Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential run marked the end of 12 consecutive years of Republican White House control. It also marked the bicentennial of the first American large cent, the coin that carried the motto, Liberty, Parent of Science and Industry. In the intervening 200 years, science protected America’s liberty, winning wars, conquering disease, and keeping the nation safe. And for the most part, America’s science and technology policy focused on those imperatives.

During the Cold War era, from 1945, when World War II ended, until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, American policymakers saw the physical sciences and engineering as protectors of Western democracy. Physicists, in particular, benefited from Washington’s flattering attention. For decades, research dollars flowed freely, driven not only by near-term defense needs, but also by a hedge against the possibility of a hot war whose outcome again would be determined by technological superiority. The way elected officials looked at it, keeping the physics bench filled with all-star researchers was a worthwhile national investment

Scientists are generally not the venal sort, but they are more than willing to receive support when proffered, especially if it comes without any quid pro quos. As federal dollars flowed to universities and high-tech industry, the Cold War era became a golden age for scientific research. It featured discoveries of esoterica, such as neutrinos, quarks, and parity non-conservation, none of which had—and still do not have—any evident practical application, as well as the development of practical devices, such as the transistor, the laser, and large-scale integrated circuits, which revolutionized telecommunications and commerce. It was also the golden age of antibiotic development: What had begun as the serendipitous discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1928 became a disease-fighting juggernaut.

The Cold War era was also a belle époque for vertically-integrated technology industries and their central research and development laboratories. Bell Labs in New Jersey, Xerox PARC in California, and IBM in New York were powerhouses of innovation. They benefited tremendously from monopolistic or near-monopolistic holds on their sectors. General Electric, RCA, and Westinghouse might not have had such strangleholds, but they, too, were technological forces to be reckoned with.

America seemingly had it all: robust state support of public universities; generous federal spending on academic research and construction of large national facilities; and industrial laboratories that were unequaled in the world. In America, liberty had truly become the parent of science and industry. War and disease might have been the prime drivers of science and technology policymaking for more than 200 years, but in economic circles, the social return on investment in research was slowly becoming recognized as an extraordinarily beneficial outcome.

Robert M. Solow, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of economics, received the 1987 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for “his contributions to the theory of economic growth.” Solow had begun his work three decades earlier, and in a series of articles^1–3 published between 1956 and 1960, he made the case that labor and capital investments only accounted for a small contribution to changes in economic growth. According to his models, technical progress, which he defined as improvements in production technology, was principally responsible for economic growth. But outside the economics arena, and especially among science and technology policymakers, Solow’s work went largely ignored.

In 1991, another economist made a foray into the arcane science and technology forest, and this time a few people heard a tree fall. Edwin Mansfield, who had been studying the economics of technology⁴ since the early 1960s at the University of Pennsylvania, published an analysis⁵ that caught the attention of several policy wonks, D. Allan Bromley, George H.W. Bush’s science advisor, among them.⁶ Mansfield had examined the impact of academic research on innovation, surveying the products and industrial processes of 76 major companies across seven areas of manufacturing during the decade ending in 1985. He found that across sectors, more than a tenth of all new products depended critically on recent academic research. In the case of the pharmaceutical industry, he found that the impact was even greater. There, more than a quarter of new drugs would not have been developed in the absence of research performed in universities.

As striking as those conclusions were, it was Mansfield’s macro-economic findings that had an even more profound impact on Bromley. Although the study was fraught with complexity and suffered from inherent uncertainties, Mansfield’s conclusion was profound. The social rate of return—the payback, not just to the innovator, but to society in general—on research conducted in universities, he concluded, was 28%. A year later, after revising his analysis,⁷ Mansfield estimated the rate could be as high as 40%, a truly remarkable number.

From a pro-science policy perspective, the timing could not have been worse. Mansfield’s modification appeared in June, just as the country was becoming consumed with the 1992 election, and politics, not economic theory, occupied center stage. In such an atmosphere, it’s more than likely Bromley was unaware of the significant upward revision.⁸ In any case, 6 months later, following Bush’s November loss to Bill Clinton, he would find himself headed back to Yale and untethered from daily senior-staff White House meetings.

Bromley was not unique in overlooking Mansfield’s 40% revision. To this day, policymakers invariably cite the 28% social rate of return on investment. And most of them neglect to mention one of Mansfield’s other significant findings, published in 1980: dollar for dollar spent, basic research has a larger impact on industrial productivity than applied research and development.⁹

Mansfield’s 1992 revision was unfortunate in its timing, but it only reinforced his earlier emphasis on the economic benefits of science. And that focus would prove to be a game changer just a few years later.

Had social media been around on November 8, 1989, images of the fall of the Berlin Wall would have gone viral. They made the end of the Cold War a pictorial reality, and they presaged changes in American foreign and domestic policy that could barely have been imagined just a few years before. The breakup of the Soviet Union, which followed in short order, left the United States as the world’s only superpower, and ushered in an era in which domestic issues would quickly take precedence over foreign affairs and military interests. It also weakened the rationale for federal support of scientific research, which had been tied to defense needs for half a century.

As the nation turned inward, the flow of federal research dollars to universities and national laboratories was suddenly in danger of being throttled back. Scientists, especially physicists, chemists, and engineers, who had taken their special status for granted, found themselves at risk. Bill Clinton’s election and his choice of Jack Gibbons, the director of the congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), as his science advisor did little to allay their fears. Gibbons had both science and science policy credentials, but Clinton had made it clear that his vice-president, Al Gore, was going to be in charge of all things technological.

Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. was no stranger to Washington. He had been a member of Congress for 16 years, serving 8 years in the House and eight in the Senate, before being elected vice-president in 1992. The son of Albert Gore, Sr., an iconic Tennessean who had represented his constituents in Congress for almost three decades, Al Jr. spent his formative years living in the Fairfax Hotel on Embassy Row, as the posh stretch of Massachusetts Avenue is known. A son of privilege, he attended prep school before enrolling at Harvard in 1965. Although he majored in government, he developed a passion for science, math, and philosophy; and after serving in the military, journalism, religion, and law, as well. His wide range of interests could easily have earned him the label ‘dilettante,’ but a conversation with him would quickly have revealed him more a renaissance man.

Gore’s breadth of knowledge and exceptional memory were on display at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Arlington, Virginia in 1991. He had already carved out a reputation in policy circles on two subjects: the dangers of anthropogenic (human-induced) climate change, which gained him popular notoriety, and the impact of technology on American life at the close of the 20th century, which had attracted the attention of wonkish techies. He was scheduled to address about a thousand physicists on the latter subject that April afternoon, but his interest in the former had taken him to the Arctic, where bad weather had interfered with his timely return to Washington. Arriving in Arlington an hour late and having forgotten to bring his prepared speech with him, he gave a 45-minute extemporaneous lecture—using no notes—on the role of quantum theory in 20th century philosophy.¹⁰

To address a crowd of physicists on such a subject took a lot of self-assurance and more than a small dose of egotism. Gore had both, and they were often on display during his tenure as Clinton’s science and technology (S&T) policy guru. Although Clinton generally preserved the S&T policy structures he had inherited from the Bush Administration—actually expanding the scope of FCCSET and renaming it the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC)—he was quite disengaged from them. Unlike Bush, who often attended meetings of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), Clinton never once during his first 2 years in office joined gatherings of the group, which his science advisor, Jack Gibbons, co-chaired. He did so for the first time in the late spring of 1995, and how his attendance at that meeting came to pass once again illustrates the importance of personal contacts in developing science and technology policy.

The story begins with Gore’s role as the Administration’s point man on anything scientific and his management of the science and technology portfolio. Despite his intellectual interest in the subject, his focus was almost solely on technology and climate change.¹¹ By the summer of 1994, leaders of the science community had become acutely aware of that tilt, and began to express concern that federal support for research—basic research, especially—was rapidly dropping off the Clinton Administration’s radar screen. The apprehension caused a number of prominent scientists to rethink their long-held aversion to advocating for their profession.

After more than 50 years of special treatment during the Cold War, physicists, chemists, and biologists had grown accustomed to seeing lobbying in their own self-interest as demeaning—although high-energy physicists had shown no qualms about making the case for the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). They viewed such activity as beneath their elite status in American society. Many scientists went even further. They argued that weighing in on any policy matter, even those that fell outside the realm of self-interest, could damage science’s reputation as an impartial arbiter. But rising concerns about research funding began to chip away at those arguments, and by 1994, several organizations had decided to test the lobbying waters.

