US Presidential Science Advisor John Marburger Writes a Short Defence in Response to a Gentile Admonition. (August 3, 2007)

    John Marburger, Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President of the United States gave the Keynote Address to the 2007 AAAS Policy Forum at the beginning of May this year.

TFW commented:

Dr Marburger effectively told the AAAS that its members had better start looking elsewhere than to the federal government if they wanted to continue to increase their resources: "The message here is that federal funding for science will not grow fast enough in the foreseeable future to keep up with the geometrically expanding research capacity, and that state and private sector resources should be considered more systematically in formulating federal science policy."

 

To call it a "geometrically expanding research capacity" was patent nonsense, but that's hardly the point, Dr Marburger is simply relaying the administration's message: "You will have your own ideas about how to fill the inevitable gap between the exponentially increasing research capacity and the much more slowly growing federal ability to satisfy it. Of all the policy issues to be discussed in today’s forum, I think this one will be with us for the longest time and will have the greatest impact on how and what research is performed in our institutions."

In a  letter to Science  in response to Dr Marburger's AAAS address, James Gentile, President of Research Corporation and Adjunct Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics at the University of Arizona opened with:

John Marburger's recent, somewhat cranky statement that U.S. researchers need to rely more on private philanthropy and industry to expand the scientific enterprise ("U.S. science adviser tells researchers to look elsewhere," J. Mervis, News of the Week, 11 May, p. 817) provides a sobering revelation that the United States has begun to stumble as a world leader in science and technology. Failure to correct this situation will result in incalculable losses in terms of future U.S. economic well-being.

It's now Dr Marburger's turn to fire back and below we reprint in full his letter published in today's issue of Science: