Academy Head Urges Doubling of Science Funds

WASHINGTON — Despite deepening social problems and the budget deficit, the federal government needs to double science spending over the next five years by all U.S. agencies that depend on scientific research, the president of the National Academy of Sciences urged Tuesday.

In his annual speech to the prestigious 128-year-old organization, Frank Press argued that science should not be viewed as competing with social problems for federal funds. Rather, science helps solve those problems through advances that create wealth, he said.

“Science is providing important discoveries and a societal pay-back that more than justify growing support,” said Press, 66, citing science’s contribution in agriculture, computer software, advanced materials, lasers and antibiotics.

He called for a $2-billion increase in President Bush’s fiscal 1992 science budget. The Administration’s program already foresees increasing the 1991 budget by $7.5 billion, or 11%, to $75.5 billion. Bush’s budget plan would keep overall spending flat.

Press said federal science spending may not be able to grow as much as he would like in the next several years because of the deficit. But over the coming decade, at least, a doubling of science spending is warranted “in view of the large tangible and intangible benefits to society,” he said.

The academy--part think-tank, part honorary society--is considered the nation’s font of wisdom on scientific policy, and its president’s annual speech carries great weight. Press, a geophysicist, has often been controversial: Last year he argued that the Japanese should donate $100 billion a year to the U.S. to modernize its research laboratories, and in 1988 his speech proposed delays in federal spending for space station, atom-smasher and genetic-mapping projects.

Press acknowledged the several arguments in favor of holding down the increases in science spending at a time of deeping domestic problems. Critics note, he said, that the United States already outspends all other nations on science and that some say U.S. scientists are “welfare queens in white coats” who always want more “but are unable to explain when they know they have enough.”