Intro at Dinner from Roland Schmidt, former president of RPI Welcome to all of you who have come to celebrate this Golden Anniversary. Fifty years ago, President Harry Truman signed the Act that created the National Science Foundation. It was — and is — a unique government entity, being an independent agency — like NASA, or EPA, for example — but also having a governing board of individuals from the academic and private sectors.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has not had the same prominence in the public eye as the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Nor has it had the same level of support as NIH. Members of Congress understand the importance of research on heart disease, cancer, birth defects, AIDS and the like much better than they understand the importance of lasers, gravity waves, magnetic resonance, superconductivity and the like. No Member of Congress has ever suffered a "superconductivity attack"!
But, fortunately, due in no small measure to the person we are honoring today — Rita Colwell, there is a growing appreciation of the fact that the kind of pioneering research supported by NSF has been vital to the advances in medical and biological research as well as to the engines of economic growth in our nation today — semiconductors, computers, telecommunications, networking — as well as to a deeper understanding of our world, from coral reefs to cosmology, from the ozone layer to acid rain, from our oceans' resources to biodiversity.
The true genius of those who founded NSF, and especially of Vannevar Bush, the inspiration behind Harry Truman's action, was in making our colleges and universities the centers of pioneering research and thus, linking it to the education of our students, especially at the graduate level.
This association of research and education is not one "made in heaven" — as we too often think. It is not the norm in many other nations. I'd like to dramatize the linkage with a personal anecdote. In the mid-80s, I was chairman of the National Science Board — Rita Colwell and I served together for many years — and we mounted an effort to persuade the Reagan Administration and Congress to double the NSF budget over 5 years. As part of our campaign, we recruited David Packard, one of the founders of Hewlett-Packard to support us. Through his clout, we gained an audience in the West Wing of the White House with top people in the Reagan administration; his Chief of Staff, Budget Director and other top aides. My job was to persuade them of the economic impact of research supported by NSF and I did so with a long list of important industrial developments that had grown out of research sponsored by NSF. The response? Donald Regan, then Reagan's Chief of Staff, said, "That's all very nice, but why can't we get all that sort of research done faster and cheaper at our National Labs?" Suppose that had been Vanevar Bush's view?
Because of NSF support (and that of NIH and other forward thinking federal agencies, too) our universities have poured forth a stream of pioneering scientific advances and a stream of superb research scientists that have transformed our economy and our society. Thus, our universities have become the world's premier institutions of graduate education, attracting students from around the globe.
During my career in industry, as head of General Electric's Corporate R&D, I was dependent on those wonderful graduates turned out by our nation's research universities and in the research itself, much of it supported by NSF. As one example, GE developed magnetic resonance imaging systems. The pioneering work in this was by Professor Lauterbur, who was then at SUNY-Stony Brook, and who was an important consultant to us in the early stages of our development. NSF strongly supported his work.
Another remarkable feature of NSF is that while it obviously exists in a strongly political environment, it's work has not been politicized. It's budget has remained remarkably free of "pork" and its grants based on merit — peer reviewed — to a surprising degree. It's not that people haven't tried. There was an occasion on which Erich Bloch — then Director of NSF and I — as Board Chairman, were summoned to the office of Jim Wright, then House Majority Leader — before he became Speaker. We knew he'd recently been visited by a prominent lobbyist who had a reputation of "bringing home the bacon" for colleges and universities who went after federal grants outside the merit-based system. What we didn't expect was what greeted us on entering Jim Wright's office: he had assembled a half dozen other Members of Congress, all on our appropriations committee and he began the meeting by saying, "You gentlemen are flouting the will of Congress!" The attack was based on the charge that NSF funds were not equitably distributed by geography. In the end what saved us and placated Jim Wright and his colleagues to some degree was an NSF program called EPSCOR that explicitly addressed the problem of helping some regions and universities develop competitive strength to win awards based on merit. NSF has been good at devising merit based programs that attack politically sensitive problems.
What I've described to you is a uniquely strong, effective organization that has thrived for five decades, contributing immeasurably to the health and well being of our nation. It is an institution of research and of education that has dramatically confirmed Vannevar Bush's appreciation of their synergy; it is an institution operating in a political world without becoming politicized to the detriment of scientific merit, it is an institution that probes the furthest frontiers of science while supporting excellence in teaching science and math from the earliest years of school.
Two years ago, further new ground was broken at NSF. Rita Colwell became the first woman and first biological scientist to head NSF. I guess one has to say, "It's about time!". Rita and I served on the National Science Board together in the late 80s. While I don't remember many details of specific discussions, arguments, positions, debates, I retain a clear memory of Rita's consistently constructive, thoughtful, forceful, and compelling contributions to our meetings. She brought the authority of a hugely successful "bench" scientist — or, in her case, "field scientist" may be more apt — as the author or co-author of 16 books and over 500 publications — and she brought the perspective of an academic administrator — at the University of Maryland she was Director of the Sea Grant College and Vice President of Academic Affairs. Just before becoming head of NSF, she had been President of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute.
Rita Colwell's eminence and leadership have been evident in many of her activities — as President of the AAAS and of Sigma Xi, both broad- based scientific associations — as well as President of several prominent societies, both domestic and international, in her own field of microbiology.
Rita Colwell says of herself, "I got my start in science out of sheer stubborness." In high school, girls weren't allowed to take physics and her chemistry teacher told her that women couldn't make it in chemistry. Nevertheless, through her persistence she earned a B.S. degree in Bacteriology and an M.S. degree in genetics from Purdue On the way to that M.S she says she counted 186,000 fruit flies. Rita, as a physicist and in light of my concluding observation, I can't help but note that number is close to the speed of light in miles per second. Her Ph.D. in Marine Microbiology is from the University of Washington. And she holds nine honorary doctorates.
Which brings me to my final comment: Rita's choice of a husband. In an interview with the New York Times in February 1999, she was asked if she thought physicists made great husbands. Her reply was, "I think, yes. I know that anecdotes don't make statistics, but I was once on a panel for the National Institutes of Health and there were four prominent women there speaking. Afterward, we had lunch together, and it turned out that each one of us was married to a physicist. We concluded that physicists have interesting work, a wide range of interests and are not overly concerned about their masculinity. Now obviously, you will find physicists who have none of these characteristics. But, in general, we all felt this was so."
Rita, it's wonderful to have a director of NSF who is a biologist who appreciates physicists.
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