unfettered research. However,they are also facing increasing pressure to change. Most of thefactors discussed in earlier sections apply to university research aswell, and there are additional special ones that apply in academia.The increasing size and specialization of the research enterprise,even in academic settings, means that what professors do is gettingfurther removed from what they teach. This raises into question thejustification of research as a crucial qualification for a teacher.Universities are also still set up for continuing exponential growth,and there are few of the negative feedback loops in operation thatwould stop the overproduction of Ph.D.s (cf. [Goodstein]). Further,the Ph.D.s that are produced are trained primarily for unfetteredresearch. That preparation is inadequate for the non-academic jobsthat more and more of them are taking. Hence there is increasingrecognition that graduate education will need to be rethought andreformed [NAS2]. The general growth of scientific knowledge meansthat interdisciplinary research offers increasingly attractiveopportunities. However, universities, with their rigid division intodepartments, are poorly positioned to take advantage of this. (Onecan go even further, and say that the fierce competition for tenureand grants is forcing faculty into extremely narrow and esoteric areasof research, which undermines the rationale for unfettered research.For a discussion of the deficiencies of the present peer reviewsystem, see [Lederberg].) Further, the same factors that operate inindustry (the high payoff from short-term work, the relative lack ofdramatic new innovations, the increasing scale of research projects,etc.) also influence the decisions makers who fund universityresearch. There are frequent calls for publicly funded work to bemore relevant. With increasing reliance on industrial funding orcollaboration, there will be additional pressure on academicresearchers to prove that what they do is of value to society. Evenmilitary-funded research was often relatively unfettered compared towhat is often required in work with industry [Ghoshroy]. The need forlarge scale efforts in some areas of research, and the commingling ofpotentially profit-making work with pure research, will continue toput strains on academic institutions.On the positive side, two factors (in addition to the inertia of thebyzantine academic system) will serve to preserve at least sometraditional unfettered research at universities. One is that the bestway to prepare students for careers in science and technology in aworld that is changing rapidly is not to train them in the narrowskills that happen to be in hottest demand at the current moment,since those are likely to be obsolete in a few years. It is better totrain them in more general skills, and in particular to concentrate onfundamental phenomena. That is also the way to attract the ableststudents to science and technology, since they usually want to feelthey are doing something basic that advances human knowledge, and notjust tweak some process to increase profits.Another factor that is likely to preserve a large fraction of theunfettered research being performed at universities, and perhaps evena small fraction of what used to be done in industry, is generalunease with the trend towards short term research. Even industrialleaders who demand immediate payback from research in their companiesrecognize the value of fundamental research as a public good, andspeak up in favor of government funding [Coy, NAM, PT]. The idea thatwe can proceed without looking far forward, dealing with technicalproblems only as they come up, seems implausible. While we cancertainly do that for a while, living off the advances made in thepast, such a strategy is unlikely to be successful for long. Even ifit were possible to dispense with long range research, it would not beadvisable. As a simple example, the discovery of public keycryptography, mentioned in the Introduction, could be calledpremature, in that it is only now, almost 20 years after the basicinvention, that public key cryptosystems are coming into widespreaduse. (Computers and communication networks had to become widespreadfor the need for public key systems to become acute.) However, theknowledge that this technology existed was of tremendous value, as itshowed that electronic commerce and related goals could be achieved atlow cost. This, in