The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, the Joint Committee for Biomedical Research, and Research!America waded in on behalf of the life sciences, enlisting the support of Rep. John Edward Porter, the new chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services responsible for funding the National Institutes of Health. But as great as the anxiety was that biologists were feeling, it paled by comparison with the worries that began to intrude on the physics community.

Among scientists, physicists had benefited most from the federal largesse during the Cold War era, given their role in nuclear weaponry and other instruments of combat. If they had any doubts about the end of their “chosen” status following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the cancellation of the SSC in 1993 surely dispelled them. In the summer of 1994, the American Physical Society decided it needed to beef up its Washington presence and start to lobby for research. It tapped me for the role.

Several months after I took up residence inside the capital Beltway, Republicans gained control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. It was more than a warning shot across the bow of the Clinton ship of state, and it prompted the president to bring on board several new policy advisors in early 1995. One of them was William E. Curry, Jr., who had lost his bid for governor of Connecticut the previous November. Bill, whom I had gotten to know well through my political work in our home state, was charged with helping Clinton reinvent his domestic policy.

After Bill arrived in January 1995, we began to meet for dinner regularly to talk policy, politics, and gossip, continuing our schmoozing as we browsed the shelves of the Georgetown Barnes and Noble. Two months into the new year, I was sitting in Bill’s office in what was then called the Old Executive Office Building (now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building), when he popped a question: What could Clinton do for science? Other than boost funding for research, which we both recognized would be difficult with conservative Republicans now in charge of the House of Representatives. I told him, for starters, Clinton ought to begin to attend PCAST meetings. Bill pulled up the White House calendar on his computer, checked the date of the next PCAST gathering and, as I sat with him, called the president’s scheduler requesting her to add it to the president calendar. “It’s done,” he said, “and I’ll put you down as a guest. You know it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t asked.”

On the morning of the PCAST meeting weeks later, the White House called to tell me Jack Gibbons had taken me off the list of attendees. No guests would be allowed, according to the protocol he had established. The meeting would take place without me, but with the president attending, and that’s all that mattered, I noted mentally.

Late that afternoon, Curry called me. “How did the PCAST meeting go? How did the president do?” he asked

“Jack took me off the list of attendees,” I recall saying.

After a few moments of silence, Bill replied, “I guess he didn’t know you and I were the ones responsible for getting Clinton there.”

“Apparently not,” I agreed.

Some months later, I saw Jack at a Washington function, and he told me how happy he was that the president had finally made time to sit down with PCAST. I never let on how it had happened. Jack was a person of extraordinary character whom I counted as a friend, and I was content to allow him to take credit for Clinton’s presence at the meeting.

I’ve decided to recount the story now, only because it so clearly illustrates how much science policy can depend on timing and friendships. Jack died in 2015, but I have a feeling he would agree with my decision to reveal what happened were he still alive today.

By the end of the 1990s the science and technology policy landscape in Washington had changed dramatically. Economic growth had become a prime rationale for research funding; dramatic medical advances had provided a strong argument for more investment in medical research; advocacy groups had proliferated; for the first time in decades, Congress had begun to dig into the science policy weeds; the boundaries between scientific disciplines had begun to blur; Europe and Asia were nipping at the heels of America’s science and technology supremacy; and, responding in part to changes in the tax code and in part to the revolution in information technology, industry had virtually abandoned its support of long-term research. Almost overnight, the policy maze had become extraordinarily more difficult to navigate.

About the same time Edwin Mansfield had published his analysis of the rate of social return on investment in basic research, Michael Boskin and Lawrence Lau, both Stanford University economists at the time, had completed their study¹² of the economic growth of nations. Analyzing the role of the three largest drivers of growth in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, West Germany, and Japan, they concluded that technical progress far outpaced capital and labor in spurring economic growth. More specifically, they found that technical progress is by far the most important direct source of economic growth for the industrialized countries in the sample, accounting for more than 50% of the growth in real aggregate output (more than 80% for the European countries).¹³

You might think that science and technology policymakers and advocates for federal support of scientific research would have immediately seized on the result, but it actually took 6 years for the Boskin-Lau report to make a significant splash in Washington. It came following a news conference in the National Press Building on March 4, 1997, at which Allan Bromley, president of the American Physical Society, and Paul Anderson, president of the American Chemical Society, released a “Joint Statement on Scientific Research” on behalf of a coalition of 22 science and engineering societies. The statement, which Bromley and Anderson had discussed earlier that day on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” read:¹⁴

Bromley met with reporters after the news conference and stressed several points. With technology underpinning economic growth, as Boskin and Lau had concluded, and with academic research providing the high rate of social return on investment, as Mansfield had found, he argued that federal support of research should be pegged to the gross domestic product (GDP). The proposed increase for the coming fiscal year, he said, should be the first installment of a 10-year plan to double federal research support. That would roughly restore funding of science as a percentage of the GDP to what it had been 30 years earlier. We knew what economic bang research had provided in the intervening years, Bromley maintained, and he was confident it would produce the same kind of return in the future. He also pointed out that industrial support of long-term research had practically vanished—except in the pharmaceutical sector—making the federal role even more important than it had been several decades before.

The Joint Statement quickly garnered champions on Capitol Hill, and by the fall, a chorus calling for doubling federal science support over 10 years had grown to more than one hundred science and engineering societies. On October 22, 1997, a throng of the society leaders and a bevy of reporters packed the Mansfield Room in the Capitol to release a “Unified Statement” containing the proposal Bromley had alluded to the previous March. The advocacy effort, unprecedented for scientists and engineers, had also yielded legislative fruit.

The gathering included three members of the Senate, Phil Gramm, a Texas Republican, Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, and Pete V. Domenici, a New Mexico Republican. Domenici wielded considerable clout as chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee, and Gramm and Lieberman were two original co-sponsors of the National Research Investment Act of 1998 (S. 1305), which authorized doubling civilian basic research over a decade,¹⁵ as the “Unified Statement” had proposed. That Domenici would lend his weight to the effort was not surprising, since New Mexico was home to two Department of Energy laboratories, Los Alamos and Sandia. He had been instrumental in securing funding for the human genome project in the 1980s, and for years he had been a prime go-to person for science in the Senate.

At first blush, Gramm and Lieberman would not have been obvious crusaders for scientific research. Gramm, a conservative Democrat turned Republican was a fiscal hawk, an unabashed free marketer with a doctorate in economics. But he had also majored in physics as an undergraduate at the University of Georgia. Lieberman was a moderate Democrat with a Yale undergraduate degree in economics and political science and a Yale law degree. Neither claimed to have professional experience in science. But as we have seen, policymaking can produce strange bedfellows, although generally there’s a backstory. The Gramm-Lieberman sponsorship of science certainly had one. It involved personal relationships and key staffers.

Allan Bromley had developed a friendship with Phil Gramm during his years as George H.W. Bush’s science advisor. Gramm, prior to being elected to the Senate in 1984, had served in the House of Representatives for three terms. His district was Texas’s 6th, home to Waxahachie, the site of the SSC, and it was a given that Gramm would be one of its biggest cheerleaders. The SSC had also been one of Bromley’s priorities, and it was natural that he and Gramm would bond over it. Although their bond didn’t save the SSC, it proved vital to sustaining Gramm’s interest in science and his willingness to promote a 10-year doubling of civilian research in 1997, first with his Republican bill,¹⁶ S. 124, in January 1997, and 9 months later with the bipartisan legislation S. 1305.

Getting a piece of legislation drafted often requires getting the attention of a dedicated staffer. In Gramm’s office, that proved to be Mike Champness. An engineer by training, he bird-dogged the issue, and it was no accident the bill called for doubling civilian research, which encompassed engineering, rather than civilian scientific research, which could have excluded it.

The dossier on Lieberman was slightly different. As a Democrat, he was not reflexively opposed to federal spending as much as Gramm. But he was far enough away from the liberal brand that he could strike a deal with a conservative Republican if the time and the issue were ripe for action. The National Research Investment Act provided such an opportunity. Bromley and I divided the responsibilities: Gramm was his; Lieberman was mine.

I first met Joe at a dinner party in Woodbridge, Connecticut in 1971, and we remained political allies for many years. I had helped him secure Democratic support for his successful Attorney General runs in 1982 and 1986, and when he ran for the United States Senate in 1988, I assisted him with his defense policy. Calling on him to consider co-sponsoring S. 1305 wasn’t a heavy lift. His legislative director, William Bonvillian, made it even easier because he was an avid supporter of science who would later move on to a private sector position representing the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Washington.

