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244  "The Scientific Study of Life"
     Remarks on Tenth Anniversary of National Institute of General
     Medical Sciences 1963-1973
     March 21, 1973

     When Hans Stetten called me some months ago and asked me to 
participate in the program I thought, to paraphrase Mark Anthony, that
it would be my job to praise the NIGMS rather than to bury it.  But
the times, unhappily, make it difficult to concentrate on simple
eulogy over past accomplishments.  Besides, I have personal predilection
against dwelling on past laurels--there is too much work to do
ahead.  I could take a very gratifying several hours to begin to
review the scientific excitement of the past decade.  Here again,
there is a personal idiosyncracy that gets in the way.  I find it
extraordinarily difficult to lecture to my classes or to make a 
presentation to a group of this kind when I know that there is such 
splendid material in writing that you could read at your leisure which 
could do a much more beautiful job of reviewing the recent history of  
the contributions of biology and the general medical sciences to human 
welfare and to medicine in particular.

     At the risk of appearing to be a press agent for my predecessor,
I would like to remind you of the volume that Phil Handler edited for
a group of committees on the National Academy of Sciences, Biology in
the Future of Man.  Another, more modest and more recent collection of
material very pertinent to the subject which I think that everyone in
this room should be aware of, appeared as a supplement to the Federation
proceedings last November entitled Contributions of the Biological
Sciences to Human Welfare.  These are two splendid documents and
they document in very, very great detail how the substance of programs
grams (of which NIGMS is the base and the core) has contributed to
human welfare and to medicine and the improvement of health during
precisely the period of its first decade.

     I'll just bring one small item to your attention from the economic
analyses of the period, in part as justifications for the programs
in which we are all interested.  I was a little startled to notice
that--for a disease too commonly passed off as rather trivial, like
measles--one can make a very solid case that the simple advent of the
vaccination program for this one disease can be attributed an economic
advantage during that interval of one billion dollars in terms of
prevention of the time, cost of medical care, and the prevention of
losses from lost income that stem from it.

     This is, of course, a story that can be replicated innumerable
times over, for in situation after situation we have grown quite 
accustomed to all the benefits of past researchers, tending to discount
them ... not in an economic sense but in a psychological sense ... and
to ignore that where we are today--on a rather relatively comfortable
and complacent platform of health advance--is derived from the product
of generations of our predecessors.  Even so, these calculations of
costs are in rather narrow economic terms.  They take no account of
the aches and the pains that are less threatening to actual life and
limb than the major diseases for which, to alleviate, we freely spend
billions of dollars each year, and do not appear readily in the 
economic accounts of health advantage.

     Besides these first order health utilities, the studies of this
decade have also opened review on many basic issues of the foundations
of heredity, of mind, of the emotions, and the pathologies thereof.  
And we've at least laid the groundwork for such aspirations as the
control of cancer, of coronary disease, of schizophrenia, perhaps even
of aging, although it would be arrogant to pretend that we know enough
to lay out a clearcut engineering blueprint for the successes in these
areas which are almost within our grasp.

     To my own view--which is obviously a biased one--the most startling
development of the decade, and the one most replete, both with 
opportunities and with policy dilemmas has been the rapid development of
fetal diagnosis ... the detection of hereditary disease in utero which
can now be accompanied by the sampling of cells from the amniotic
fluid ... and which is available for a limited number of conditions of
hereditary origin--both chromosomal and metabolic in their impact.
There is the possibility that this, of course, can now be legally
coupled with selective abortion on rational principles to prevent the
birth of wretchedly unhealthy children--for example, those with Tay-
-Sachs disease who would otherwise be absolutely doomed to die within
a few years of neurological deterioration.

     The decade has also seen the explosive spread of oral steroids
for contraception--a technology whose impact on knotty problems of
population growth is at least less ambiguous than its influence on the
liberation of sexual mores, and whose long range consequences on the
relationships of men and women is quite incalculable.  These are not 
necessarily the issues that would be brought up in a simple eulogy of
past accomplishments because they also point to some of the troubles
and some of the difficulties that scientific effort also generate.
But they are also very much on the public mind and they should be very
much on ours too--the double-edged nature of the kind of sword that we
fabricate in our research shops.