turn, facilitated planning for the informationage, and forestalled unnecessary research for alternatives.While one can justify some support for unfettered research, the caseis not easy. Further, there seems to be no way to get back to thedays in which individual researchers had to make hardly anyjustification for their projects, and areas grew with the stimulationof bountiful funding for all. Choices will need to be made,especially choices between fields. Scientists can show that they havebeen making good choices, given all the uncertainties involved, indeciding on directions within subjects. (Even there, though, therehave been many mistakes, such as a famous university eliminatingmatrix theory from the requirements for an undergraduate degree inphysics in the early 1920s, just a few years before the invention ofquantum mechanics.) However, scientists have been notoriously bad indeciding on priorities between subjects. Unfortunately, such choicesseem inescapable. While scientists usually feel that knowledge isgood by itself, the public is unlikely to support the large scaleresearch enterprise we have without utilitarian justification.Claiming that the superconducting supercollider would have absorbed asmaller fraction of the US federal budget than Tycho Brahe's Uraniborgobservatory did of King Frederick II's revenue did not persuade manypeople to vote for the $15B project. The lack of measurable payofffor the economy from the last 50 years of experimental high energyphysics (combined with the lack of pork barrel appeal) seemed to playa bigger role.We do not have a convincing way to justify any particular splitbetween unfettered versus directed research. We do not even know whatthe optimal level of total R&D effort is. Many scientists andmathematicians feel that their personal projects are crucial for thedevelopment of human knowledge. However, while one can perhaps make asimilar case in art (if Verdi had been diverted from music towards amore mundane occupation, such as banking, would anyone else havecomposed the Manzoni Requiem, for example?), it is hard to argue thisin science or mathematics. Most researchers are Platonists, andbelieve that they discover more than invent. It is impossible todismiss out of hand the argument that long-range unfocused researchshould be abandoned or at least sizably decreased in favor ofshorter-term projects with greater payoff. Fundamental discoveriesthat are not made soon as a result of such a downsizing would simplybe made later. One can even argue that in the long run, humanknowledge might benefit from such redirection, since the improvedtechnology developed during the next decade or two of the digitalrevolution, as well as the higher standard of living and bettereducation that result from it, will enable much faster progress on abroader front in the future. There are numerous examples of ambitiousprojects, such as machine language translation in the 1960s or TedNelson's hypertext Xanadu project in the 1970s and 1980s, that wereattempted too early, before the tools (hardware, software, and basicknowledge) to carry them out were available. It is even dangerous toargue that in some fields we are relying on discoveries of unfetteredresearch made a century ago. That argument can quickly be turnedaround, to say that if we haven't yet fully exploited the lastcentury's work in those fields, why should be go much further in themnow?A much more persuasive case for research, including relativelyunfettered one, can be made by citing extended research programs thathave only recently started to have an impact in the marketplace, butare crucial today. The Computing Research Association has compiled anexcellent report on just such developments [CRA]. It shows how adecades-long collaboration of universities, government, and privateindustry has provided the basic tools for the information society.Broad programs, directed at areas that appear to be especiallypromising or important, but ones that leave substantial freedom forindividual investigators, may be the most promising approach. Thismay not be exactly "the free play of free intellect" advocated byVannevar Bush, but it should be easier to justify to the public,promote technological change, and advance human knowledge. AsLangmuir is supposed to have said, "You can't predict what you willfind, but you can make sensible bets on where to look."Acknowledgements: I thank John Armstrong, Sam