Personal relationships and legislative staff engagement are important for achieving policy goals, but often they are not sufficient. Having a strong buy-in from the chairmen of the committees of jurisdiction—in this case the three authorization committees, Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation (CST), Energy and Natural Resources and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP)—can tip the scales in a dramatic way. And the Gramm-Lieberman bill had none of them, although Domenici, who was one of its co-sponsors, was a senior member of the Energy Committee, and as chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee, he controlled the purse strings of the Energy Department’s science programs. It’s also very likely the link between science and economic growth was still too novel to attract widespread endorsement. And the argument about future impacts was not as compelling as the case for immediate social program needs. In the end, S. 1305 never made it across the finish line, but it would gain renewed traction soon enough.

A month after Gramm-Lieberman met its demise in the late spring of 1998, like the proverbial Phoenix, a bill predicated on many of the same economic rationales arose from the legislative ashes. It contained a few significant sweeteners to attract conservative members, authorizing doubling civilian research funding over twelve rather than 10 years; requiring the president as part of his annual budget request to provide assessments—including possible terminations—of federal research programs, as well as a prioritized list of his requests for research; and directing the White House to commission a National Academy of Sciences study of the research evaluation methodologies.

The new bill,¹⁷ the “Federal Research Investment Act,” carrying the label S. 2217, also had the backing of Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican who chaired the Science, Technology, and Space Subcommittee of the CST, and John D. (“Jay”) Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, who was its ranking member. Just as significantly, the bill had the support of Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who chaired the full CST Committee and had assigned one of his staffers, Elizabeth Prostic, the task of shepherding it through the legislative sausage-making process. The changes in leadership and authorization language paid off. The Senate passed S. 2217 by unanimous consent on October 8, 1998, just as the 105th Congress was closing out its second session. There wasn’t enough time left for the House to act. But with the unanimous vote in their pocket, the bill’s sponsors vowed to reintroduce it once the new Congress convened in January 1999.

The Findings section of the bill put Congress firmly on record in recognizing economic growth as a prime impetus for federal support of science and technology. It also signaled a new reality: other nations were catching up rapidly with American technological superiority, and on a globalized landscape, economic competition was the new normal. The language is concise and worth repeating because its long-term impact was substantial:

SEC. 2. GENERAL FINDINGS REGARDING FEDERAL INVESTMENT IN RESEARCH.

1. (a) VALUE OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT—The Congress makes the following findings with respect to the value of research and development to the United States:
   1. (1) Federal investment in research has resulted in the development of technology that saved lives in the United States and around the world.
   2. (2) Research and development investment across all Federal agencies has been effective in creating technology that has enhanced the American quality of life.
   3. (3) The Federal investment in research and development conducted or underwritten by both military and civilian agencies has produced benefits that have been felt in both the private and public sector.
   4. (4) Discoveries across the spectrum of scientific inquiry have the potential to raise the standard of living and the quality of life for all Americans.
   5. (5) Science, engineering, and technology play a critical role in shaping the modern world.
   6. (6) Studies show that about half of all United States post-World War II economic growth is a direct result of technical innovation; and science, engineering, and technology contribute to the creation of new goods and services, new jobs and new capital.
   7. (7) Technical innovation is the principal driving force behind the long-term economic growth and increased standards of living of the world’s modern industrial societies. Other nations are well aware of the pivotal role of science, engineering, and technology, and they are seeking to exploit it wherever possible to advance their own global competitiveness.
   8. (8) Federal programs for investment in research, which lead to technological innovation and result in economic growth, should be structured to address current funding disparities and develop enhanced capability in States and regions that currently underparticipate in the national science and technology enterprise.

True to their word, the sponsors of the “Federal Research Investment Act” reintroduced the bill at the start of the 106th Congress,¹⁸ and the Senate passed it (now with the label, S. 296) on July 26, 1999, again by unanimous consent. There were several major hurdles still to be overcome, and they illustrate how hard it is to implement science and technology policy, especially when money is involved.

Congress carries out most of its work through its committees and subcommittees, and where broad science issues are concerned, there are many that may claim jurisdiction on a single piece of legislation. Bills that are so legislatively challenged can proceed with either sequential referrals—one committee completes its work on the bill before the next one considers it—or concurrent referrals—multiple committees carry out their work on the bill at the same time—neither of which guarantees a smooth or efficient process.

Subtle but significant differences in the House and Senate jurisdictional structures make the legislative maze even more difficult to navigate. The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee (its current name) oversees the operations of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (formerly the National Bureau of Standards), the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the basic science programs in the Department of Energy (DOE). But it has no responsibility for DOE’s management structure or the functions of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Those fall under the jurisdiction of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The Senate juggles the authorization and oversight tasks of science agencies just enough to create confusion. It assigns all energy issues to the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, EPA to the Environment and Public Works Committee, NIH to the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, and three of the remaining “N” alphabet agencies—NASA, NIST, and NOAA—to the Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee. It gives that committee and the HELP Committee joint responsibility for NSF.

In both chambers, defense research falls within the province of the Armed Services Committee, and agricultural research is part of the portfolio of the Agriculture Committee (called Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry in the Senate). The fragmentation of congressional oversight and policymaking for science and technology mimics the fragmentation of science and technology across all federal agencies or departments: Transportation, State, Justice, Education, Intelligence, Homeland Security and Treasury all have a toehold in the science enterprise, and each falls under the jurisdiction of a different committee or subcommittee.

The balkanization of science within the federal bureaucracy has been a feature of American life for almost a century and a half. It led the Allison Commission¹⁹ to consider establishing a Department of Science in the mid-1880s. And although the commission ultimately rejected the plan, the concept gained new currency in 1995, after Republicans won control of the House of Representatives. Having wandered the halls as the minority for 40 years, they began reshaping the Capitol landscape to match their guiding principles contained in the “Contract with America”—much as the Israelites did when they entered the Land of Canaan after 40 years in the desert.

A Department of Science was one concept that captured the imagination of Newt Gingrich, the new outspoken Speaker of the House and architect of the “Contract.” He put it on the plate of the House Science Committee and its chairman, Robert “Bob” Walker of Pennsylvania, a fiscal conservative with a bent for rabble rousing, but, like Gingrich, in many ways a science geek. Walker served one 2-year term as Science Committee chair, and by the time he retired from the House in 1997, a Department of Science was no longer an agenda item. Changing the way the federal government organized the science and technology functions would have been a monumental task, and many policymakers believed the consolidation would carry substantial risks to a system that, for all its occasional inefficiencies and redundancies, actually worked quite well.

In spite of the thrashing about, balkanization of science and technology policy remained—and still remains—a feature of the federal bureaucracy. Following S. 296’s initial referral to the House Science Committee on July 27, 1999, it fell victim to the jurisdictional strains. Even if multiple referrals could have been avoided, however, the bill would have had a difficult time in the House, because the legislation authorized new spending without any “offsets”—reductions in spending on other federal programs—a violation of the statutory rules known as “PAYGO,” to which House conservatives insisted on strict adherence.

Setting aside the authorization obstacles facing the legislation, the objective of the “Federal Research Investment Act”—increasing government support for research—ultimately would have required Congress to appropriate the funds. And given PAYGO rules, achieving that goal would have been even more difficult than getting agreement on general policies and proposed spending targets. Realizing a budgetary success, history has shown, is not for novices.

However difficult the budgetary maze might have been in 1999, at least there was a road lawmakers and bureaucrats traveled, and there were rules of the road they generally followed. By 2018, the road had been washed out, and the rules, ditched. On March 22 that year, the House of Representatives voted 256 to 167 to pass H.R. 1625. Its first page read:

H. R. 1625

• To amend the State Department Basic Authorities Act of 1956 to include severe forms of trafficking in persons within the definition of transnational organized crime for purposes of the rewards program of the Department of State, and for other purposes.

If you proceeded no farther, you would have no idea the bill provided $1.3 trillion dollars in federal discretionary spending for the fiscal year that had begun the on the first day of the previous October.

The bill was actually the “Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018,”²⁰ an “Omnibus” spending package 878 pages long. The State Department title, a carry-over from pending legislation, was merely a parliamentary vehicle for getting money out the door before the government would have to shut down. The Senate passed it 65 to 32 a day after the House had acted, and the president signed it into law a few hours later. Everyone was acting under the gun.

Hardly any members of Congress had read all 878 pages of the bill, and there is little doubt President Trump had barely thumbed through it. That was not what Congress had in mind when it passed the “Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974,” which prescribed the sausage-making process of funding the federal government and its programs.²¹

The 1974 act stipulated that the federal fiscal year would begin on October 1, rather than July 1, as had been the case until then. But the legislation did much more. It prescribed a complex budgetary process, illustrated by the following chart, which uses fiscal year (FY) 2018 as an example.