     And I think that we do have here prototypes of some of science's
most crucial problems for the near future.  On the one hand we must
answer the scoffers who, forgetful of the complacent platform on
which we now stand, question the payoff of research.  On the other, in
the very process of answering the most urgent of human demands--be it
for health, for freedom from anxiety, as I have mentioned, or for
efficiency in transportation or for national defense ... to speak to
other examples, and you can imagine what I mean ...science may pose
new dilemmas of personal and social decisions just in proportion to
their success and to their efficacy, from a strictly technical
standpoint.

     Undoubtedly, one of our more urgent challenges for the next
decade is to learn how to project more accurately the second and third
order consequences of technological investments in different fields.
This process may be completely futile insofar as a crystal ball is the
indicated instrument.  Our biotechnology programs are not capable of
generating that kind of prognosticative device.  But in many areas it
is obvious that technical advances have uncovered previously patched-
-over areas of pure and simple scientific and technical ignorance,
that are remediable by the investigative process.

     Despite the examples that I've put on the top of my list--
concerning fetal medicine and contraceptive techniques--the last decade
is likely to be remembered above all as the era of the ecological 
revolution ... of the penetration into the public consciousness of the 
changes that large scale human technology has introduced into our 
environment... and in very large part very deep concerns--new concerns--
about role of those environmental factors on our own health.  We have  
a long list of environmental additives whose consequences for human 
welfare have been the subject of great public hysteria--certainly a
great deal of controversy--and where we have incurred enormous expense
as the result of our ignorance about how to evaluate the costs to
human health of these additives.

     We can top the list of these consequences of ignorance by talking
about cigarette smoking.  We certainly pay a price on the order of at
least $5 billion a year, as the health cost of smoking.  Now you may 
think, in what respect is that the result of ignorance? It's very 
simple.  We don't know the active ingredient of tobacco which is 
responsible for many of its several pathological effects in man.  Yet it
might, indeed, be a very simple proposition to reconcile the habit and
the pleasures that many people continue to spend large sums for, with
a much more healthy environment for them to enjoy, if we but had some
additional scientific knowledge.  And I put it very plainly that our
bill for that ignorance is certainly much larger than those five
billions.

     We've had a whole series of crises of policy judgments with 
respect to environmental additives where decisions have been made on one
side of the fence or on another, on the basis of highly fragmentary
and incomplete information ... where honest men may disagree ... about
the extent to which risks would continue to be sustained.  But whether
you accept the risk and thereby accept the possible health cost, or
whether you deny the risk and deny yourself the economic advantage of
a particular additive--in both cases a very heavy price is paid.  This
may be unavoidable in some cases; it is certain to be sheer waste in
others.  By this analysis you can see, again, that we are spending 
billions in a context of incompletely scientifically founded policy 
decisions that have run from arenas such as cyclamates and from air 
pollution to the question of whether lead from gasoline additives is or
is not a serious health hazard.

     The evaluation of drugs--the extremely long procedures that are
now imposed on their validation and their availability in health ...
even questions about whether potatoes are serious sources of
teratology ... and such issues as the health consequences of the SST
... the very large arena of the health consequences surrounding
nuclear energy ... all of these which run into actual economic costs
into the tens of billions of dollars every year are, at bottom, 
founded on incomplete biological, biochemical, embryological, and genetic
information about the consequences of these environmental additives
for our own health consequences.

     These costs of ignorance are enormous.  Now you might say that
science is also very expensive.  It's expensive to do it in that to
uncover the answers to many of these questions might cost a significant
fraction of the economic advantages of responding to them.  However,
when you consider that these are costs that are compounded year
after year after year--whether they are denied opportunities with 
respect to nuclear energy, or whether all the political complications
that surround our efforts to find secondary and tertiary solutions to
problems like those of energy--they do accumulate in a very large
measure.

     But I think that to some science seems even more expensive 
precisely because it uncovers these problems. Perhaps there are some who
wish we didn't know that radiation is mutagenic and carcinogenic.  We
could then use our atmosphere and other resources as sinks for our
waste in that sphere, and get at least a short-term advantage of the 
economic utility of the procedures.  Unfortunately, you cannot play
those kinds of games with nature for very long.  Those costs will be
incurred to the extent that they are real ... to the extent that there
are actual health hazards ... connected with them whether you know
about them or not.  Merely to be ignorant of them is simply to defer
your recognition of them into the future--in no way to blunt yourself
to the actual impact.

