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                 BASIC SCIENCE AND BASIC TECHNOLOGY


	There  is  a  substantial  consensus  today  that research at
Stanford  is  insufficiently  oriented  towards  civilian  goals  and
excessively  oriented  towards  military  applications.  (Admittedly,
stating the consensus in this way passes over disagreements about how
military  the research is, whether defense research should be done at
all, whether the U.S. wears a white hat or a black one,  and  whether
research is good or bad on the whole).

	1.  There  is  pure  research  and  applied  research.   Pure
research is pursued by the researchers because it is interesting.  It
is  supported  by the government frankly through the National Science
Foundation under the theory that some good will come of it  some  day
with  examples  taken  from  biology  or nuclear physics according to
taste.   Congress  has  never  been  extremely   enthusiastic   about
supporting pure research, and it is not clear that they will agree to
support it at much above its present level.  It seems  very  unlikely
that  Congress  will  support  everyone  who  would  like  to do pure
research and is qualified to do so. Besides  this  frank  support  of
pure  research,  a  substantial amount of it is supported by agencies
with applied missions on the ground that some good will  come  of  it
for  this  agency's  particular  mission.  The Defense Department has
taken a particularly "enlightened" view of supporting pure  research.
This enlightened view is mainly the result of the military dependence
on the advice of high level scientists who push  their  own  goal  of
supporting pure research as well as helping the military out with its
specific problems.  In  the  time  scale  since  World  War  II,  the
enlightened  view  has not been borne out by retrospective assessment
of the extent  to  which  present  military  hardware  resulted  from
previous  pure  research  supported  by  the  military.  This was the
conclusion of Project Hindsight established to look into the  matter.
In  my  opinion,  military support of pure research has been partly a
swindle and partly  a  quid  pro  quo  for  direct  help  on  applied
problems. At present, Senator Mansfield has initiated a witch-hunt to
root out military support of pure research and  non-military  applied
research.

	Applied  research  can be divided into two parts: research in
support of a  specific  mission  and  research  aimed  at  developing
technical  capability.   We shall call the latter basic technological
research and distinguish it from pure scientific  research  and  from
support  of missions.  It is distinguished from pure research in that
it is specifically  oriented  at  producing  capability  and  not  at
satisfying  curiosity.   Examples of basic technological research are
development of integrated circuits, most of the work of the  Stanford
Artificial Intelligence Project, and most engineering research.

	Basic  technological research has had a very spotty record of
government and private support.  In some areas, it gets carried along
with  mission  oriented research and is well supported.  In others it
has a long tradition of university support  and  gets  carried  along
with  pure  research.   Examples  of the former are medical research,
much biological research, aeronautics.  Examples of  the  latter  are
the   traditional   branches  of  electrical,  mechanical  and  civil
engineering.  The scientific establishment in this  country  is  more
interested  in  pure  research  than in technological research, and a
number of years ago engineering schools conducted what almost amounts
to  a purge of technological research, and some of what is done today
in engineering departments is as unlikely to ever  have  applications
as  the  theory  of numbers.  NASA supports very little technological
research today;  as  the  funds  got  squeezed,  many  projects  were
abandoned  on  the  grounds that they were not in support of specific
approved missions.

	Many important areas of basic technology are totally  ignored
by  the  academic community.  For example, as far as I know, there is
no academic research in production  engineering:   companies  develop
special  hardware  for  their own production lines and the sellers of
machine tools  develop  new  products,  but  projects  in  production
technology   of  greater  scope  that  organizing  a  particular  new
production line  or  developing  a  partcular  new  machine  tool  or
transfer  machine  practically  don't  exist.   An  exception was the
Defense Department support of the development of numerical control of
machine tools now phased out.

	Another  example is construction technology.  The traditional
discipline of civil engineering is related to construction  technolgy
in  that  it  is  concerned  with making structures that will serve a
given function, but it is little concerned with how the structure  is
to be put together.  CHECK THIS OUT