As the timeline illustrates, October 1, the last line in the chart, is the start of a new fiscal year, but the budget process leading up to it actually begins 24 months earlier with budget planning by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) with science oversight by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).²² Usually, shortly after New Year’s Day, OMB, reflecting the priorities of the president, gives federal agencies guidance for preparing their budgetary requests for the fiscal year not yet on the horizon. In the case of the 2018 fiscal year, that would have happened early in 2016. By the end of the summer, agencies and departments submit their budget requests to OMB, and just before Thanksgiving, the budget office provides them with their “pass backs,” which reflect how much the president intends to propose for their activities. They have about a month to appeal the White House decisions before the presidential budget plan is set in stone. For the 2018 fiscal year beginning on October 11, 2017, that would have occurred just prior to Christmas in 2016.

According to the 1974 statute, the president is expected to send his budget request to Congress on the first Monday in February. Once Congress receives the “President’s Budget,” the House and Senate Budget Committees begin work on a resolution that establishes an aggregate bottom line for federal spending known as the 302 (a). It also provides a proposed budgetary breakdown by “function” for all the activities of the federal government. By April 15, after sorting out their differences, the House and Senate are expected to adopt a joint Budget Resolution, setting the stage for the twelve appropriation subcommittees in each chamber to begin their work.

As their first order of business, the subcommittee chairs, known as “cardinals,” negotiate how much money each will have at its disposal. Once the haggling ends and the so-called 302 (b) allocations are set, each subcommittee begins the “mark-up” of its spending bill. A positive vote from the subcommittee sends the appropriations bill to the full committee for approval, and eventually to the chamber floor for passage.

Constitutionally, the House must act first and deliver its bill to the Senate for further action. If the Senate amends the bill, as it often does, a conference between appropriators of both chambers takes place to resolve the differences, and both chambers vote the compromise either up or down without further amendments. If the outcome is positive, the bill winds up on the president’s desk for his signature. If it is negative, the House begins anew. Once signed, the bill becomes law, and money flows to the federal agencies covered at the beginning of the new fiscal year. But if the president declines to sign the bill, both chambers have the option to override his veto with a two-thirds vote. If they can’t, they have to try to craft a new bill that can gain presidential approval.

Each stage of the budgetary process draws different people to the table. Scientists and engineers populate agency advisory committees and put their intellectual heft behind programs and initiatives. Members of the science and technology community and leaders of companies that have skin in the game often testify at congressional hearings, using those opportunities to influence policy and spending decisions.

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, if they are operational, supply the president with policy recommendations and budget advice. The National Academy of Sciences, through the National Research Council, periodically assesses disciplinary needs and opportunities, hoping the White House and Capitol Hill will consider its decadal studies as reliable forecasts of the technological future.

Think tanks also throw their weight around, including the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, for example, on the right; the Center for American Progress on the left; the liberal-leaning Brookings Institute and the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute in the center; and organizations such as the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Aspen Institute, which try to steer clear of partisan politics. Science and technology advocacy groups and lobbyists of every stripe knock on any available door to plead their case, basing their petitions on whatever issues might gain traction: defense and homeland security, cures for disease, economic growth, education and jobs, environmental challenges, transportation and, with increasing frequency in recent years, innovation, entrepreneurship, global competitiveness, and artificial intelligence (AI).

The buzz is incessant, a cacophony produced by economists pushing their hottest analyses, pollsters peddling their juiciest numbers, academics pontificating on their freshest ideas, scientists trumpeting their coolest discoveries, medical researchers promoting their latest advances, titans of industry and entrepreneurs touting their greatest innovations, military contractors marketing their newest capabilities—in truth, lobbyists all, using every tool of the trade from grass-tops to grass-roots, from op-eds to ads, from marches to money, from assurances to threats, always assuming that outcomes are never certain. It’s amazing that elected officials and bureaucrats can keep their cool in the face of the bombardment, and in the end, often—but not always—make smart decisions. But that is the essence of American democracy.

It’s worth repeating what Winston Churchill said when he addressed the British House of Commons in 1947:²³

Nonetheless, the sponsors of the 1974 Budget Act could not have imagined the hyper-partisanship that has plagued Washington since the beginning of the 21st century, the havoc it has wreaked with regular order in Congress, and in the aftermath of the 2016 election with its subsequent chaos, and the threat to American democracy, itself.

In 1999, the House and Senate were still making the effort to pass all twelve discretionary appropriations bills on time. In the end, they managed only a third of them. But, as the succeeding years would prove, 1999 was the pinnacle of success. From 2000 until 2017, Congress failed to pass even one bill by the October 1 deadline. The consequences for scientific research, which appears in nine of those bills—although significantly in only six (Agriculture; Commerce, Justice and Science (NASA, NIST, NOAA, NSF and OSTP); Defense; Energy and Water Development; Interior and the Environment (EPA) and Labor, Health and Human Services (NIH)—have been substantial.

In the absence of regular order—that is, reporting out the individual bills from the appropriations, passing them on the floors of both chambers and sending them to the president’s desk for signature—Congress has resorted to two remedies: a mammoth “Omnibus” bill that contains all the spending goodies in one gift box, often, with special interest sweeteners dropped in at the last minute; or a series of “Continuing Resolutions” that maintain spending at the previous year’s level, or lower, and typically prohibit any new initiatives. Both legislative prescriptions poison the careful planning and follow through that research and development require. When political practicalities and immediacy trump thoughtful policy, the outcome is far from beneficial.

Economic growth as a rationale for federal support of science retained its cachet, but it never gained enough currency during Clinton’s presidency to mimic the successful campaign for doubling funding of biomedical research. The difference is not hard to understand. As the history of science and technology policy demonstrated, mitigating epidemics and curing disease had been winning issues among lawmakers almost from the founding of the republic. Major advances in medicine during the last quarter of the 20th century only strengthened the historical predisposition of Congress to commit funds to those causes. It also did not hurt that members of Congress were living longer and increasingly serving in office well into their dotage. Undoubtedly, many of them saw themselves as prime beneficiaries of National Institutes of Health breakthroughs.

Still, activating congressional support for any policy almost always requires two key elements: Hill champions and public backing. Medical research was no exception, and Research!America, had been at work tackling both, since its founding in 1989. With Mary Wooley at its helm, the organization and its partners took their case to the public and by 1997, they had also found three members of Congress willing to spearhead the doubling effort: Tom Harkin, a Democratic senator from Iowa; Arlen Specter, then a Republican senator from Pennsylvania; and John Porter, a Republican representative from Illinois. The three were no ordinary members. They controlled the NIH purse strings, and during the five-year period from 1998 to 2003, the NIH budget doubled. Finding champions for a cause is important; finding the right champions, even more so.

As the 1990s were winding down, biomedical research was on a roll. Money was one metric, but revolutionary scientific advances were just as indicative. Nowhere was that more evident than the Human Genome Project.²⁴

It had gotten off to a slow start in 1985, when Robert Singleton’s DNA sequencing proposal elicited a tepid response from the NIH. If the nation’s premiere biomedical agency had been the sole Washington player, the project might well have vanished from sight, at least for a time. But science is not the province of a sole federal agency—as it is in a ministry of science in most other countries—and the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Health and Environmental Research (later renamed the Office of Biological and Environmental Research) stepped into the breach.

Within two years, funding for the nascent genome project appeared as a line item in Ronald Reagan’s presidential request for DOE’s fiscal year 1988 budget. But it still needed a Capitol Hill champion, and it found an enthusiastic one in a key Republican senator, Pete V. Domenici from New Mexico. He chaired two influential Senate committees—Budget and Energy and Natural Resources—and shaped by the presence of two national laboratories in his home state, he had an abiding interest in all DOE matters.

As the project worked its way through the appropriations process, NIH got genome religion, and Congress provided planning funds for a joint NIH-DOE effort. By 1990, the genome project had become a reality, and was targeted for completion fifteen years down the road. James Watson, who had shared the Nobel prize with Francis Crick in 1962 for unraveling the mystery of DNA’s double helical structure, took the project lead at NIH. And David Galas assumed the reins at DOE.

It was painstaking work, but almost from the outset, two things were clear. If it succeeded, the result would stand as one of the crowning achievements in the annals of science. Cracking the code of human life was the biological equivalent of deciphering the telltale cosmological signs of the big bang that began the universe. The scientific splendor of the Human Genome Project was without question.

But there was more at stake than the grandeur of accomplishment and the fame that accompanies it. There was the possibility of fortune at the end of the genome rainbow, and such a prospect did not escape the attention of the growing ranks of bio-pharmaceutical companies. It also did not escape the attention of NIH director Bernadine Healy, who saw the project as a perfect fit for the Bayh-Dole Act.

