00100	suggested headline: CIVILIANIZING RESEARCH
00200	
00300		There is a substantial consensus today that research at Stanford
00400	is insufficiently oriented towards civilian goals and excessively
00500	oriented towards military applications.  (Admittedly, stating the
00600	consensus in this way passes over disagreements about how military
00700	the research is, whether defense research should be done at all,
00800	whether the U.S. wears a white hat or a black one, and whether
00900	research is good or bad on the whole).
01000	
01100		1. There is pure research and applied research.  Pure research
01200	is pursued by the researchers because it is interesting.  It is supported
01300	by the government frankly through the National Science Foundation
01400	under the theory that some good will come of it some day with examples
01500	taken from biology or nuclear physics according to taste.  Congress
01600	has never been extremely enthusiastic about supporting pure research,
01700	and it is not clear that they will agree to support it at much above
01800	its present level.  It seems very unlikely that Congress will support
01900	everyone who would like to do pure research and is qualified to do so.
02000	Besides this frank support of pure research, a substantial amount of
02100	it is supported by agencies with applied missions on the ground that
02200	some good will come of it for this agency's particular mission.  The
02300	Defense Department has taken a particularly "enlightened" view of
02400	supporting pure research.  This enlightened view is mainly the result
02500	of the military dependence on the advice of high level scientists who
02600	push their own goal of supporting pure research as well as helping
02700	the military out with its specific problems.  In the time scale since
02800	World War II, the enlightened view has not been borne out by retrospective
02900	assessment of the extent to which present military hardware resulted
03000	from previous pure research supported by the military.  This was the
03100	conclusion of Project Hindsight established to look into the matter.
03200	In my opinion, military support of pure research has been partly a
03300	swindle and partly a quid pro quo for direct help on applied problems.
03400	At present, Senator Mansfield has initiated a witch-hunt to root out
03500	military support of pure research and non-military applied research.
03600	
03700		Applied research can be divided into two parts: research in
03800	support of a specific mission and research aimed at developing
03900	technical capability.  We shall call the latter basic technological
04000	research and distinguish it from pure scientific research and
04100	from support of missions.  It is distinguished from pure research in
04200	that it is specifically oriented at producing capability and not at
04300	satisfying curiosity.  Examples of basic technological research
04400	are  development of integrated circuits,
04500	most of the work of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project,
04600	and most engineering research.
04700	
04800		Basic technological research has had a very spotty record
04900	of government and private support.  In some areas, it gets carried
05000	along with mission oriented research and is well supported.  In
05100	others it has a long tradition of university support and gets carried
05200	along with pure research.  Examples of the former are medical research,
05300	much biological research, aeronautics.  Examples of the latter are
05400	the traditional branches of electrical, mechanical and civil
05500	engineering.  The scientific establishment in this country is more
05600	interested in pure research than in technological research, and a
05700	number of years ago engineering schools conducted what almost amounts
05800	to a purge of technological research, and some of what is done today
05900	in engineering departments is as unlikely to ever have applications
06000	as the theory of numbers.  NASA supports very little technological
06100	research today; as the funds got squeezed, many projects were
06200	abandoned on the grounds that they were not in support of specific
06300	approved missions.
06400	
06500		Many important areas of basic technology are totally ignored
06600	by the academic community.  For example, as far as I know, there is
06700	no academic research in production engineering:  companies develop
06800	special hardware for their own production lines and the sellers of
06900	machine tools develop new products, but projects in production
07000	technology of greater scope that organizing a particular new production
07100	line or developing a partcular new machine tool or transfer machine
07200	practically don't exist.  An exception was the Defense Department
07300	support of the development of numerical control of machine tools now
07400	phased out.
07500	
07600		Another example is construction technology.  The
07700	traditional discipline of civil engineering is related to construction
07800	technolgy in that it is concerned with making structures that will
07900	serve a given function, but it is little concerned with how the 
08000	structure is to be put together.  CHECK THIS OUT