At six in the morning on May 10, 1950, from the back of his train stopping in Pocatello, Idaho, President Truman signed into law S. 247, creating the National Science Foundation (NSF).¹ It was a second birth, the first effort to create a new agency aborted by President Truman unhappy with a structure that made the government the paymaster but ceded governance to scientists by allowing the National Science Board to select the director. Truman rejected an agency “divorced from control by the people to an extent that it implies a distinct lack of faith in democratic processes.”² The new structure met Truman’s complaints but also left something for the scientific community. The director was nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate but served a six-year term to obviate presidential elections and, in principle, politics. The governing body, the National Science Board, while appointed by the president was given a fair degree of autonomy to guide not only the affairs of the new agency but also—naively, it turned out—the growing science programs across the government.

The agency’s purpose was laudatory and critical: “ . . . to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense; and for other purposes.”³ Its

beginnings blended modesty and tensions. “Modesty” was in its first budget of $225,000 for fiscal year 1951 to pay for administrative costs. FY 1952 was the first real “science budget,” and that was only $3 million against a congressional cap of $15 million and Vannevar Bush’s call for $33.4 million out of the starting gate. While the foundation came into life a month before the Korean War, it got little of the new monies for military research. Sputnik changed that with a vengeance, as it did so much else; the foundation’s budget tripled between 1957 and 1959. In FY 1973, my first as director, the budget was $610 million.⁴

There was also modesty in the new agency’s portfolio. It didn’t include the social sciences, carrying on Vannevar Bush’s distaste for them.⁵ And it did not include military research. Further, and a feature of the NSF particularly attractive to me, was that it was not permitted to do research on its own. Its principal role was to judge proposals made by external units. From the beginning, these external units were primarily in the academic institutions of the country, more particularly grants to individual researchers, then and now the foundation’s principal raison d’être.

This was not quite what Vannevar Bush envisioned. Bush saw the NSF⁶ as a much more powerful, all-embracing patron of science than actually resulted. His proposal was to have all basic research that was supported by the government overseen by the NSF with much of the research itself done by the universities. This was an idea that clearly stemmed from the success of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during World War II in mobilizing academic research.

The “tensions” were largely reducible to the foundation’s “split personality,”⁷ between the agency itself and the National Science Board, the latter created to govern the foundation and to guide government-wide policy for the support of research. When I joined the National Science Board in 1969, this comment was apt:

The notion that a small agency could somehow carry on the work of the wartime OSRD in coordinating government-wide research was naive. The political scientist Don Price pointed out that in the five-year interval between the end of the war including the OSRD and the birth of the National Science Foundation, “the National Institutes of Health had gotten rolling, the Office of Naval Research had gotten rolling, the Atomic Energy Commission had gotten rolling, and by the time the Science Foundation was really set up with about $3 million in appropriations, it was not the great new post-war overall research program doing military research for the government and so forth. It was just the smallest and youngest and weakest of the scientific research programs.”⁹

The understandable resistance of agencies to having their research programs taken over by a new agency was in fact seconded by the first director of the foundation, Alan Waterman, chief scientist of the Office of Naval Research before he came to NSF. He had no interest in empire building but wanted to focus on the foundation becoming first rate. He had the right priorities. He was also politically astute and knew that the way to get traction on research programs of other agencies was through the president’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The NSF, quoting Don Price again, “could be the provider of dispassionate advice to a place which really has got some muscle and leverage, and that’s the Budget Bureau. Give them the obligation to look at the total program and then if they’ve got any influence it’s bound to be through the budgetary process, which won’t be their action at all, but advice to the Budget Bureau.”¹⁰

There was yet another tension facing me as the new director, affecting all of science and with it the federal agencies supporting it. This was the impact of the 1960s, one that I certainly felt during my tenure at Carnegie Mellon University and that followed me to Washington. Science came out of World War II a hero, the tool that gave us radar, the bomb, penicillin, and so much else vital to winning the war. Now the halo was askew, and science and indeed almost all institutions of our society were being questioned, often hard and sometimes with little regard for the civilities of discourse.

That decline wasn’t reversed until the mid-1970s, and federal funding didn’t return to the 1967 level until 1982.

Those very real tensions aside, the NSF quickly earned high marks for the quality of its research support. That was due in part to its delayed creation. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) had stepped into the vacuum for support of basic research caused by the delay in launching the foundation. As the de facto NSF between 1946 and 1951, ONR established peer review by knowledgeable colleagues as the principal guide to where money went.¹² That principle of money being awarded on scientific merit traveled to the NSF when Alan T. Waterman moved from the ONR to NSF.¹³ That principle has prevailed, albeit with occasional dents, twists, and sometimes outright assaults. It was in place when I was sworn in on February 1, 1972, and has remained to this day the bedrock on which the foundation has grown.¹⁴

Bunny and I arrived in Washington on the evening of February 17, 1972, in a snowstorm, which meant little traffic and a beautiful snowy scene as we drove to Georgetown and our new home, the “Innkeeper’s House” on 33rd Street. It also meant a parking ticket: the snow covered a No Parking sign where I left the car. That aside, the movers arrived, and by the weekend with a lot of hard work we were well settled, thanks to Bunny’s careful division of the Pittsburgh furniture between Washington and Randolph.