     Another source of resistance to health research is only beginning
to surface in overt expression.  Medical people are arrogant enough to
hold to the consistent belief that life and health are precious, worth
sacrificing a great deal of their own energies to help preserve.  But
this tenet should not be taken for granted.  One prominent attorney
has asserted that research on life-sustaining heart devices should
perhaps be curtailed, since society has not yet given its "informed
consent" to the extension of life span--and indeed we must foresee
many economic and social adjustments if we could generally look forward
to another twenty or thirty years of active, healthy life after
the customary age of retirement.  (This is a pattern some of our
youngsters are anticipating by retiring even before they enter the
establishment's "labor force," while others are forced into it by our
clumsy arrangements for providing useful employment for everyone who
is eager to work, much less those who have a reasonable distain for it
if it can be avoided.)  But I would be happy to see the plebiscite
that is indicated by such criticisms, except that we just may not be
able to deliver on the implied promises within the lifetime of many of
the voters.  Much mischief has already been done by promises to solve
cancer or heart disease according to fixed, and unjustifiable time- 
tables.  Our caution about the potential reach of discovery can be
overzealous too, if the public then fails to understand the level of
human sacrifice that flows from the failure to support basic, 
far-reaching research in the health sciences.

     Moreover, science so often carries bad news with respect to the 
impact of a new environmental agent that I think we scientists get it
both ways. We're blamed, on the one hand, for promoting the introduction
of a technology by providing the ultimate basis for its happening; and
then we're the people who tell the world, well, you had better worry
about asbestos in your talcum powder.

     We have just come to realize that asbestos, too, must be added to
the list of potentially serious carcinogens.  So we therefore face the
task of justifying social investment in science in the face of 
skepticism, both from a new right as well as a new left.

     Some say, however, perhaps we should set our sight on a new
direction.  If there are very large economic values involved in the 
pursuit of science, perhaps one should return to the mechanism of the
free market as has been advocated with respect to training procedures
in science.  We should perhaps explore more dispassionately the 
consequences of accepting the free enterprise ideology in this sphere as
we have been advised to do so.  To do this properly, I do think we
need some new institutions.  I will attempt to be reasonably objective
and dispassionate and not indulge in angry polemics or complaints
about the sources of the policies that have been suggested here.  In
these new institutional arrangements, above all, if we're to have a
valid basis for the assumption that the payoff for higher education
should be regarded as the fruit of a personal investment, then we
ought to establish much more clearly property rights in knowledge.

     This would imply going beyond the existing patent system, which
recognizes property rights in inventions which can be justified 
primarily because of the need to protect the kind of investment involved
in the exploitation of a new invention.  If we are to demand of the
individual student that he regard his own education as a capital  
investment on which there are to be fruits for the future, then we
should protect his property right in what he has learned, and we
should protect his property right in what he has discovered and what
he has later communicated.

     This will have a number of interesting consequences.  The cost of
transactions will be very high.  I may demand a release from each of
you that you will not make exploitative use of the information that I
transmit to you in a lecture of this kind.  It will mean that I can
tax you with a royalty for any further implications derived from any
of the ideas that I transmit to you--require an entrance fee that most
of you will be willing to pay in order to have access to those goods.
But that would be setting it up on a reasonable economic base entirely
consistent with the notion of a free enterprise system carried to its
logical extremes, which is of course an absurdity.

     In the medical field it also would have other interesting 
consequences, because it would imply that a man who has invested or has
gotten another venture capitalist to invest in him ... in his education
... should have a right to have the fruits of success as he does
in other areas, and that payoffs be properly rewarded.  If, therefore,
I discover a new drug or a new procedure--the basic principle of free
enterprise capitalism, one which is extremely successful and works
very smoothly in market allocation processes in other arenas, should
be applied here too:  "charge all that the traffic will bear"  under
any and all circumstances, since that is the absolute paradigm of the
recovery of investments in risky enterprises.  That means that when a
drug is first introduced--if it has any significant utility whatsoever
--that it would of course be available only to the rich, would be
advertised at the highest possible price.  Thus, the first doses of a
penicillin ought to go at ten or one hundred thousand or million
dollars per dose, which would be a very good bargain in some situations,
in some circumstances, for life-saving purposes to those who can
afford it.