Also known as the Government Patent Policy Act of 1980,²⁵ the goal of the bipartisan legislation was to bridge the chasm between the discoveries resulting from basic research—by that time, mostly carried out by university scientists using federal funds—and the potential commercial applications the discoveries might spawn. Two senators, Indiana Democrat Birch Bayh and Kansas Republican Robert Dole, teamed up to co-sponsor legislation they hoped would give the flagging economy a boost. Until that time, the federal government had retained all rights to the intellectual property of federally sponsored research. The Bayh-Dole act allowed universities and other nonprofit institutions, as well as small businesses, to patent any inventions emanating from such research, so long as the government had unfettered access to those inventions at no additional cost. How universities shared the profits of the inventions with its faculty innovators was up to each university. In the ensuing years, especially in the biomedical arena, many top universities reaped major financial benefits from patents and licensing agreements attached to the research outcomes.

Healy judged that the Human Genome Project might generate major profits for NIH researchers, and she put her considerable public weight behind a proposal to allow the project’s intellectual property to be patented. She also put herself on a collision course with James Watson, the highly respected but prickly Nobelist with a big reputation and an ego to match, who believed that every outcome of the Human Genome Project should be available to all comers free of charge. But Healy held all the high cards, and Watson found himself fighting a losing battle. Facing allegations of financial impropriety, which he claimed were trumped-up charges designed to force him out, he resigned his position as head of NIH’s genome program on April 10, 1992.²⁶ Of course, Healy disputed Watson’s version of the episode, but whatever the truth, Watson was out, and Healy was in.

The following year, NIH became the lead agency, with Francis Collins, a guitar-playing University of Michigan geneticist, recruited to run the operation. Although DOE no longer occupied center stage, its new project director, Ari Patrinos, would be thrust into a crucial policy role seven years later.

Fame and the possibility of the pot of gold at the end of the genome rainbow began to attract a number of international participants—prime among them, the Wellcome Trust of London—and the pace of the ambitious research program picked up. George H.W. Bush’s science advisor, D. Allan Bromley, had already recognized that science was on a path toward globalization, and had convinced the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to create the Megascience Forum in 1992. But in making his case, he had drawn heavily from his experience with big physics facilities, such as the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). If the Human Genome Project was on his radar screen, he never let on.²⁷ Although it escaped Bromley’s attention in 1992, the global nature of the project would become an undeniable truth by the end of the decade. It would provide a fitting coda: science at the close of the 20th century was a truly international enterprise.

The genome project attracted more than international partners. Its profit-making potential caught the attention of Tony White, a hard-charging, no-nonsense corporate executive, who had taken over the reins of Perkin-Elmer in 1995. By the time White arrived on the scene at its Connecticut headquarters, the analytical and optical instrumentation company, founded in 1937, had become an unfocused conglomerate in almost total disarray. The company’s technological image had been badly tarnished in 1990, when it botched the fabrication of the Hubble Space Telescope mirror, nearly crippling the $2-billion NASA instrument. And during the next few years, its Wall Street image fared no better. The price of a share of its stock remained mired in the single digits.

In 1993, Perkin-Elmer had purchased Applied Biosystems (ABI), a California company specializing in sequencing proteins, amino acids, and DNA, but the acquisition had little impact on Perkin-Elmer’s bottom line or its stock price. As the outside world saw it, the company was still a lumbering dinosaur. But Tony White saw it differently. He recognized that a biotechnology revolution was on the horizon, and ABI could give Perkin-Elmer an opportunity to become a major player. In short order, he split the company in two, pumping assets into a cutting-edge life sciences piece and sucking resources out of the stodgy instrumentation business he left behind on the cutting room floor. He went on a buying spree, bolstering Perkin-Elmer’s life sciences enterprise with a bevy of small biotech acquisitions. One of his purchases would soon spark a titanic battle between the public and private sector for bragging rights to the human genome—and any riches it might return to private investors.

In 1997, White gobbled up PerSeptive Biosystems, a protein analysis company, which a freshly minted MIT Ph.D., Noubar Afeyan, had started seven years earlier. With the acquisition documents not yet finalized, Afeyan, still a relative newbie, made an audacious proposal. Using ABI’s technology, he argued, Perkin-Elmer could upstage the Human Genome Project and complete the entire sequencing in just three years, five years ahead of the public research program’s timetable.

Riches beckoned, and White jumped at the idea. He had the financial resources and the technology, but he needed a scientist with the knowledge, charisma, drive, and daring to turn Afeyan’s wild dream into a reality. Timing is everything, and perhaps the only man who had those attributes had just become available. What transpired would alter the landscape of science and technology policy in ways that no one could have imagined.

Craig Venter was born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1946 and grew up on the wrong side of the tracks—literally—in the scruffy bay-side neighborhood of Milbrae, California. He had been the quintessential bad boy, a surf bum, a rule breaker, far more interested in girls and fast cars than passing his classes and getting into college. But he was not without talent. He had been a high school swimming champion, and he had proved himself adept at building things. Most of all, he had shown himself to be a risk taker with a huge ego.

Unable to get a student deferment, because he hadn’t made it into a senior college, Venter enlisted in the Navy. He soon found himself headed to Vietnam at the age of twenty following a court martial for failing to obey a command. Ever resourceful and always living on the edge of an ethical cliff, he finagled a posting to the field hospital in Da Nang where he worked first in the emergency room, then in the infectious disease clinic, and finally in the relative safety of the operating room. Those medical experiences would prove to be life changing.

When his stint in Vietnam ended, Venter, whose IQ cracked 140, enrolled in San Mateo Community College, and three semesters later, transferred to the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). Now in a hurry to establish himself in biomedicine, he raced through his Bachelor of Science degree, and physiology and pharmacology Ph.D. in just five years. Skipping the postdoctoral waypoint on the traditional career path of an academic scientist, he landed a junior faculty position at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Despite his rude and crude manner and his outlandish garb, he had no trouble getting grants and building a significant research group. But Buffalo was not in the same league as MIT, Berkeley, or even UCSD. And Venter had set his sights higher. In 1984, he and his second wife—Claire Fraser, his former student-paramour—left western New York state for the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland.

There, he got hooked on genomics. He knew nothing about DNA sequencing, but an article in Genomics about automated sequencers captured his attention. Venter was not one for bureaucratic process, and he found a way to pay for two of the sequencing machines ABI had developed. By 1989, two of them were up and running in his lab. It was at just the point James Watson was launching the Human Genome Project at NIH.

Never diffident about self-promotion and always willing to take risks, Venter was also a superb salesman. He had little trouble convincing Watson the sequencing machines could give the Human Genome Project a big boost and were worth an investment of $5 million. But neither he nor Watson had counted on the federal government’s bureaucratic procedures. A single line in an agency manual could slow down a speeding train to a glacial pace with little anyone could do about it.

Venter, who considered bureaucracy a hindrance to scientific research, nonetheless had to justify his request in a written proposal subject to peer review. He had to behave as if he were an ordinary NIH scientist—which, of course, he was—even though he thought himself superior to everyone else around him, with the exception of Watson, whom he revered. Venter’s proposal failed to garner support from the science community on two successive attempts. According to James Shreeve, author of The Genome War, Venter’s NIH lab manager, Richard McCombie, explained the rejections, this way: “There were two reasons why the grants were rejected. First, we were way ahead of everybody else, and nobody realized it. And second, Craig was an asshole, and everybody realized it.”

After that episode, there was little doubt Venter would leave NIH if the right opportunity came along. It happened less than two years later, when HealthCare Investment Corporation offered him an astounding $70 million over seven years to set up a new non-profit basic research institute devoted to genomics. Venter accepted, although the proposition came with a stipulation. The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), as Venter named his new laboratory, would be required relinquish the commercial rights associated with any of its discoveries to a new for-profit company, Human Genome Sciences (HGS). As an incentive, HealthCare gave him a ten percent interest in HGS. To keep him honest, it brought in William Haseltine as head of HGS.

The seeds of an eventual parting of the ways were sown at the outset. Haseltine, like Venter, arrived at the joint enterprise with a reputation as a smart, opportunistic scientist. But he also brought with him a business-world notoriety as a cutthroat executive, bent on maximizing profits at almost all costs. To anyone who knew the two men, it was clear that eventually Haseltine, not Venter, would be calling the shots, and Venter would have to either bend or bail.