On the drive from Pittsburgh where I left the president’s house and the presidency of Carnegie Mellon University to come to Washington to be the director of the National Science Foundation, Bunny and I had time to talk over what this move meant to us, to think of the happiness

and joys of the past and the challenges and changes of the future. We were excited about the change, although it was an abrupt ending to my university life—at Cal Tech, where I earned my doctorate; at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I achieved tenure; and at Carnegie Tech cum Carnegie Mellon, where I learned something—at times the hard way—about running an institution.

Bunny and I found Washington transformed from the city we had known 20 years earlier when we lived in Alexandria. The metropolitan area had grown. Officials and staff in the large numbers of embassies and the international financial banks had made the nation’s capital truly cosmopolitan. There was a lively cultural scene, including the newly opened John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. And there was a growing restaurant trade. It was a different city than the sleepy provincial capital with remnants of wartime temporary buildings dotting the Mall that we had known when I was chief scientist of the Air Force.

I had spent lots of time in Washington off and on during World War II, on my trips either from the Radiation Laboratory to Washington in 1941–1942, or in going to and from the London Mission of the OSRD in 1943–1945. We had also lived there for about two years while I served, on leave from MIT, as chief scientist of the Air Force. And I had often come to Washington to consult with the various branches of government and to serve on committees, boards, and panels of government agencies, the National Research Council, and so on.

President Nixon announced my nomination as director of the National Science Foundation on November 15, 1971 at his morning press conference. It was a relief to no longer have to dodge reporters tracking down rumors of my nomination and in making the news public to the Carnegie Mellon community. Two days later I flew to Washington to prepare for the confirmation gauntlet, one considerably less onerous and lengthy than what often happens nowadays. Edward E. David, Jr. was the president’s science advisor, and between him, his colleagues at the White House Office of Science and Technology, and the congressional liaison people at the NSF, a very smooth set of meetings were arranged with Republicans and Democrats particularly involved in NSF affairs.¹⁵ And I was already well known to those members of the House interested in science and technology. All the work on my confirmation got an A

when I learned while at a meeting in California that the Senate had confirmed me without dissent.

I learned a great deal about NSF in the previous three years after declining in January 1969 my first invitation to be director but becoming a member of the National Science Board. Turning down the 1969 offer inadvertently triggered some problems, since the next candidate on the list was Franklin Long, a distinguished chemist at Cornell University. Long had served on the President’s Science Advisory Committee, and while on the committee but speaking as a private citizen he had opposed the administration’s push to build a supersonic transport.¹⁶ In obvious retaliation, Nixon blocked Long’s nomination. There was a huge outcry from the science community. Nixon relented and withdrew his objections, but Long declined because of the controversy. Nixon then somewhat mollified the science community by appointing William McElroy, a biochemist¹⁷ and professor of biology and director of the McCollum-Pratt Institute at Johns Hopkins and a registered Democrat.¹⁸

I went to my first meeting as a member of the National Science Board on May 21, 1970, and the next day we went to the White House to meet with President Nixon. We traipsed into the Cabinet Room in our usual haphazard way, and Lee Dubridge, who had arranged the meeting, was feeling good because the president had agreed to his request to add $10 million to the foundation’s budget for research programs.¹⁹ The foundation’s overall budget had in fact declined in the latter 1960s, and the FY 1970 budget was less than that for FY 1966, even less so with inflation.²⁰ Funding for research was “boom or bust.” The boom was the very sharp spike in money after Sputnik. The bust was the decline in federal funding for nonmilitary programs, including science, forced by the Vietnam War hitting at the same time as the scientific and technical doctorates from the boom years hit the labor market.²¹

The president came in and after friendly greetings and supportive remarks about Lee said, “I’m very pleased to announce to you today that we’ve just added $10 million to the budget of the National Science Foundation for basic research.” He then looked straight at Philip Handler,²²

who as chair of the science board, was seated directly opposite. Phil didn’t smile, didn’t say thank you. Nixon’s face changed almost as if a hood had dropped over his eyes. He smiled and said, “I know, Dr. Handler, it isn’t enough, is it?” Phil said, “No, Mr. President, it isn’t.” That settled— ended is maybe a better word—the good relationship of the National Science Board with the Nixon White House.

I learned a lot about NSF in the year and a half I was on the board before I became director. I learned for example that any hope that the foundation’s research program would focus entirely on fundamental work was short lived. NSF’s role in applied research became a hot topic in my two and a half months of “suspended animation” between my nomination and being sworn in. That issue became the scalpel for dissecting me, because it was the dominant issue for the scientific community dependent on NSF funding, a community that tends in any case “to be mildly manic-depressive or at least subject to sudden swings from supreme self-confidence to self-pitying gloom.”²³ But it also focused on me because I was a basic scientist gone astray, having traversed from a fundamental physicist in earning my doctorate at Cal Tech to an engineering professor at MIT doing work that ranged from what I considered very basic to clearly applied.

