0.11 The carter and reagan years: 1977-89  (Page 4/10)

The NSF also began adding engineering research to its portfolio, creating both a Directorate of Engineering and Applied Science and a Directorate of Engineering.

The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 provided considerable incentive for industrial firms and universities to enter into cooperative research agreements. Council on Governmental Relations, The Bayh-Dole Act: A Guide to the Law and Implementing Regulations (Washington, DC: Council on Governmental Relations, 1999). The act granted rights to federally funded research results to the organization that conducted the research, allowing private firms to negotiate potentially profitable rights agreements with their university partners.

The president needs [scientific] help!

Early in 1980, the quarterly journal Technology in Society published a special issue on “Science Advice to the President.” Later in 1980, this edition of the journal was published as a free-standing book. See Golden, op. cit . Edited by William T. Golden, the volume featured essays by all but two presidential science advisors from the Truman through the Carter administrations, and included reflections on the presidential advisory system from fifteen other veteran observers, including former President Ford. According to Golden, the objective of the volume was to explore “how to be most effective in encouraging the President, every President, to seek, consider, evaluate, and utilize such wise and spirited advice.” That Golden, his editors, and his contributors chose to address these essays to “the President, every President” during an election year highlights their dissatisfaction with the presidential advisory system under Carter.

Golden explicitly called for the restoration of PSAC: “The ‘argument of the work [the collection of articles],’ in Winston Churchill’s phrase, is that the office of Science Adviser to the President should be retained and that, before or promptly after the 1980 Presidential election, a President’s Science Advisory Committee should be reestablished, with privacy if exemption can be won but without it if it cannot.” William T. Golden, “Contours of Wisdom: Presidential Science Advice in an Age of Flux,” in Golden, op. cit. , 5.

Many contributors praised Frank Press, the incumbent science advisor, for his effectiveness in dealing with the president and his inner circle. That Press himself contributed a Foreword suggests that he did not regard the volume as an attack on himself or Carter.

As already noted, Press did concede, however, that President Carter’s decision “in reorganizing the science advisory apparatus…not to make use of a formal outside group such as the President’s Committee on Science and Technology (PCST) had come under some criticism.” The thrust of the implied criticism by Golden’s contributors was that the administration had not adequately involved the scientific community in policy formulation. Edward David, Jr., Richard Nixon’s last science advisor, made that point explicitly. While conceding that the science advisor’s principal constituent had to be the president rather than the Congress, the scientific community, or the amorphous general public, former Nixon science advisor Edward David, Jr., emphasized, “If, indeed, there are elements missing from the current White House science advice performance, it is the function of providing paths to the future based upon new technological possibilities and basic relationships in the research and development process. It is indeed unrealistic to expect this kind of performance from the White House or OSTP staffs themselves… Indeed, the missing element appears to be the broad and deep contributions by dedicated members of the scientific communities... In past times, this effort was supplied by the President’s Science Advisory Committee and its panels." Edward E. David, Jr., “Current State of White House Science Advising,” in Golden, op. cit ., 57.