It took nearly five years for Venter to conclude he needed to exercise the second option and concede he had made a mistake. His reputation as a serious scientist was in jeopardy. Academics were pillorying him for refraining to publish his research findings quickly and openly, and at the same time Haseltine, with his eye on HGS’s bottom line, was berating him for releasing too much information publicly too quickly. Venter and Haseltine’s unhappy marriage ended in July 1997 when TIGR and HGS officially parted ways.

Venter should have learned a lesson about commercial support of research, but the lure of big bucks for his big scientific genome quests would remain too enticing. Less than 6 months passed before Tony White made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Perkin Elmer intended to establish a new company to sequence the human genome, White told him, using ABI’s technology. He wanted Venter to run it and work with Michael Hunkapiller, the brains behind ABI’s automatic sequencers, to beat the Human Genome Project to the finish line.

Venter’s competitive ego took over. He loved racing his yacht for sailing trophies. Now he would be racing Francis Collins for scientific glory. But having been stung by Haseltine’s venality, he wanted to make sure White would not put him in another scientific straitjacket for the sake of corporate profits. The human genome, Venter insisted, had to be made publicly available, and at no cost to anyone who wanted it. White and Hunkapiller went along with his request, but reserved the right to seek patents on a limited number of genes that held promise for profitable medical applications. They struck the deal, and in May 1998, Perkin Elmer established a new company with Venter as president.

Celeritas is the Latin word for speed, and Venter, for an obvious reason, settled on the name Celera for his new enterprise. The Human Genome Project had an eight-year lead. But Venter, the consummate risk-taker, was convinced that by adopting an unconventional—as yet unproven—approach to sequencing, and by taking advantage of Hunkapiller’s technical genius and the largest and fastest bank of computers in the private sector, he would sail to victory. It would soon become clear that operating without government funding also tilted the playing field heavily in Celera’s direction.

Although Venter had insisted that the final human genome sequence should be in the public domain, he never committed make Celera’s intermediate steps publicly available until the project was complete. By contrast, under the terms of the global public collaboration, the Human Genome Project (HGP) partners had agreed to deposit their vetted results every step of the way in an open database, known as GenBank. In short, Celera had access to all of HGP’s data, while Collins and his partners had access only to what Venter would allow them. In the annals of science and technology policy, it’s hard to find a comparable example of such a public-private competitive asymmetry.

For HGP and especially NIH, the stakes were enormous. If Celera won the race, the nuances of how it pulled off the victory would be lost on policymakers, and most significantly, congressional appropriators. In the eyes of elected officials, it would feed a simple narrative: the private sector was far more adept at research—even basic research—than the government. The consequence for future NIH budgets and activities was obvious, and Collins understood it well.

Moving forward, there were three possibilities. Celera could form a collaboration with the HGP global partnership for the duration of the project. Celera could compete head to head with NIH, DOE, the Wellcome Trust, and the other HGP partners around the world. Or all of the participants could try to find some middle ground, however elusive it might be.

Collins was in no mood to compromise, and he took every opportunity to denigrate Celera’s unconventional “shotgun” genomic approach. But as the leader of the multinational effort, he was in a position to wage more than just a scientific battle. He had the political access Venter lacked. He was prepared to use it at the right time, and Venter knew it.

Collins’s boss was the director of NIH, Harold Varmus. A well-respected Nobel Laureate, he wielded plenty of clout of his own. But of even greater importance, he was close to Bill Clinton, having co-chaired Scientists and Engineers for Clinton-Gore during the 1992 presidential campaign. Venter had little doubt the president would weigh in strongly on HGP’s behalf if Collins wanted him to.

The same was true across the pond. John Sulston, who was leading the Sangster Center’s part of the collaboration supported by the Wellcome Trust in England, was similarly well positioned with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Venter might have had a congressional card to play, but Collins and Sulston had the White House and 10 Downing Street ready to trump it.

The Department of Energy had much less to lose by collaborating with Celera. Even though it had been the originator of the Human Genome Project, it had long become NIH’s poor, almost forgotten cousin. Ari Patrinos, who had been leading DOE’s effort for half a dozen years, saw Celera as a promising partner. And in the fall of 1998, less than 6 months into the company’s rookie year, he approached Venter with a proposal for a public-private partnership. Venter was interested, but there were several major issues that needed to be resolved. The other HGP partners—particularly NIH and the Sangster Center—would have to agree. And the gap between Celera’s profit motive and HGP’s open science ethic would have to be bridged.

The debate churned for several months before the proposition foundered. Celera had to abide by the ground rules Tony White had laid down when Perkin Elmer established the company: Celera would have first dibs on any intellectual property the project generated—other than the genome itself. As a result, Venter’s team couldn’t submit its step-by-step gene results to the GenBank until White and his team had used their 3-month proprietary time window to file for patents on them. That proviso ultimately proved a bridge too far for the HGP partners to cross. And after months of intrigue and accusations by each side that the other was not acting in good faith, the public and private ventures reverted to what they had been at the outset, adversaries and competitors.

In retrospect, even if Collins and Venter had struck an acceptable agreement, it is hard to see how a key policy issue could have been resolved to the satisfaction of both parties. The private sector needed financial deliverables, and the public sector needed societal benefits. The federal government was spending billions to achieve the latter. Would it be fair to taxpayers if Perkin Elmer and its shareholders became the prime beneficiaries of the government program by snapping up patent rights that flowed from the genome project? Or did PE, as it had renamed itself by then, rightly deserve the spoils because it had shown the moxie to gamble on an unproven scientific approach—even though it was piggybacking on an existing government program?

The decision not to pursue a partnership might have begged those questions. But it raised another one. If Celera had the ability to sequence the human genome, and agreed to make the raw genome publicly available free of charge to anyone who wanted it, why should taxpayers continue to pick up the tab for HGP’s research program? That question had gnawed at Collins from the time Venter had entered the fray.

By the time the saga ended a few years later, all three of the questions remained largely unanswered. They remain so, even today. It’s possible the human genome saga is a one-off, but given the rapid pace of technological innovation in the 21st century, it’s more than likely similar policy conundrums will surface again.

Before it ended, the race for sequencing the human genome produced more than scientific euphoria. It initiated a shockwave that began at the White House on March 14, 2000 and traveled at light speed to Wall Street in New York and “The City” in London, eventually reaching Silicon Valley in California months later. The story bears repeating because it illustrates how important it is for government officials, especially those at the highest levels, to remain in the loop, get their facts straight, and make certain their communications are accurate.

Patrinos’s failed attempt to set up a collaboration between HGP and Celera produced several immediate fallouts. Collins revved up the engine of the public project, committing to produce a “genome draft” by 2000. Venter went all in, asserting that Celera would complete the entire sequencing before HGP had published its draft. White’s intellectual property team submitted filings for individual genes at an astonishing rate. Each side accused the other of producing flawed science, making impossible promises and engaging in shameful, if not libelous, activities. The unrelenting salvos sent Celera’s stock price on a wild ride, soaring upward on every glowing parry by Venter and crashing on every negative riposte by Collins. As the two traded barbs, a number of lawmakers began to wonder whether the government was wasting money on HGP and should simply let Celera finish the work on its own. Others suspected Celera was blowing smoke when it promised to release the completed genome publicly. Otherwise why would investors keep throwing money at the company?

That was the state of affairs in January 2000, when Bill Clinton decided to intervene. He gave his science advisor, Neal F. Lane, a simple command:²⁸ “Neal, you need to fix this.” Lane had replaced Jack Gibbons at the White House in 1998 following a five-year stint as director of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

When Clinton began staffing his administration in the winter of 1992, he made it clear that he wanted the White House to reflect the diversity of America. Lane did not help the roster on the gender or ethnic front, but unlike many past high-level science officials, his pedigree bespoke Oklahoma and Texas, rather than Massachusetts, New York, or California. He was a respected theoretical atomic physicist with experience in university administration, a commitment to civic responsibility, and more than a passing knowledge of Washington. His calm, gentlemanly demeanor stood in stark contrast to the hubbub that swirled around the Clinton White House, especially in its early days. But as NSF director, he was exiled to Virginia.

Unlike the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which was located in the Old (Eisenhower) Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, NSF was situated in the suburb of Arlington during much of Lane’s tenure. Being close to the levers of power is important for gaining political advantage, but it’s also important for keeping current with major issues. Five miles—the distance from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to NSF’s headquarters—might not seem far, but during Washington’s rush hour, it can be a hellish bumper-to-bumper drive.

As Lane has admitted privately, when he moved back to the District of Columbia as OSTP director and presidential science advisor, he knew almost nothing about the Human Genome Project.²⁸ He had simply been out of the loop. Opponents of NSF’s relocation to Arlington had warned of such a hazard in 1992, when the agency was ordered to leave town to save money.