     Also, let the process of free competition by other innovators,
who may emulate the same procedures, increase the supply of those
goods until the appropriate market equilibrium is established and the
poor can also benefit equally with the rest.  I think I'm not making
too much of a parody of Milton Friedman to suggest this approach in
solving those problems.  Rather, I think the answer is very simple.
We simply would not stand for such a system.  It would be very much
against our moral feelings that there are limits to what the traffic
can bear where human life and health are concerned.  And the fact is,
we have other kinds of obligations, of one to another, so that we
simply do not have a free market system in issues that relate to 
knowledge relevant to life and health.

     There is, of course, something of a market in arenas of the medical
specialties, where services are indeed bid up, where some groups 
who work very hard for their incomes can achieve very high incomes in
pathology, in radiology, and so forth ... where there is, indeed, an
obvious scarcity of specialists just in terms of how the market 
evaluates those particular services. And in these areas it would be hard
to see why the government should turn away from an opportunity to
reduce its eventual cost in health insurance, and in whatever role it
plays in the maintenance of public health, by pushing up the supply
and reducing the cost by appropriate manipulation of the market, which
would be far less intrusive than whatever it undertakes in many other
arenas.

     But that question--that we simply will not ask all that the
traffic can bear--is not really the basic difficulty in creating an
open market in knowledge.  The basic difficulty is that the transaction
cost is simply too high.  If we had to depend on the recovery of
an economic yield every time there was an exchange of fact, an 
exchange of information, and collect a royalty for the promotion of
ideas--the overhead would exceed the intrinsic value of each item by
many, many fold.  And I simply do not know of any economist who has
examined this issue in any explicit detail who would begin to advocate
application of the principle of a free enterprise economy in the
knowledge field, in the way in which it may be entirely appropriate in
many others, as a means of allocating resources.

     Yet, at bottom, that is the implication of the statement that the
training of graduate research specialists should be subject to market
forces in order to determine the distribution of individuals who go
into it.  Now you may say that I've made a parody of the situation--
that this was not what was intended by those policy implications 
concerning training grants.  Still, I think they were inasmuch as the
suggestion and the imposition of policies with respect to the 
termination of these programs are simply part and parcel of the total
government commitment with respect to research funding.  So it is
indeed a self-fulfilling prophecy to say that there will not be 
sufficient positions to occupy the graduates of our research programs
when the same market controller--in something that is very, very 
different from the free market--has also determined what the overall role
of those research programs will be in our economy.

     All in all, considering the transaction costs of any hindered
system-of any economically-tagged system of exchange of knowledge--it
would seem that the social support of free science--I stress free--is
about the best bargain that a society can get.

     Obviously, this view is not held unanimously or we would not be
in our present difficulties of funding and of the public image of
science today.  The ultimate motives for the recrudescence of the war
against science are difficult for me to rationalize.  My speculations
deserve to be tested with empirical evidence and theoretical analysis
in fields of social science with which few of us here pretend to be
expert.  Some of us may view the present campaign as simply the
renewal of a centuries-old conflict between science and theology,
issues that others believe had been laid to rest at least 100 years
ago.  Many years ago the sociologist Robert K. Merton pointed out a
number of ways in which the methodology of science conflicts with the
cultural style of the community in a fashion that he predicted would 
cause some of the troubles we are now experiencing.  As scientists we
pride ourselves about our universalism, disinterestedness, the 
socialization of knowledge, and our role as a community dedicated to 
organized  skepticism.  These are all uncomfortable burdens to be borne
by a social system which has few other precedents for dedication to 
these aims and methods .  In addition, we tolerate as a necessary evil a
level of specialization of knowledge that may already be the limiting
factor in the communication within, and growth of, science as a whole,
and which seems to bar the average citizen from very direct 
participation in the intellectual excitement of scientific advance.  
When this acceptance of arcane jargon becomes transformed into 
sanctimonious self-superiority about the qualifications of technical 
experts for guiding human affairs, we are, of course, raising still  
greater difficulties for ourselves.

     Whatever a priori norms we might have about the responsibilities
of science to the Republic, it is a plain empirical fact, that the
present budgetary crisis reflects, that we simply have not done a 
sufficiently effective job of communicating our values, our utilities,
and our ethos to the public at large.  In addition, the organization
of our scientific disciplines and the academic institutions that 
go along with them, although ideal for preserving the integrity of
scientific criticism in established areas, may tend to have a dampening
effect in cultivating an overall perspective about the values of
the scientific enterprise as a whole, as well, perhaps, sometimes even
in the promotion of new kinds of ventures within the framework of
science itself.

