Science has played a crucial role in making the United States great and powerful.
||| FROM THE WASHINGTON POST |||
The evisceration of the National Science Foundation (NSF) — including wholesale firings, budget-slashing and arbitrary elimination of grants — is especially worrisome to those of us who understand the crucial role science has played in making America a great and powerful nation. Congress must act soon to halt this devastating attack.
Established in 1950 at the outset of the Cold War, the NSF was the realization of a concept envisioned by Vannevar Bush in his famous 1945 report, “Science: The Endless Frontier.” Focused on basic research in the physical sciences, the agency grew slowly but steadily during the 1950s, experiencing a burst of political support and funding growth after the launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik I satellite shocked the nation in 1957.
At its heart was a management ethos borrowed from successful wartime research: the idea that knowledgeable scientists could identify the most fruitful topics and the best ways to pursue them. The NSF usually recruits experienced scientists to manage its programs, bringing them from universities and research institutes to its Virginia headquarters for a few years’ duration. Thousands of other scientists have served on its peer-review panels.
The agency played a leading role in bringing the internet and World Wide Web to a broad spectrum of users. Its NSFNET computer network, originally intended for the academic and educational pursuits of scientists at U.S. universities, was opened to public and commercial use in 1991, serving as the internet’s “backbone.” The first widely available Web browser — Mosaic, the prototype of many subsequent browsers — was developed by two programmers at the NSF-funded National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. And during the mid-1990s, NSF supported Stanford University’s Digital Library Initiative, in which graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed the guts of their Google search engine.
Authors | Neal Lane is a physicist and former director of the National Science Foundation and science adviser to President Bill Clinton. Michael Riordan is a physicist, author of “The Hunting of the Quark” and co-author of “Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider.”
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Orcasonian readers upset with this (and other) national developments can express their concerns by writing Senator Patty Murray at:
https://www.murray.senate.gov/write-to-patty/
As the Ranking Minority Member on the Senate Appropriations Committee, she wields substantial power and influence in Congress, which needs to reassert its Article I power of the purse.
And Senator Maria Cantwell is the Ranking Minority Member on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, which has jurisdiction over the NSF, NASA, NOAA and other federal science agencies. You can email her at: Maria_Cantwell@cantwell.senate.gov.
I’m hoping that these Washington state women and a few “Rational Republicans” like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski can turn things around in the Senate.