Bleecker, Greg Blonder,Joe Buhler, Rob Calderbank, Elise Cawley, David Cohen, Mel Cohen, BillCoughran, Peter Denning, Henry Ehrenreich, Stephen Elliott, AlanEnglish, Joan Feigenbaum, Paul Ginsparg, Stevan Harnad, AlbertHenderson, Joe Kilian, Kathy Krisch, Bob Kurshan, Susan Landau, LouLanzerotti, Jeff Lagarias, Leslie Lamport, Ed Lazowska, JoshuaLederberg, Mike Lesk, Peter Littlewood, Ron Loui, David Maher, GaryMcDonald, Jim Mazo, Charles Molnar, Larry O'Gorman, Arno Penzias, JohnPoate, Raghu Raghavan, Peter Renz, Bruce Reznick, Bruce Richmond, AviSilberschatz, Larry Shepp, Neil Sloane, Warren Smith, Harold Stone, AlThaler, Chris Van Wyk, Hal Varian, and Stephen Wolfram for theircomments on an earlier version of this article.References:[Armstrong] J. A. Armstrong, Is basic research a luxury our society can no longer afford?, The Bridge (quarterly published by Nat. Acad. Eng.), vol. 24, no. 2, 1994.[Burke] Colin Burke, "Information and Secrecy: Vannevar Bush, Ultra, and the Other Memex," The Scarecrow Press, 1994.[Bush] V. Bush, "Science: The Endless Frontier," Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1945.[ByerlyP] R. Byerly Jr. and R. A. Pielke Jr., The changing ecology of United States science, Science 269, Sept. 15, 1995, pp. 1531-2.[CRA] Computing research: driving information technology and the information industry forward, report prepared by the Computing Research Association, available online at URL http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/lazowska/cra/[Coy] P. Coy, Blue-sky research comes down to Earth, Business Week, July 3, 1995, pp. 78-80.[Ehr] H. Ehrenreich, Strategic curiosity: Semiconductor physics in the 1950s, Physics Today, Jan. 1995, pp. 28-34.[FloridaK] R. Florida and M. Kenney, "The Breakthrough Illusion: Corporate America's Failure to Move from Innovation to Mass Production," Basic Books, 1990.[FL] H. I. Fusfeld and R. N. Langlois, eds., "Understanding R&D Productivity," Pergamon Press, 1982.[Ghoshroy] S. Ghoshroy, Universities face R&D cuts as defense budgets decline, in The Institute (IEEE member newsletter), vol. 19, no. 6, June 1995.[Gomory] R. Gomory, Of ladders, cycles, and economic growth, Sci. Am., June 1990, p. 140.[Goodstein] D. Goodstein, The big crunch, available on line at URL http://www.caltech.edu/~goodstein/crunch.html. (Previous versions published in several journals, including American Scholar, vol. 62, no. 2, spring 1993.)[Hamilton] D. P. Hamilton, Computer makers face hidden vulnerability: supplier concentration, Wall Street Journal (Eastern ed.), Aug. 27, 1993, p. A1.[Lederberg] J. Lederberg, Research and the culture of instrumentalism, in issue 1.1, spring 1995, Columbia - 21st Century.[NAS1] Science, technology, and the federal government: National goals for a new era, National Academy Press, 1993.[NAS2] Reshaping the graduate education of scientists and engineers, National Academy Press, 1995. Summary available online at URL http://www.nas.edu/nap/online/grad/summary.html[NAM] National Association of Manufacturers, press release, July 1995.[Normile] D. Normile, Japan expands graduate postdoc slots, Science 269, Sept. 8, 1995, pp. 1335-6.[PT] Letter to Senator Dole, dated March 13, 1995, from 15 industrial leaders, reprinted in Physics Today, May 1995, p. 54.[Price] D. J. Price, The exponential curve of science, Discovery 17 (1956), pp. 240-243.[RSE] P. A. Roussel, K. N. Saad, and T. J. Erickson, "Third Generation R&D: Managing the Link to Corporate Strategy," Harvard Business School Press, 1991.[Schmookler] J. Schmookler, "Invention and Economic Growth," Harvard Univ. Press, 1966.[Schnaars] S. P. Schnaars, "Megamistakes," The Free Press, 1989.[StalkH] G. Stalk, Jr., and T. M. Hout, "Competing Against Time: How Time-based Competition is Reshaping Global Markets," Free Press, 1990.[Stewart] T. A. Stewart, What information costs, Fortune, July 10, 1995, pp. 119-121.[TR] The legacies of World War II, (a roundtable discussion with H. Brooks, J. W. Forrester, P. Morrison, A. Roland, S. van Evera, E. C. Weaver, H. Woolf), Technology Review, May/June 1995, pp. 50-59.[Toffler1] A. Toffler, "Future Shock," Random House, 1970.[Toffler2] A. Toffler, "The Third Wave," Morrow, 1980.[Toffler3] A. Toffler, "Powershift," Bantam, 1990.[Zachary] G. Pascal Zachary, Vannevar Bush on the engineer's role, IEEE Spectrum 32, no. 7, July 1995, 65-69. |
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