Another issue that served to set the stage for my confirmation and tenure as director was that the foundation was low on the political totem pole. I can’t recall any director of the NSF ever being asked to make a political speech. For the most part, both parties in the Executive Office and the Congress agreed on the importance of supporting basic research and, hence, the foundation. That support has continued unabated to this day, if not without arguments at the margins—pushes for particular programs; disputes about how to move public money to the researchers and the relative weight given to peer review, geographic distribution, equity for minorities, and helping the have-not states bootstrap their research quality so they could compete with the haves; and the value of the social sciences and indeed whether the foundation should support them at all. Of course, there were some special features of my tenure, notably the Vietnam War and the corrosive effect it had on all nonmilitary agencies. And then came the Watergate scandal, and the way that hit me. That’s a story for the next chapter.

Some of my friends asked me when my nomination was announced why I did it, given that I would take office in President’s Nixon fourth year in office. I thought the risk low, since the director nominally had a six-year term and to date there hadn’t been any leadership changes for the NSF when a new president came in; again, remember the foundation was a minor character in Washington politics. And a second reason I wasn’t worried was that I could defend the programs that the administration wanted the NSF to carry out, although I knew I was going to push the administration in some new directions.

The biggest issue in my in-box when I arrived as director was the foundation’s role in applied research. NSF’s programs had always had an applied side. An OMB official, Carlyle E. Hystad, pointed out that early in its life the foundation had to choose between purity and financial growth; and when it sensibly opted for the latter, it also made a Faustian bargain when by 1970 “the Foundation, of its own volition, had become a diversified agency. Were its leaders sincere about touching nothing but pure research, they should long since have settled for a budget in the neighborhood of $200 million a year.”²⁴

The “bargain” got a tougher bite to it in the early 1970s as the Nixon administration confronted a troubled economy: slowing productivity, recession signs, and severe squeezes on the federal budget imposed by the Vietnam War and by the growth of federal entitlement programs launched by the Johnson administration. The initial response had been to whack at the federal budget, including the sciences and therefore the NSF budgets. However, the Nixon administration reversed course in the FY 1972 budget and asked federal agencies to spend more money to “prime the economic pump.” That government-wide instruction was particularized with the NSF, strongly abetted by senior OMB officials who asked that the foundation spend more of its funds on making sure jobs were there for all those new Ph.D.’s produced by the flush times of the early 1970s. That pressure was joined by the demand—still with us today—that we find faster ways to move all that wonderful research to market, to transform it into commercial innovation, into new products and processes.²⁵

The budget tension cast into relief a “central ambiguity”²⁶ in the nation’s postwar research system. The premise of federal support of re-

search was that it benefited agency goals and hence the government’s goals. The issue was how sharply to define the benefit before the money flowed. For research at universities the support was rarely tied to specific outcomes; rather, the belief was that a rising tide of knowledge would benefit all. That was fine, when money was plentiful. When it drained away, the uncertain links of academic research to specific administration or congressional goals became a political target.

The result was a dog’s breakfast of successive programs that in one form or another was intended to stimulate the application of science and technology to “practical needs.” There were several such programs for NSF, each swallowed up by a bigger successor. Easily the largest was Research Applied to National Needs, RANN, a clever title since it didn’t call for “applied research” as such but only that the programs seek to apply the research supported by the foundation. RANN was born out of a “bribe.” In 1969 the foundation had, at the behest of the Congress (which had changed the foundation’s organic act to make it possible), created a program grandly if clumsily called Interdisciplinary Research Relevant to Problems of Our Society, IRRPOS. With an annual budget of about $13 million, IRRPOS supported interdisciplinary research projects—that is, research across the usual disciplinary boxes of science—in universities, national laboratories, and the like.²⁷

On December 13, 1970, in the OMB director’s office in the Old Executive Office Building, that marvelous pile next to the White House, NSF Director Bill McElroy was given a startling “gift”: $100 million more for the foundation’s budget—almost a 20 percent increase—in return for the foundation phasing out its support to institutions,²⁸ cutting back its educational programs, and substantially increasing its efforts in applied research.²⁹ That was a remarkable offer, especially with the budget cuts of the past years. McElroy accepted the offer. ³⁰ I would have done the same thing.