Fortunately, Lane was a quick study, and by the time the president had given him the “fix this” order, he was up to speed. His plan for ending the genome free-for-all followed a plan he and his British counterpart, Sir Robert May, had discussed a year earlier. It would involve two White House events. In March, on behalf of the entire HGP collaboration, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair would reiterate that the raw sequence of the genome would be available publicly, and would not be subject to patent protection, although individual genes could be. Several months later, Clinton and Blair would announce the completion of the first draft of the human genome, with Collins and, hopefully, Venter both attending.

Lane was trying to paint a smile on the genome baby, but it almost turned into a scowl. After negotiations with Celera had broken down over openness and the GenBank issue, word had spread that Collins, through a third party, had begun exploratory discussions with the biopharmaceutical company Incyte, a potential commercial competitor of Celera. Would Incyte consider a partnership with HGP on the final phases of the genome project, subject, of course, to HGP’s requirements for openness? That was the gist of the rumor that reached Venter. If it was true, he concluded bitterly, the government was out to destroy him.

Stoicism was not in Venter’s DNA, and he had no qualms about using the media to publicize what he saw as an unethical and even illegal assault on Celera. On March 13, USA Today broke the Incyte story²⁹ under the headline, “Feds May Have Tried to Bend Law for Genome Map.” It was Collins’s turn to be furious. He took Venter’s accusations personally. In truth, each side saw the other as the greedy party, and itself as the aggrieved party. But as dicey as the situation was, it was about to become even worse less than twenty-four hours later.

Lane had suggested the National Medals of Science and Technology ceremony, scheduled for March 14, as the venue for the release of the joint statement by Clinton and Blair. The upbeat atmosphere in the White House East Room, he thought, and the ceremony’s focus on scientific discovery might temper the nastiness of the genome rhetoric. It was a good idea, and it might well have succeeded, had it not been for a damaging communications gaffe.

Flashback to Chapter 1—Before the president entered the East Room, Lane’s senior advisor, Jeffrey M. Smith, handed him one of America’s first coins to use as a prop. The 1792 large cent, which bore the inscription, “Liberty, Parent of Science and Industry,” would provide a perfect segue to the medal ceremony and the genome statement. The orchestration was perfect, and it’s doubtful any members of the audience knew what had happened at a White House press briefing several hours earlier.

It’s the job of the White House press secretary to keep the media informed and cast the president in a favorable light. Joe Lockhart, who had been on the job since 1998, was good at both. He was a loyal White House team player, a conscientious worker who made sure he was on top of the issues of the day. He could be funny, but he could also be biting in his criticism of journalists who made the president look bad.

The morning of March 14 is likely one he will never forget. In giving the media a heads up on the genome statement to which Clinton and Blair had agreed, he had given the impression they would be calling for a ban on all intellectual property rights associated with the human genome. The implication was that individual genes fell under the same ban, and would have no commercial value. In the East Room, a few hours later, Clinton sought to clarify the matter, giving a big boost to the government-funded international collaboration in the process. His words made it clear that only the raw genome was off limits to patent filings:³⁰

But his words did little to calm the stock market. Celera’s shares plunged fifteen percent that morning, taking the entire biotech sector down with it. Following the ceremony, Lane and Collins met with reporters in the White House Briefing Room to try to stem the bleeding, but their efforts failed. The Nasdaq was cratering.

The following morning, at the White House senior staff meeting, Lane was the object of some black humor. “I recall” Lane told students at a Rice University symposium in 2018, “that Clinton’s economic advisor Gene Sperling said—in jest—‘I just want to congratulate Neal Lane for doing what Alan Greenspan (then Chairman of the Federal Reserve) has been trying to do for months.” (He meant, of course, deflate a stock bubble.) I don’t think I was enjoying the moment that much. In the end, it all worked out. Once investors understood the confusion, the markets recovered.”³¹

Well, not quite. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index hit its high of 5,133 on March 10. Within 30 days, it had lost 20% of its value, and by the end of 4 years, it was down almost 75%.³² Lockhart’s botched media advisory probably did not cause the Nasdaq crash. But the knee-jerk reaction of biotech traders to the misinformation he provided was a clear sign that the tech bubble was about to burst. The dot-com explosion in Silicon Valley, which had propelled the euphoria on Wall Street and in The City, was over.

At the Rice University symposium Lane closed with these words: “My message from this story is that facts and truth matter, but they are not enough. They have to be translated and communicated effectively to be of use. And that process can get muddled, as it did in this case.”

He might well have added that in an age when the economy—and for that matter, much of life, in general—is so heavily dependent on science and technology, policymakers must be extremely careful what they say and how they say it. A few words accidentally misplaced or a few actualities unintentionally mischaracterized can wreak havoc.

The genome controversy ended on a positive note a few months later. The rapprochement occurred only after Collins and Venter had clashed at a congressional hearing. Throughout the rancorous rock throwing, DOE’s Ari Patrinos, the supporting American actor in the genome drama, had been able to maintain his friendship with both Collins and Venter. And after several private cheese, pizza, and beer meetings at his home, he arranged a truce and a fitting end to the rivalry. Celera and HGP would declare a tie in the rivalry. Venter and Collins would both participate in the June White House event Lane had suggested, and pictures of both of them would appear on the cover of Time and the front page of The New York Times. They would also publish their scientific results at the same time.

On June 26, 2000, President Clinton again spoke from the podium in the East Room, beginning his remarks with these words of gratitude:³³

Tony Blair added these thoughts:

The well-orchestrated event brought some tranquility to the human genome dispute. A week later, following Lane’s script, Time’s cover³⁴ featured a picture of Venter and Collins with the headline “Cracking the Code: The Inside Story of How these Bitter Rivals Mapped Our DNA, Life Historic Feat that Challenges Medicine Forever,” and in mid-February 2001, Nature published HGP’s results³⁵ while Science published Celera’s.³⁶

But the final chapter of the saga was not written until more than a decade later. It fell to the American Civil Liberties Union and its science adviser, Tania Simoncelli, to close the circle. In 2009, the ACLU filed suit against Myriad Genetics, a Utah-based company, which had exercised its right to patent individual genes, in this case the rights to the BRCA genes associated with breast cancer. The Association for Molecular Pathology was the plaintiff, but Simoncelli was the protagonist. She argued compellingly that genetic patent protections harmed patients financially, stifled medical research, and damaged healthcare.

The entire biopharmaceutical industry watched as the case made its way through the federal court system. It reached the United States Supreme Court in the fall of 2012, and on June 13, 2013 the justices ruled unanimously that naturally occurring genes could not be patented.³⁷ Unlike the stock market meltdown that occurred on March 14, 2000, Wall Street barely hiccupped. But Nature took notice, naming Simoncelli one of “Nature’s 10 People Who Mattered in 2013.”³⁸

The Executive and Legislative Branches might have been the battlegrounds of the genome war. But in the end, the Judicial Branch provided the final word in one of the most significant science and technology policy chapters in American history.

Craig Venter’s character was on full display during his successful quest for the human genome: brash, boastful, smart, focused, and capable. He accepted that controversy came with the turf, and he wasn’t shy about expressing his opinions. He hasn’t changed much since.

In 2004, Venter and Daniel Cohen, the principal scientist at the Parisian company GENSET, made a bold forecast. “If the 20th century was the century of physics,” they wrote,³⁹ “the 21st century will be the century of biology.” It hasn’t quite worked out that way.

Biotech has blossomed, but the physical sciences, computation, engineering, and mathematics haven’t been slouches. Physicists discovered the Higgs boson, and together with astronomers and computer scientists, they confirmed the existence of the gravitational waves Einstein had predicted a century earlier. Streaming videos, smart phones, tablets, LED lighting, autonomous vehicles, robots, drones, high-speed trading, and augmented reality have come to characterize life in the 21st century. Even in medicine, biology hasn’t been flying solo.

Harold Varmus, NIH’s director from 1993 until 1999, was on target in his 2000 Washington Post essay, “Squeeze on Science,” referenced previously. Commenting on the disparity in federal support for the sciences, he opined:⁴⁰

Although the op-ed’s focus was medicine, it captured the essence of science and technology in the 21st century.

