FUTURE SCIENCE FUNDING: Whether rhetoric has content or is empty, if it's good rhetoric with little of a track record, usually requires a passage of time to determine. In that light:
[April 27] We will devote more than 3 percent of our GDP to research and development. We will not just meet, but we will exceed the level achieved at the height of the space race, through policies that invest in basic and applied research, create new incentives for private innovation, promote breakthroughs in energy and medicine, and improve education in math and science. (Applause.)
This represents the largest commitment to scientific research and innovation in American history.
Just think what this will allow us to accomplish: solar cells as cheap as paint; green buildings that produce all the energy they consume; learning software as effective as a personal tutor; prosthetics so advanced that you could play the piano again; an expansion of the frontiers of human knowledge about ourselves and world the around us. We can do this.
In low keyed delivery but with Kennedyesque implications harking back to "the height of the space race" science funding will not remain orphaned as with Cheney-Bush.
Or so the man says.
It would be a "change". Is it too early to believe in it? Probably.
And then, Congress has to deliver its share, and we all know how one branch can play blame games with the other.
The President's tilt toward application-related realities and anticipated outcomes is rhetorical, for the public, but the audience he was speaking to at the time well knew the truth of basic research being the necessary predecessor to any deployed capital for producing and marketing devices or services.
In the mid-sixties while I was in college NMR was something a few professors pursued with very specialized one-off Varian spectrometers needed to do the work, glass cylinders fitting into the field cavity, all that and a professor in the basement of Louderman Hall doing that kind of research, now recently deceased - one of the Manhattan Project scientists who after the war rejoined academia, that specialist and his graduate students getting and interpreting a spectrum output to see what resonated at which energy levels, and what that at a pure basic research level meant for science - that was NMR reality in a nutshell. At the time no thought was given to, "In two decades or so this methodology will allow non-invasive radiological study in medicine in ways not yet imagined." (It's a tautology - if not yet imagined, would we expect anyone to be saying that?)
The application did, however, follow in time after the basic breakthrough work.
Basic research and campus faculty quality must be built over decades but can be easily lost in a few years to other institutions, in other states or at the nation's ivy league schools or at Standford or Rice or Case-Western Reserve, or Carnagie-Mellon - that class of private institutions - quality faculty cherry-picked that way, and lost from campuses such as the U.Minn. Twin Cities to others not having stingy government purse-string holders --- that is a truth the particular audience knew when Obama was speaking.
The speech transcript is here and a video can be downloaded here.
Here, is the whitehouse.gov released speech excerpt which I excerpted above. The photo appears here.