IRRPOS disappeared and RANN arrived exactly one year before I became director, on February 1, 1971. Ray Bisplinghoff, my former MIT colleague and deputy director of the foundation, became acting director of the Research Applications Directorate, essentially RANN.³¹ On February 23, RANN got over $11 million of the director’s special reserve fund to pay for seven projects already under way. Projects included the

role of deterrence in criminal behavior, a study of the quality of American life as a guide to developing “social indicators,” and an examination of “critical environmental problems affecting modern society, a study that led to changes in California’s air pollution regulations.”³²

It wasn’t all hosannas and rose petals for the new program. Some influential members of Congress—in particular, members sitting on the House Committee on Science and Space, the foundation’s authorizing committee—were dubious. They were unhappy about the cuts in institutional support, in basic science programs, and “increased emphasis on research in the social sciences and very heavy emphasis on applied research.” To them the foundation appeared to be “almost moving into a mission-type agency.”³³ The unhappiness got teeth when the FY 1972 budget emerged. The administration’s request for RANN was cut by $30 million to $54.1 million, out of a total of $622 million for the foundation. And the foundation’s funds for institutional and educational support were restored—only in theory since the Nixon administration impounded those funds.³⁴

The next big event after those shock waves hit July 19 when Bill McElroy announced his departure for the University of California at San Diego. I was called on to succeed Bill as NSF director in November, and on February 1, 1972, I was in the hot seat. That first day began appropriately enough with a presidential prayer breakfast at 8 a.m. I didn’t feel a need for prayer at the time, but later I felt I ought to begin most of my days with one. I was sworn in after the prayer breakfast by Ed David at the NSF offices at 1800 G Street, N.W., virtually across the street from the Old Executive Office Building and its next-door neighbor, the White House.³⁵

The next several days were largely for getting acquainted—with the senior staff of the foundation, especially the people running its major directorates, and with White House staff. Ed David invited me to lunch in the White House mess two days after confirmation, where I met John Erlichman, who greeted me enthusiastically while also bragging loudly about all the things that he had to get done. I wasn’t impressed. A few days later at a White House reception I met Bob Haldeman, another of the senior White House staff whose reputation was destroyed by Watergate.³⁶ I was even less impressed.

A much pleasanter encounter came a few days later when I had a reunion with George Shultz whom I had known since our postwar MIT days when we were both young assistant professors trying to scramble up the academic ladder.³⁷ George was now director of the OMB and special assistant to the president. As OMB director, George was tremendously important to me because OMB had in recent times had a very strong say in the foundation’s programs—for example, the $100 million “bribe” mentioned earlier that, among other things, launched RANN.

Until I became NSF director, I didn’t have much contact with the people at OMB. I came to admire them for they really did work very hard to make the government run effectively, efficiently, and economically. They were tough but underneath pleasant people. We arranged a luncheon meeting in my office with Jack Young, who was in charge at OMB of the science and technology agencies, and Ray Bisplinghoff, my deputy. Jack had many questions about how the programs were going and where one might expect them to go in the future and it was a good exchange. Jack was a graduate of Colgate, as I was, so the people at NSF who discovered this thought it would be just great for our dealings with OMB. They couldn’t have been more wrong, for Jack treated me and the NSF just exactly like he treated all of the agencies—with skepticism and sympathy and hard work to get them into shape.

I soon faced my first real task as director: to present and argue for the foundation’s FY 1973 budget, first to the House Science and Aeronautics Committee and then to several other committees. Given the budget calendar under which Washington operated (and still does), I was in reality presenting, and defending, Bill McElroy’s budget.³⁸ My main task was to convince the Congress by convincing the committee to raise the foundation’s budget for FY 1973 by about 12 percent, from $600 million to $675 million. In 1972, $675 million was considered a lot of money (and it still is). But that $675 million had to be divided among some 15 different line items, which could be grouped into three major areas: the relatively new applied programs, especially RANN; science education; and, of course, research, the core of the foundation’s raison d’être and

then and now easily the largest part of its budget. And the research part— in FY 1972 about 60 percent of the foundation’s budget, or $374.2 million—consisted of support for individuals, decided by peer review, such as very active work on molecular evolution; national and special research programs, such as the Global Atmospheric Research Program; and national research centers, such as the Kitt Peak National Observatory.

We proposed about a 10 percent increase for science education, to $70 million. Aims included improving the quality of science training in order to expand career options and developing curricula and other materials to provide students with a better understanding of science so that they could participate more effectively in our technologically oriented society. More specifically, we wanted to address some widely recognized problems: the need to find ways to improve the cost effectiveness of science education through the application of improved curricula, modern educational technology, and new instructional strategies and methodologies; the need to assure the nation of the appropriate quantity and variety of scientific and technical manpower; and the need to improve science education for a broader range of students and to foster science training and awareness for nonscientists so that they could function effectively as both workers and citizens. All fine goals, but there seemed to be always a great argument as to whether the National Science Foundation should spend its money on these programs.

As I presented testimony on the science education program, I couldn’t help but notice that we didn’t have the same zip and excitement in them as we did in the research programs, where we had more specific examples and a more attentive audience. I well remembered what my predecessor, Bill McElroy, had said—that the tensions and dissension we incurred in the government on the science education program were so great that they were hardly worth a candle. Of course, it was worth it, even if it was— and still is—frustratingly hard to move a system as enormous and ponderous as education and to deal with the political infighting that meets the merest hint of change.

