A Physicist Goes to Washington

August / September 2009 By: Tom Michael Volume 7 Number 4

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Bill Foster (D-Il.) was elected in 2008 to succeed former House Speaker Dennis Hastert. He previously worked as a researcher at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory for 22 years. At Fermilab, Foster started his career by helping discover the top quark, the heaviest known form of matter. He also led the team that designed and built several scientific facilities and detectors still in use today including the Recycler Ring, a giant particle accelerator. He earned a B.S. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and graduated from Harvard University with a Ph.D. in physics in 1983. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society, received the Rossi Prize for Cosmic Ray Physics for the discovery of the neutrino burst from Supernova SN1987a.

The halls of Congress are filled with people from all walks of life—€”lawyers and businessmen, former athletes and activists, ranchers and doctors, the list goes on and on. But one group of professionals—€”scientists—€”is sorely underrepresented. Today, there are only three scientists in all of Congress, down from four two years ago. The newest addition to the roster is Rep. Bill Foster, a physicist and Illinois Democrat elected to former House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert's seat last year.
With a Ph.D. from Harvard, and 20 years experience as a physicist at Fermi National Laboratory (often referred to as Fermilab), Foster is quickly emerging as a go-to guy for members of Congress who want an informed perspective on issues ranging from climate change to implementation of the America Competes Act.
Foster recently spoke with Innovation about the role of government in science, and how Congress should approach difficult issues including energy, climate change and technology transfer and how to recruit more scientists into politics.
As one of three scientists in the Congress, how would you assess the general scientific acumen, or awareness, of your colleagues?
Particularly, with the new administration there is renewed respect for the role of science, and I think that is true for the legislative branch as well. There are an enormous number of very smart people serving in Congress but the degree of scientific training and business training is all over the map. I can have wonderful discussions with people on either side of the aisle on these things. Sometimes we can go down all the technical aspects they have studied, and other times it doesn't rise above the level of talking points. The appreciation of science is there in the abstract fairly strongly throughout Congress at this point. What is missing is the habit of applying scientific principles to public policy.

What do you mean by that?
For example, everyone understands in a qualitative sense that we need to do something about greenhouse gases. Scientists say, okay, okay, this is a problem; let's write down a list of technically viable solutions and then do a scientific and economic analysis of the problems and choose the solutions that basically do the least damage to our economic growth—€”much more like a venture capitalist would do. That sort of mentality is not there in Congress—€”taking a hard-nosed look at the economics of everything that is being proposed. Members of Congress are very much taken by the gee-whiz technology. In the case of energy, there are literally hundreds of ways to make renewable energy, but the number of them that will ever make economic sense is very small. Trying to have a serious economic analysis is something that is not always done.

You mentioned climate change. What are your own views on climate change and how can we deal with it as a nation and a global community?
In the long run, we have to engage the entire world and develop and deploy technologies that emit less greenhouse gases. We have to push very hard on conservation measures, which are the most cost-effective. And we have to have a range of clean energy technologies under development at all times. Some of our effort, particularly governmental effort, should be devoted to very long-term projects like fusion, and some more speculative things like what's called hot dry rock.

How should all of these exciting, but speculative, initiatives be paid for?
These (fusion, hot dry rock, etc.) are the sorts of things that are either technological long shots or simply have a long development time before they will be there. You are not going to get venture capital to go into these. This is one of the things I struggle with in technology policy. There are limits to what the commercial realm will do. You can see that venture capitalists —€¦are at the limit for what makes sense for a business model.
Part of it is simply the limitations on our patent system—€”the limited time period for patents. Why is Bell Labs essentially gone today when they were responsible for developing the laser and the semi-conductor and all the other great things? The problem is the shortness of our patents. Imagine if Bell Labs had received a 50-year patent for the invention of the transistor or the laser. They would be alive and well for the next 50-year invention. But 50 years or anything like that is too long for a run of the mill invention.

So how do we expect private business to carry the R&D weight that America would like them to?
If we expect commercial firms to carry the weight of long-term tech development we have to change the model by which they get incented. We have to acknowledge that private enterprise is not going to have the funding horizon for an invention that will be applied 50 years from now. Since the benefits of that are essentially spread around the entire economy we have to have the national government —€”which primarily means the national labs or new institutions like DARPA or ARPA-E that are being talked about or implemented.