     The seeming incapability of scientific expertise to reach
reassuringly precise conclusions about the costs and benefits of
investments in environmental modifications of various kinds, in the
introduction of new drugs and additives, and even in the evaluation of
investment of basic research itself, furnish all too ample ammunition
for the critics of laboratory science who, naturally come from other
sorts of intellectual background.  It should be perfectly obvious that
problems of, for example, environmental hazards cannot possibly be
resolved by the isolated application of the techniques of biology and
experimental medicine any better than they can be dealt with by applying
abstract formulations from economics or political science; and we
surely must develop new institutions that can more effectively bring 
both kinds of inquiry to bear on crucial policy questions of this
kind.

     Up to this point, the ultimate future applications of our 
scientific knowledge have appeared as the main justifications for our
social investments in such science.  So economists can ask questions
like "what is the appropriate discount rate?"  And there will be some
deferral payoffs.  But when we talk about long-range goals--if those
are to be the justified purposes of present investments--we have to
think, are we discounting our present investment at two percent, at
five percent, at 10 or 20? And one often thinks of this type of 
process--wherein you say that if the eventual payoff is going to be the
saving of `x' lives, in some future year, and you have to discount
that at 10 percent--any thing that is 20 or 30 years off becomes very
difficult to justify an investment in ... just by the laws of    
compound interest.

     Now this is an entirely appropriate way to begin a system analysis
and a comparison of competing programs within a given sphere.  If
you want to ask yourself, "is it better to put `x' dollars into 
education," having some idea of what the payoff will be with respect to
cigarette smoking habits, or put the dollars into the design of better
helmets for motorcyclists--with a whole set of competing alternatives
there really is no substitute for this kind of economic analysis ...
provided it's done rationally and provided it takes into account all
of the economic factors in the situation within a given sphere.  But
it's a very poor system to use in trying to compare vastly different
kinds of programs.  And I can only illustrate by asking you what you
think is the dollar value of national security compared to a given
level of health.  It may be a reasonable question to ask, in that it
may expose some of the assumptions that underly your value judgements,
but it's not one to which the economist or anyone else can possibly
give a prescriptive answer.  He can observe how you behave in your
market choices--when you choose aircraft carriers over health
research.  But we must also ask how well informed such decisions are.

     There is one element in the analysis that, as far as I know, has
been overlooked by every economic analyst of the situation.  The
effort to derogate the ultimate value of future benefits of present
day health research by invoking a discount rate totally overlooks the
fact that, as a matter of historical record, the economic value that
we place on life has been growing very rapidly as well.  Its future
value is increasing and should so discounting equations ... because
it's not a fixed good, not a fixed quantity of potatoes, or gold, or
even labor, or other kinds of productivity.  The value of life has
always been judged extremely flexibly in every society, and it is
roughly infinite; that is to say, it is in fact worth roughly what any
individual has at his disposal from his resources at a time when he
actually confronts the situation as to whether or not he should make
an investment for the preservation of his life.  (It is not precisely
infinite, of course.)

     But even looking at it from the point of view of the social
valuation of life in terms of the investments that communities have
been willing to make ... how many million dollars to prevent how many
deaths in a given circumstance ... the historical record is perfectly
plain showing a progressive increase in that valuation--both in real
money and in the inflated values of a constant currency over the
years, which just about beats out any discounting of current investments
at any rate that one could reasonably propose.

     All this is to suggest that most economic analysis in this area
are, at bottom, faulty; that when they're pushed beyond the limits of
the capability to express meaningful equations, they're going to give
nonsensical results.  Within an arena of competing programs for
related goals, the translation of lives into dollars, as of some
particular contemporary period, serves a very useful purpose in focusing
attention on the most cost-effective kinds of programs.  But that
translation factor is, inevitably, an arbitrary one--it reflects the
mores of the moment, it reflects what the community at a given time is
willing to invest, and it is by no means the fixed price of a given
commodity or a given product that the economist would have to have if
he is to make comparisons of lives today and lives in the future ...
or lives today and other goods today ... in the way that he would seek
to do in other arenas.