Our real meat was the science for which the foundation served as steward. It’s impossible to report on everything, but I’ll offer a sampling to show why so many others and I were so excited by the exuberance of the national research effort. There was enormous ferment in the funda-

mental fields—in physics, astronomy, chemistry, and geology. And the promise and style of the International Geophysical Year that led to Sputnik and the exuberant growth of U.S. science, and the foundation’s budget, were echoed by more programs knitting together research efforts of many countries: the Global Atmospheric Research Program, the International Biological Program, the International Decade of Ocean Exploration, and, not least, research programs at the poles of the planet, the Arctic and Antarctic. And major new facilities for doing fundamental science were being built or coming on line, facilities still serving us today. Not only Kitt Peak but also the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, best known for its radio telescope³⁹ in Puerto Rico about 12 miles south of Arecibo; the National Radio Astronomy Observatory with observing sites in West Virginia at Greenbank; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

There were lots of reasons to be excited, with the most dramatic being the stunning insight in the earth sciences that the earth is hardly static but geologically very much alive. It was an insight that could explain how mountains are built and continents move, the geography of earthquakes and volcanoes, the patterning of the Hawaiian Islands. That pieces of the earth—most obviously, the facing coasts of the Americas and Africa—could neatly fit together was an old observation and the genesis of the idea that continents drift. But it was an observation, with evidence for and against. Absent an explanation of the forces that moved continents, the notion made it into the Sunday supplements but not into mainstream science. The answer as it emerged in the early 1960s is that continents don’t move; plates do. By the late 1960s, the fundamental ideas of plate tectonics were in place. The earth’s lithosphere, which includes surface rock, is broken into plates that slide past, collide, or separate from each other. And as the plates move, they carry their passengers, the continents, with them. Plates are created at seams in the earth—such as the mid-Atlantic ridge—by upwelling of new rock and then recycled where they collide, in a continuous cycle of creation and renewal. The emergence of this idea—and the observations to back it up—transformed geology. It was revolutionary but also a continuum in that “from time to time in the history of science a fundamental concept appears that serves to unify a field by pulling together diverse theories and explaining a large

body of observations. Such a concept in physics is the theory of relativity; in chemistry, the nature of the chemical bond; in biology, DNA; in astronomy, the Big Bang; and in geology, plate tectonics.”⁴⁰

Geology wasn’t the only science in revolution. But as the notion of plate tectonics unified one science in the 1960s, so the discoveries in astronomy in the same decade bewildered another:

In my first year as NSF director, astronomers could say for the first time in the long history of the science that they could “observe the universe in virtually any part of the electromagnetic spectrum” as they moved their telescopes off the earth with “rockets, balloons, and stratospheric airplanes.” They could observe X-ray stars, the diffuse X-ray background, very “hot” infrared galaxies, “cool infrared stars (that may include planetary systems in the process of formation),” and through rockets with ultraviolet detectors find hydrogen molecules in the regions between the stars.⁴² And soon the chemical laboratory in space became quite well stocked, astronomers finding not only hydroxyl radicals in the dust clouds between stars but also other diatomic molecules, such as carbon monoxide, silicon oxide, and carbon sulfide. These weren’t simply curiosities, but, as our radio telescope became more powerful in extracting details, they became tools for probing the nature of interstellar dust clouds, their role in the formation of stars, and the mechanisms for forming even more complex molecules.

The rest of physics hadn’t been exactly idle either. The internal structures of the proton and neutron came into much greater focus. That queer particle, the neutrino, with neither mass nor charge, was found to come in two forms, electron and muon. And an audacious effort begun in 1968 to validate ideas about how the sun shines by detecting solar neutrinos was under way several thousand feet down in a South Dakota

gold mine.⁴³ We recently had come to better understand the electronic structure of solids, work that set the table for the major advances in fashioning new materials in the decades to come. The advent of semiconductors and their extraordinary demands in materials properties led to techniques for creating materials of exquisite purity and as nearly perfect single crystals. That led to turbine blades for jet engines made of single metal crystals that were much more ductile and stronger.

The barriers that not only physics but also other sciences faced in being “optics-limited” became more porous. “That is, the speed or accuracy with which a measurement could be made, a device controlled, an object detected, or a chemical analysis completed often was limited by fundamental optical problems of intensity, resolving power, stability.”⁴⁴ The signal event in breaking through the limits was of course the laser. Einstein (who else?) first suggested the possibility of the stimulated emission of light in 1917, but it wasn’t until 1954 that the first microwave laser (the maser) was built, followed in 1960 by the first optical laser. The applications that emerged in the 1960s turned hollow the early skepticism that this was an “answer in search of a solution.” Monday morning quarterbacking made it obvious that the special talents of the laser would make it an extraordinary tool. Properly stimulated, the laser could emit very high-energy beams of coherent light—that is, light composed purely of one color or frequency. Moreover, the light emitted was many times more powerful than the light used to stimulate the lasing action. Here was not only a source of pure light but also an optical amplifier. The effect was enormous, on pure science and on technology. The laser was used in the 1960s by elementary particle physicists to probe the structure of electrons; by chemists to probe the structure of materials and to do wholly new types of chemical reactions; by planetary scientists to measure the exact distances to the moon and other bodies; by geologists to measure to an exquisite precision the movement of tectonic plates; and by biologists to probe the structure and even do surgery on bodies within cells such as chromosomes. And the laser enabled holography, this seemingly magical (even now) tool to create images that appear three dimensional without lenses.

