A Lab of One's Own by Rita Colwell & Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

Author:Rita Colwell & Sharon Bertsch McGrayne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

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For really big change to be possible, we were going to need outside help. One day early in my term as NSF director, when Newt Gingrich and I were in a meeting, I told him, “Speaker Gingrich, the NSF budget must be doubled. It has to be doubled.”

“Director Colwell, you’re wrong.”

My immediate thought was, Oh dear. This is not good.

But then he said, “It should be tripled.” In another committee meeting, Bordogna heard Senator John McCain say the same thing. And Senator John Glenn, the former astronaut, would testify to a congressional committee that the NSF’s budget should be “five times” bigger.

Senator Mikulski and Senator Kit Bond, a Republican from Missouri, were ready to lead a bipartisan effort to increase the agency’s budget substantially. Pulling out our list of the critical new areas of science we wanted to support—including mathematics, computer science, ecology, and women’s programs—we began informing members of Congress about each one. (I use the word “informing” because it is illegal for agencies to “lobby” Congress. Instead, we “inform” its members about what we’d like to do.)

I’d been walking both sides of the aisle ever since becoming director of the NSF, and assumed I’d be a key player dealing with Congress myself. But the NSF’s legislative affairs unit protested. Traditionally, directors didn’t go to Capitol Hill to speak to Congress about money. When I discovered the unit was making budget agreements with congressional aides without telling me, however, I insisted on speaking to Congress myself.

Walking the halls of Congress felt like old times in the Maryland statehouse. Congress was a bit more refined—its members didn’t munch on their lunches during hearings—but some of the old low-level bias remained. When I testified with Bordogna at my side, some congressmen and their male staffers would direct their questions to my deputy instead of to me. Still, I found that most of the politicians I encountered—from both sides of the aisle—were fundamentally well-meaning. The lesson here is that scientists need to spend time making sure their congressional representatives visit the universities and other science facilities in their districts so they can better appreciate the research that’s going on. And of course, it’s important to be kind and to show respect. Personal relationships—that’s what it’s all about.

In the end, I couldn’t double the NSF’s budget. I did manage to get it increased by 63 percent—extra funds we used for productive and socially relevant programs, including major funding for computing, student stipends, mathematics, women professors, large-scale physics and astronomy projects (one of which confirmed Einstein’s general theory of relativity), a new airplane for high-altitude research, and earthquake research centers. I am certain that having Neal Lane, my predecessor NSF director, in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the first two years of my tenure was an important factor in my success with the budget. I had hoped to do more, but as of this writing, this was nevertheless the greatest period of growth in the NSF’s fifty-year history.

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