     In the long run, the value of a life is what well informed people
will pay for it.  And we know that this is a highly variable coefficient
determined by many, many aspects of the history of a given individual
(as, of course, many such valuations are) but which can be very
large indeed in circumstances where the customer knows that he can
have a useful outcome from making a specific investment.  Besides the
direct economically evaluated goods that are the results of our 
research investments, we must not ignore the side effects, even though
these (the latter) are even more difficult to put dollar figures on.
We thus have in essence what one might call the Newtonian as against
the Baconian justification for science.  At the very pinnacle of the 
pyramid, the process of pure research--the fact that there are people
who are engaged in this struggle with ignorance and this struggle with
nature--brings a unique intellectual, moral, and aesthetic value to 
any community.  It's rather easy to scoff at that, and it's hard to
put a dollar value on.  But the very fact that there are still long
waiting lists of applicants for admission to institutions like Harvard
and Yale and Stanford--who represent an adherence to those kinds of
goals--tells that there is still a public interest in these aspects of
the intellectual life that are reflected by investment in science as
well as in the raw payoffs which might be better reflected in the
technological academies.  Here, too, we don't charge just what the
traffic will bear in the exchange of these commodities nor could we 
possibly survive without doing so this way in a free enterprise
economy.

     Essential to the integrity of science is a process of internal 
criticism, of the demand for public validation of experimental
results, which is, in effect, manifested by the peer review system.  I
know one can make many criticisms of it, as it works out in some 
detailed examples, but these do not stand up very well to very close
scrutiny.  The worst abuses that I can think of have to do with taking
too simplistic a view of the consequences of a peer review analysis.
I have had the privilege, pleasure, and agony of sitting on some 
councils and have often debated whether anyone really understood the 
meaning of a number like 134 when it appeared in a priority score, say,
from another study section.  These evaluations are simply not as 
unilinear as would be necessary to justify a single dimensional scale, 
and I think there is a certain distortion in the process--the 
intellectual and evaluative process of peer review--that demands that it
be expressed in terms of a single number.  No one can say that, 
ultimately there is a single number.  In fact it ends up being one bit  
of information, yes or no. So there has to be a dividing line that will 
separate sheep from goats.

     But I think at any stage--where judgment still has to be
applied to the judgments of a set of peers--that to transmit
information about evaluation by a single numeric is a distortion.
And it's one that gets to be reflected back in the internal 
processes of the peers who are doing the reviewing; back to the 
investigators at the point where they write their application; and to  
the Councils and the staff who have to cope with this overly-constricted
format in which information is transmitted.  I would hope that at the
same time there is a re-examination of the distribution of goals and
responsibilities among various Institutes, and that there also be some
very serious attention to the process of peer review itself.

     While there are, of course, always many possibilities for the
further perfection of any system, peer review included, it is hard to
see any viable alternative that could preserve the scientific integrity
of research programs.  The main competitors, as possible approaches
to resource allocation, would be the free market and pressure group
politics.  Some of the problems of applying free enterprise models to
the development of scientific knowledge have already been summarized.
In any case, I doubt that we are about to offer incentive contracts
that include pecuniary bonuses to the investigators whose work is
proven to have the highest economic payoff.  Were we to adopt such a
crude system of incentives we would be encouraging an overweening
attention to priority and to depriving other workers in the field of
access to current information.  The peer review is, nevertheless, a
muted form of reward for performance that depends on the judgments of
a large and visible group of experts to make determinations about the
probable relative utility of a variety of competing proposals.  The
success of efforts to use bureaucratic planning for guiding large-
scale investment in technological projects, subject to the influence
of pressure groups from different regions and specific industries has
had such painful outcomes that one would hardly believe them to be 
good models for changing the policies of NIH which have been so 
outstandingly successful in promoting research of high quality. 
Administrators who believe that the process of grants administration 
will be simplified by dispensing with scientific expert judgment have 
failed to take into account the intrusion of many other pressures 
against which peer review has been an effective buffer.

     Nevertheless, peer review can be improved, especially  by looking
more realistically at the nature of the judgments that group is capable
of transmitting as this information goes down the chain.  It is
still somewhat deficient these days in terms of the feedback to the
applicants, and we should be looking for better ways to take advantage
of the enormous effort and critical intellectual judgment that goes
into the peer study of research proposals under the present system.

     Now of course, there is one very serious danger about the 
continued success of all of these processes and that is that our 
investment in basic research may help to cultivate free and critical 
minds.
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