The list is endless, and, of course, the uses of laser are ubiquitous today, from compact disc players to eye surgery to holographic images on

credit cards. The point is that this single tool transformed and pushed forward an enormous spectrum of sciences. In the same vein, in the early 1970s the National Science Foundation was putting in place new instruments and facilities that also changed forever the nature of fundamental sciences and their applications. A prime example were our facilities for oceanographic programs, such as the very substantial ocean sediment coring program, which had within it the Deep Sea Drilling Program. Started in August 1968, the aim was to explore the age, history, and development of the ocean basins and their seas by drilling through the ocean floor and taking out cores. On June 24, 1966, NSF and the University of California signed a contract for the Deep Sea Drilling Project, to be sited at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and with Global Marine, Inc. doing the actual drilling and coring. The centerpiece was what became the first and then famous ocean drilling ship, the Glomar Challenger. Its keel was laid in Orange, Texas, in October 1967. In March the ship sailed down the Sabine River to the Gulf of Mexico. It operated in all the world’s oceans for 15 years, recovered over 19,000 cores taken from over 600 ocean bottoms. It reached down to as deep as 23,000 feet of ocean water and almost 6,000 feet into ocean floor. It tied dock the last time in November 1983. Parts of the ship, including its positioning system and engine telegraph, are now in the Smithsonian Institution.⁴⁵

The cores brought up from 17 holes drilled at 10 sites along an oceanic ridge between South America and Africa brought up powerful support for a fundamental tenet of plate tectonics: that new sea floor was made at the rift zone in the ridges. Indeed, the age of the ocean floor turned out to be 200 million years compared to the age of the earth of about 4.5 billion years.

As fine as the science was, just as astounding was the technology to get it. Doing the drilling without breaking the pipe meant that the ship had to be kept very stable in oceans home to ferocious and sudden changes in current, wave, and wind conditions. That was solved with a computer-controlled positioning system reliant on sound waves coming from acoustic sources on the sea floor. Acoustic positioning also dealt with what seemed to me the even harder “needle in the haystack” problem. Drill bits wear out, which meant pulling up perhaps several thousand feet out of the ocean bottom and then reinserting the pipe with a

new bit in the same hole. It was done for the first time on June 14, 1970, off the New York coast in 10,000 feet of Atlantic Ocean water.⁴⁶

Just as the voyages of the Glomar Challenger transformed forever the geological sciences, so did new instruments that looked up and not down, in particular the advent of radio telescopes. Radio waves being at the lowest energy end of the electromagnetic spectrum barely interact with atoms and molecules. The upshot is that the earth’s atmosphere is transparent to radio waves day and night, making radio astronomy a 24/7 science. Karl Jansky, a radio engineer, located radio waves coming from the center of the galaxy in the 1930s, but it wasn’t until after World War II, and the enormous investments and gains made in radar and radio technology, that the first radio astronomy telescopes were built. In 1958 we had the first radar echoes from another planet, Venus, sharply establishing its distance. The structure of the Milky Way was probed by measuring radio signals originating from hydrogen atoms distributed in the spiral arms of our home galaxy. By 1972 the United States was operating over 15 radio telescopes, with NSF supporting the major ones, including a large telescope in the northern mountains of Puerto Rico, about 12 miles south of Arecibo. It originated in a 1958 paper by Cornell scientists; construction began two years later, in the summer of 1960; and dedication was on November 1, 1963.⁴⁷ Within six months there was radar contact with Mercury, and a year later that planet’s rotation rate had been accurately determined. In 1974, Arecibo found the first pulsar in a system of binary stars, a discovery that in turn enabled the confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity and a Nobel Prize.

Unique among radio telescopes, the 1,000-foot dish nestled in a natural bowl⁴⁸ doesn’t move, and it is the transmitting and receiving detectors hung overhead that are manipulated to “point” the telescope. Although first conceived as an active radar telescope—that is, sending out radar signals and catching them on their return—it quickly also was adapted as a passive radio telescope, catching radio waves from space from regions beyond the eyes of optical telescopes. I gladly inherited the task of having the Congress approve funds for a major upgrade of the reflecting surface, to enable detection of shorter wavelengths, which meant ever finer geographic details of planets, and also a 10,000-fold improvement in “hearing” radio signals from space, enabling the tele-

scope to detect signals that may have started toward earth some 10 billion or more years ago.

