A Conversation with John Marburger

August / September 2006 Volume 4 Number 4

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John W. Marburger III is science advisor to the president and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. A physicist with a Stanford doctorate, he has had a long academic career as a professor of physics, specializing in nonlinear optics, at the University of Southern California and as president for 14 years of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He was director of Brookhaven National Laboratory before his current appointment. He spoke recently with Innovation.

INNOVATION: Should there be a department of science at cabinet level?

MARBURGER: In my opinion, no. It's an ancient tradition in America to have science done through departments that have other missions. And it was only after World War II that the National Science Foundation was created. Many of the other agencies that do science had been in existence for a long time before then. Having a single department of science, as many other countries do, may sound good, but it suggests that you have a top-down approach to science and that there is an office that knows what kind of science or what kind of studies are best to carry out the missions of each agency. But when you've got it distributed like this, each agency makes the decision about what kind of science is best to carry out its missions and there's some sort of optimization that occurs there.
Now, you may say, well, they may get in each other's way and so forth. But it creates sort of a market feeling to the distribution of research resources where you've got a number of different people looking at different problems and trying to figure out what the best way of solving those problems is from their perspective. And it introduces a diversity of points of view that I think is very valuable. In fact, America's innovation system differs from that of other countries primarily because of this diversity. We have lots of different business models and approaches to regional economic development, for example, and types of universities and educational institutions. It's as if we had a huge number of experiments or pilot programs going on all in parallel all the time, and if one of them doesn't work, then you've got all these others out there that you can look at. So we have evolved a very robust system. It is held together, intellectually speaking, because all of the agencies depend on the science community for expert advice. So the professional societies, like the American Physical Society or the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers or the National Academies are central points for program assessments and evaluations and sources of people to serve on expert panels to advise all these agencies.

When you were director of Brookhaven National Laboratory, you had some involvement in technology transfer. Can you tell us whether that system is working satisfactorily today and if it can be improved.

Well, there's no one system of technology transfer in the U.S. If anybody could ever find an optimal way of doing it, then we would all do it that way. But the process of technology transfer is not very well understood, and you're probably aware of this. Some places seem to do it well and other places don't. And it's hard to distinguish among them. In my view, the most valuable form of technology transfer we have in the U.S. is the practice of doing federally sponsored research in universities where students are trained and then go out and start up their own companies or work for another company. And they take the technical expertise that's acquired and the new ideas and take them out into the industrial sector and make products out of them. So that's one.

Somebody once said the most effective form of technology transfer walks on two legs and I believe that. You spread the people around. The places where federal funds are being used to support basic research have a stake in developing intellectual property if it can be developed. We've seen the revenues to labs and universities go up from intellectual property pretty steadily since 1980.
But increasingly, such research centers are participating in regional economic development initiatives. So you've got states all around the country investing in incubator buildings, for example, that are located near research universities. The best examples are Silicon Valley and Research Triangle in North Carolina. Those occurred early on without very much state participation.
Today you've got state funds being invested to try to create little Silicon Valleys all over the country. And some of those are in fact very successful, where the business incubator facility is located near a place that may reduce startup costs for small companies, or where they can get graduate students or even undergraduates to work in their labs. These are very powerful for technology transfer, and I think that, on the whole, it's successful experiment.

Steve Chu at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and others have made a case for an advanced research project's authority for energy. They call it ARPA-E, based on DARPA, the defense program. Your take on that?

I don't like that idea. It surfaced in a report of the National Academies of Science [the Augustine Report]. That was one of the ideas that had a minority report. I agree with the minority report. There's a big difference between the energy industry and the Defense Department. The energy industry is widely dispersed, not controlled or owned by the federal government. It's kind of an open-ended situation where you're at great risk if you attempt to pick technologies at the front end. Whereas DARPA feeds into a customer that knows exactly what it wants. I also believe that in the long run, and probably even in the short run, ARPA-E will draw resources away from other higher critical areas within the Department of Energy. DOE science has been underfunded for a long time. The basic science has been underfunded in areas like nanotechnology and materials research. We've got to get more funds in there. We can't be distracted by things like an ARPA-E that are essentially new programs that will require funding in competition with the other needs of the department.

So that brings us to the American Competitiveness Initiative, which has passed both house of Congress and is going to conference. Assuming passage, how do you see it helping in the short run as well as the long run?

In the short run, it's going to put more money into precisely those research activities that tend to lead to technologies. The idea is to prioritize agencies that have big activities in things like the nanotechnology initiative or information technology materials or quantum coherence phenomena. Those areas have not been very well funded relative to biotechnology or biomedical research and space science and some other areas over the past two decades. So we think the Initiative will give a real shot in the arm to some of the highest leveraged research that we conduct in this country. It responds very much to what we've heard from industry personnel and others. They want the federal government to do basic research in physical science and they think we're not funding it enough.

It seems as if we're not getting a whole lot of people graduating in the physical sciences from colleges and universities these days. What do we do about that?

My experience as a university president tells me that when you put money into research areas, it tends to attract students into those areas. They all need jobs and they get excited about working on it and they tend to do it. So I think there is a very direct relationship between the number of even undergraduate degrees in areas of science and the amount of federally funded research that goes into universities. It's a great way to fuel this pipeline of technical talent.

The jury seems to be in on global warming and the verdict seems to be clear: we're getting warmer. Have we got an administration policy for this?

Absolutely. It was pretty obvious back in 2000 or 2001 when the president himself said the earth is warming, we have to take responsibility for our missions. People seem to forget that the issue here is not whether the earth is warming or even whether we're emitting too much CO2. The real issue is what do you do about it? CO2 emissions are closely connected to how you produce and use energy. You are not going to make any significant changes in the energy technology. So this administration has invested strongly in a whole spectrum of new energy technologies, from the very visionary fusion research program that we're in with other countries, the hydrogen economy and the next generation of nuclear reactors. We strongly support nuclear energy. Ethanol and synthetic fuels and other innovative ways to make our use of energy more efficient and also to produce it without adding to the CO2 burden in the atmosphere. So I don't know why people can't understand this. This administration has sort of bypassed the science argument. We're not taking any exception to the notion that the earth is warming. We're serious about changing the energy technology.

Have you seen the Al Gore film, An Inconvenient Truth?

No, I haven't seen it yet. My wife has seen it and told me about it.

And she said?

Well, she said, "Wow, that was really something. If I hadn't been talking to you for the last four years, I'd be really concerned."