How should it be determined who does what?
Right now we're going to have to live with a system that splits it according to time scale. Very long-term research and development is going to have to be primarily done by research laboratories and universities with essentially government funding. Short-term commercial deployment is best done by businesses. At present I don't see any way to have a commercially viable model for long-term research. Our best shot at that were the Bell Labs or the GE research labs. They did not pay for themselves on the time scale of reward by our patent system. I think it's actually essential that the government be the primary sponsor of long-term fundamental research.

Can you give us a couple of examples?
At the far end there is curiosity-driven research—€”things like astrophysics and particle physics. Some claim there is a foreseeable benefit because you are going to learn very fundamental things about the nature of the world around us. Then there is an intermediate scale having to do with things like plasma research, or fusion research in general where there is a specific goal but that might be quite a long distance away. You are not promising your investors a profit this quarter or maybe even this decade. Then you get farther on down to things like light sources, which are used very heavily for surface analysis and so on and can very quickly have commercial applications.

Shifting gears, as a former member of the national laboratory community, what is your view of the role of nuclear power in the nation's energy mix?
I personally do believe nuke power has a role to play. It's one of the only systems you can write down today that can provide the base load for electrical power generation without producing a lot of carbon dioxide. We also have a reasonably good understanding of how much it will cost. The main uncertainties are the straightforward uncertainties of what cement and stainless steel and copper and so on are going to cost. It's actually very attractive. I think that the jury is still out on what the unsubsidized costs of various alternative energy sources will be. There is very little in the way of renewable energy that competes in an unsubsidized market.

Congress has passed but not funded the America Competes Act, a sweeping initiative to make America more competitive in the global science and technology race. How important is it that Congress pay for this legislation?

It is very important and I think it's going to take continual effort on the part of Congress to make sure that there is a stable and growing level of funding for basic scientific research....One of my frustrations in politics is that it's very hard for politicians to focus on anything except what plays out in the next election. So when you talk about education or basic research where the benefit is 10 or 30 years from now it's very hard to maintain the focus long enough to get the right level of investment there. I think we systematically under-invest in those long-term areas.
It's equally important that we provide the right cultural background that properly respects the necessity for sitting down and studying—€”so it is not all fast gratification. The model of success that we put in front of our children very often doesn't have a clear statement that the way you're going to succeed is to study in detail the things that do and don't work in the fiscal world and the business world and try to apply new ideas there.

How can the federal government do a better job of fostering technology transfer, or moving government-funded technology to the marketplace, where it can stimulate the economy and create jobs?
One of the most important changes we could make in all the science agencies is to convince absolute top-flight scientists to enter the federal bureaucracy. There is a sort of reverse snobbism that has permeated the system. If you're a bright young student the best thing you can do is get tenure at a top university, and if that fails then get tenure somewhere else, and if that fails you can go into the national laboratories. If that fails you can get a job at DOE or NSF or something like that.
As a result you get this upside-down situation where scientists at top universities are making their 40-page proposals for a $20,000 grant at the same time that students who would not have been accepted as post-docs are making hundred-million dollar decisions in the agencies. The best thing to do to solve that problem is to make it a much more common career path for people to spend 10 years in the federal bureaucracy at the NSF or DOE and other agencies and then return to university jobs.
One specific thing that would make a huge difference is if top universities would reserve the endowed chair in their science departments for people who have spent 10 years in the federal agencies. What it would do is raise the level of communication between the labs and the universities and the agencies. It would generate a lot more cross-fertilization between the key institutions for technology development and that would, I think, also improve the whole business of tech transfer.

Any other thoughts or ideas on the issue of Congress and science?

There is a continuing frustration on a lot of scientists that there isn't a lot of technological expertise in Congress. You've heard of Emily's List—€”it's a very successful program to encourage women to enter politics. They identify promising candidates and give them help with training and fundraising and so on. An organization that did the same thing to encourage scientists to go into politics would have a serious positive impact. If any of your readers wants to pick it up as a project they can contact me at any time.

Tom Michael is Washington bureau chief for Innovation.