My portfolio as director of the National Science Foundation also included the ends of the earth, for NSF had programs in both the Arctic and the Antarctic. Those programs embraced national research efforts and also the very sizeable facility at the South Pole, at McMurdo Sound in the Antarctic. An example of research within a national program, in this instance the International Biological Program,⁴⁹ was the work on tundra ecology at Barrow, Alaska, 5 degrees above the Arctic Circle. The growing season in this tundra is short and cold; the rest is Arctic winter. Alaska, Finland, Norway, and Sweden are about one-third tundra; yet at the time we knew very little about it, most especially how tundra responds to different kinds of stresses. That issue was especially acute when I became NSF director because the North Slope oil fields at Prudhoe Bay, about 200 miles from Barrow, were close to operation.⁵⁰

The foundation also had another role in biology, that of seeing to the health of fields neglected by other research agencies, typically because they were not within their portfolios. The plant sciences are a prime example, where after 1970 both the National Institutes of Health and the Atomic Energy Commission drastically cut if not eliminated their support in these sciences, sending areas such as photosynthesis, plant physiology, and plant pathology into a financial hole. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which didn’t have a competitive grants program at the time, didn’t step in. But NSF did. And in the 1970s it built a strong program in this area, focusing on such fields as photosynthesis, nitrogen metabolism, plant cell culture, and plant genetics. Ultimately, plant science and ecology became the majority of its metabolic biology program.⁵¹

And in a way I inherited a continent, for the NSF in 1972 took responsibility for the entire U.S. program in Antarctica, except for icebreakers.⁵² Antarctica is the highest, coldest, driest, and windiest continent. With very low precipitation, most of the continent is technically a desert, with the icecap containing almost 70 percent of the world’s fresh water

and almost all of its ice. There were four research stations, and that austral summer 142 scientists were working on 51 research projects at the U.S. stations and in the field. That research intensity was even more impressive against the logistical⁵³ problems of a very short time span to do any work, move people and goods in and out, and the loss at the time of two of the five ski-equipped aircraft and the need to “retire” two more. The research work on the ice was complemented by work on the research ships Eltanin and Hero and on two icebreakers.⁵⁴

None of my three predecessors as director of the foundation had been to Antarctica,⁵⁵ even though it was a substantial part of the NSF budget. Senior Navy and Coast Guard officials went down there, but not the NSF director. I changed that, going to Antarctica in early December 1972. Before going, I read journals and accounts of early expeditions, including the one by Roald Amundsen, who got to the South Pole on December 14, 1911. That was 162 years after Captain James Cook circumnavigated it in 1773 and just ahead of Robert Scott, who made it early in 1912 but died trying to get back.⁵⁶ I also read about the flight over the South Pole by Richard E. Byrd⁵⁷ and two colleagues on November 28, 1929, in a Ford Trimotor, the Floyd Bennett. Those achievements were especially close to me because in 1926 I saw and touched Byrd’s polar airplane when it was displayed at Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia. I was 10, and visiting my cousins, Guy and Nell Ford, to see the Sesquicentennial Exposition celebrating the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.⁵⁸ As a young Boy Scout, I was very aware of the competition for an Eagle Scout to go with Byrd on his South Pole expedition, a competition won by Paul Siple.⁵⁹

I was well briefed for the trip by foundation experts, including Philip M. Smith, program officer for the Antarctic program who had been to the continent 14 times. On December 7, 1972, I flew via Los Angeles to Auckland, New Zealand, and then on to Christchurch, where we were met by the commander of the naval station that was the jump-off point for Antarctica. We got our cold-weather clothing and safety briefing, and I went on to press interviews, including one by a New Zealand TV station.

The next day there was a jet-boat outing on the Waimakariri River with John Hamilton, son of the inventor of the water jet boat,

hosting. The Waimakariri River arises in the mountains on the west coast and flows through beautiful gorges across the whole South Island and into the ocean on the east coast. The river is an ideal place with lots of rapids, some shallows, and some swift-running water— just exactly the kind of stuff that water jet boating was invented for. The water jet sucks up water in a scoop and then ejects it at high speed out of the rear for a water jet thrust. The small boat that we had, good for four or five people, could really fly up the river, skimming the tops of rocks that were only 2 or 3 inches deep.

As we unloaded for lunch in a gorge, we heard a “hello” from the top of a cliff. A fellow started winding down a serpentine-like path to get down to the river and join us. It turned out to be a friend of John Hamilton and one of the leading sheepherders of the South Island, with thousands of sheep pastured all over the lands bordering the river. He came down and we started a conversation and he said, though I cannot imitate his thick New Zealand accent, “Say, didn’t I see you on the telly last night?” And I said, “Well, I was on the telly broadcasting about the National Science Foundation.” He said, “Yes, that was a very interesting broadcast. Was I correct that you said that the annual budget was over $600 million?” I said, “Oh, but it’s nothing; those are in U.S. dollars, not New Zealand dollars.” He observed: “That’s just about the entire national budget of New Zealand.”

Another former colleague of mine at MIT, Bob Seamans, then Secretary of the Air Force, joined us in New Zealand.⁶⁰ We had a deal that he provide us an Air Force C141 transport plane to ferry our researchers to McMurdo Sound if we invited him to the South Pole with us. Also Grover Murray, a member of the National Science Board, and some members of the New Zealand Antarctica Authority accompanied my NSF party. We arrived in Antarctica, and after dinner at the McMurdo Station we went out in the continuous daylight to visit the Shackleton and Scott huts⁶¹ at Cape Evans and Cape Royds, respectively. The bunks, sleeping bags, the place where they slaughtered seals were all remarkably preserved by the cold. We were told that the canned foods were so well preserved that we could eat some. We declined.⁶²

We left for the South Pole the next morning, on a ski-equipped C-130 Hercules plane, landed midmorning at the Scott-Amundsen base, the first U.S. research station at the pole, and launched into a hectic

schedule. First up was a lesson in what happens to buildings at the South Pole. A building sitting on top of the ice is buried by the ice and snow, slowly sinking deeper and deeper. The ensuing pressures slowly destroy the building; indeed, several of the buildings we saw were visibly buckled and had been declared off limits. We were allowed in and entered a room with three desks, one of which had been Paul Siple’s. We saw efforts to deal with the pressure problem, by building a very large dome serving as protective cover against the drifting for the laboratories housed in it.⁶³ After that briefing, intended to show me why operating at the South Pole costs so much, we had briefings on the science being done at the pole, concentrating on glaciology and meteorology.

Then lunch, addressing cards to friends postmarked at the South Pole, and then finally a visit to the pole itself, for pictures and the obligatory circumnavigating of the world by running several times around a small stake representing that year’s exact location of the pole. Bob Seamans and I chased each other around the world three times, quite an exhausting feat because of the rarified mile-high atmosphere and our heavy clothing and booting. (Each year that stake in the ice is reset several tens of yards because the mile-thick ice cap flows steadily over the land.) Bob and I had a chance to tighten an immense nut on an immense bolt used in the construction of the first geodesic dome at the South Pole Station. I could hardly lift the heavy wrench used by the Navy Seabees in the construction.

Then we had a bit of luck. The weather was good enough to fly to the Soviet Union’s South Pole station at Vostok. The station was a few hundred miles from the pole, at a higher altitude, at the geomagnetic South Pole, and the coldest place on earth, –126^o Fahrenheit having been recorded there. We landed after six tries in wind-driven snow and were warned that the engine and hence the propellers would keep going so that the hydraulic fluids didn’t freeze. We were warmly met by the Soviets, and while we were there to hear science, formalities still had to be observed. That meant speeches and vodka toasts after every speech.

We finally got to the science, especially their work in boring through the ice. The Soviets had already bored through at least 10,000-year-old ice, taking out cores 5 inches in diameter. One we looked at showed clearly that about 13,000 years ago there was a major volcanic explosion somewhere in the world. We of course drank another vodka toast, this

one cooled with 10,000-year-old ice, which fizzed as the ice melted, releasing tiny bubbles of gas trapped over 10,000 years ago. We saw more science, but then the pilot said it was time to go, else we risked the hydraulics freezing up and having to wait for the next plane, whenever. We were sympathetic to that argument. Still, the head of the laboratory insisted on us seeing his experiment, and that of course meant more vodka, this one a truly fine Georgian version. Finally, we had to go, not least because the vodka was winning, we being at the equivalent of some 11,000 feet and hence not too well supplied with oxygen. The local snowstorm into which we had landed was still going, and we used the sound of the motor to find the plane. The Soviet leader came out to say “goodbye” and headed directly for the plane right between the fuselage and the turning propellers! My heart stood still, but he made it, and we made it, all of us leaping aboard, helped along by some unceremonious shoves. The Soviets had done something very thoughtful. They gave us several 3-foot sections of what was at a minimum 10,000-year-old ice packaged in special containers to keep them from melting. The ice was then shipped back to the United States, for my colleagues and I to use at our cocktail parties.⁶⁴

There were many more visits and tours and then the return trip to Christchurch, where I got taken out on the Selwyn River to fish for brown trout. It was fabulous dry fly-fishing, but while I had several on the hook, I didn’t have any in the net. Then back to Washington, where I had one week before I went on my annual two-week jaunt to Randolph over Christmas and New Year’s. Back at 1800 G Street, there were Christmas parties, meetings with new ambassadors to Poland and Spain, where NSF had cooperative research programs, and a meeting with the foundation’s executive council to report on a brand new document called Science Indicators. The report has since 1973 been published biannually and has become indispensable in understanding the state of American science and technology. I also recommended that each year the board have at least one member visit Antarctica to ensure the quality of research and the exercise of its oversight.

My first year as NSF director was done. I had survived. I enjoyed it. No political blowups. But I had a nagging feeling that this was going to change.