If anything, the sciences are more interdependent today than they were when Varmus addressed the matter in 2000. Some of the institutions that govern science and technology have recognized the new reality and taken steps to address it, but some have either turned a blind eye or have been unable to surmount structural impediments. Nine months before the Washington Post published Varmus’s essay, and 2 months before Joe Lockhart’s media release unintentionally tanked the Nasdaq, Bill Clinton delivered a speech about science at the California Institute of Technology. In it, he highlighted the value of science and technology to the nation; stressed the importance of the federal role in sustaining it over the long term; called attention to the interdependence of different fields of research; and, underscoring the last point, introduced one of his signature policy achievements—the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The following excerpt summarizes those four key points:⁴¹

President Clinton and his science advisor, Neal Lane, had clearly understood the nature of science and technology at the close of the 20th century—their centrality in American life and the degree to which the various threads of the science and technology fabric are interwoven. One of Clinton’s last acts before he left office was signing legislation⁴³ on December 29, 2000 that established the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) at NIH. It integrated the physical sciences into NIH’s portfolio, formally validating Varmus’s proposition.

It’s worth a brief digression to reflect on how that legislation materialized. The story illustrates the role that turf and connections play in the policy arena. Two years before the bill reached Clinton’s desk, the biophysics community had successfully enlisted the support of several key members of Congress⁴⁴ to promote the NIBIB concept. But the legislative effort had stalled because the White House was not backing it.

I had been working in Washington for four years, when the biophysicists⁴⁵ approached me for advice. In that short time, I had learned enough to suspect that turf more than policy was the problem. The biophysicists had begun their discussions on Capitol Hill before they checked the NIH box. Varmus, who was still the NIH director, could have been an ally. Instead, he became an obstacle—a least temporarily.

Most federal administrators abhor an end run around them. And I felt confident that Varmus, however brilliant and renowned, was not an exception. The rationale for an NIBIB seemed extremely strong, and the solution seemed extremely straightforward. Clinton’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) needed to make it an Administration initiative, and allow NIH to take credit for it. A phone call to a science colleague at OSTP and a one-page description of the proposal began the process.⁴⁶ A year later, NIBIB became a reality, although by that time Varmus had moved on to become president and CEO of Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York.

Shortly after 10:00 o’clock in the morning on April 2, 2013, Francis Collins, now the director of NIH, walked up to the lectern in the White House East Room and introduced Barack Obama to the expectant crowd that had gathered. Obama, whom many long-time observers of the Washington scene have called the “Science President,” was about to announce a bold new inter-agency, interdisciplinary, public-private partnership that kicked Varmus’s characterization of 21st century science up a notch. With the usual twinkle in his eyes and his impeccable delivery, the president began to speak:⁴⁷

The BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative was unique in many ways. Developed and led by Philip Rubin and Tom Kalil at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, it was a grand scientific challenge that mined the resources and expertise of multiple federal agencies, most prominently the Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA), NIH and NSF. But even more significantly, it tapped into the rapidly growing world of science philanthropy. It brought on board at the very outset the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Kavli Foundation. On a grander scale, it cast a strong spotlight on the central role technology can play in addressing complex scientific problems.

With a few succinct sentences, the president also used the opportunity to underscore the enduring impact of federally funded scientific research and the serendipitous outcomes that characterize basic research. The audience that morning comprised mostly scientists, Washington insiders, banks of TV cameras, and a battery of reporters. Despite the coverage and the promise the BRAIN Initiative held, it’s likely the announcement created little more than a transitory blip on the general public’s radar screen. It’s the reality promoters of science have come to expect: Most of the public loves the innovations science delivers, but has little interest in what led to them and what is necessary to sustain the delivery pipeline.⁴⁸

The Executive Branch of the federal government is far better equipped to orchestrate cross-disciplinary initiatives than the Legislative Branch. As the Nanotechnology and BRAIN initiatives demonstrate, a well-functioning OSTP can use interagency mechanisms, such as the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), to plan and execute such efforts. And a president who fully appreciates the potentialities of PCAST and NSTC can have an outsized impact on America’s science and technology enterprise. Barack Obama was a rare White House occupant who understood that instinctively. He met with his council of advisers regularly and used the NSTC levers effectively, creating an enviable science legacy.

Congress has no comparable capabilities. Biomedicine and the physical sciences fall under separate authorizing committees and separate appropriations subcommittees. Likewise, different committees and subcommittees have responsibility for science-related energy, environment, homeland-security, and defense matters.

One story illustrates an unintended consequence of the jurisdictional division of responsibilities among congressional committees. The narrative involves one of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) premier research facilities located on the campus of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, now known as SLAC National Laboratory. Originally built for high-energy physics research, SPEAR, the acronym for Stanford Positron Electron Accelerating Ring, was one of the sites of the “November 1974 Revolution”—the discovery of the charm quark. For leading the SPEAR research effort, Burton Richter received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1976,⁴⁹ sharing it with Samuel Ting of MIT, who had carried out complementary work at Brookhaven National Laboratory. That same year, Martin Perl, who received a Nobel Prize in 1995⁵⁰ for his work at SPEAR, led a research team to make another dramatic discovery: the tau lepton, a fundamental particle similar to the electron but about 3,500 times more massive.

Almost from the beginning, scientists outside the high-energy community had recognized that the “synchrotron radiation,” which SPEAR generated as an unwanted by-product of its operation, could be harnessed to study matter at the atomic scale. For chemists, material scientists, condensed matter physicists, and biologists, it was a boon. They piggy-backed their research on the high-energy physics operation, using the intense X-ray light to study everything from semiconductor surfaces to protein molecules with a precision that had previously been unthinkable.

By 1990, high-energy physicists had milked SPEAR for all they could, and SLAC converted SPEAR into a dedicated synchrotron X-ray light source. But repurposing an old accelerator designed for a different use is not the same as building a new one from scratch and optimizing it for the new objective. It was clear that SPEAR soon would be unable to compete with a new generation of machines that were specifically designed to produce the intense X-ray beams scientists needed. One had actually been operating since 1983,⁵¹ and two new ones⁵² were scheduled to join the club within four years. The Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL), as the research center was officially known, would either have to build a new accelerator or close its doors.

Arthur Bienenstock had been SSRL’s director for nearly twenty years when he left Stanford to become OSTP’s Associate Director for Science in 1998. He began to hear complaints from NIH, which was supporting biomedical research at SSRL, that its programs were subject to the whims of the DOE, which funded SLAC, and the National Science Foundation, which shared responsibility for supporting SSRL. NIH demanded to have a voice in SPEAR operations and any plans for its future. Officials at DOE were equally vocal. They complained that a third of the users of the synchrotron facility received support from NIH for their research projects, but paid little, if any, of SPEAR’s operating costs. They also noted that the DOE’s science budget was stagnant, while NIH’s was on a course to double over the next five years. In short, DOE was poor, and NIH was rich.

Bienenstock did what a smart policymaker should do. Instead of relying on his own instincts and knowledge—which was considerable—he set up an interagency committee to answer two questions. First, was a new machine warranted? And second, if so, should DOE fly solo, following past project practices, or should it break new ground by pursuing a joint effort with NIH? The memorandum of understanding signed on May 27, 1999 by Harold Varmus, on behalf of NIH, and Martha Krebs, director of the DOE Office of Science, on behalf of the Energy Department, contained the answers to both questions. Upgrade the facility, and pursue it as a joint DOE-NIH project.

Keith Hodgson, who had been named SSRL’s director after Bienenstock left, underscored the novelty of the cooperative approach, writing at the time⁵³ in Synchrotron Radiation News, “This is the first time an outside agency has agreed to assist the funding of a major DOE basic science research facility….” He further noted that the arrangement was “sensible,” because structural biologists, by that time, had grown to about half of the 1,600 researchers using the SSRL facility. The approach exemplified the interdependence of the sciences.

Less than four years later, on March 8, 2004, SPEAR3, as the new facility was called, delivered its first new beam of intense X-ray light. The policies Bienenstock had set in motion had worked out, and the marriage of the physical and biological sciences had been accomplished—although not without a glitch on Capitol Hill, which, might have been anticipated with even less than perfect hindsight.

The joint project, budgeted at a total of $53 million, needed two separate appropriations subcommittees in each congressional chamber to act on the proposed spending plan. The House Labor, Health, and Human Services Subcommittee, which had responsibility for NIH, did its part, passing a funding bill that was in line with the project’s budget profile. But when the Energy and Water Development Subcommittee, which had purview over DOE, “marked up”⁵⁴ its funding measure, the SPEAR3 upgrade was absent. In the “stove-piped”⁵⁵ world of divided congressional responsibilities, the Energy and Water Subcommittee, it seemed, had been unaware of the Labor and Health Subcommittee’s action.

The error was rectified before the appropriations bill reached the House floor for a final vote. And in the end, no damage was done. But the hiccup highlights what can happen when legislative machinery fails to keep up with science and technology’s changing complexion.

Congress has more than a machinery problem. In an era when science and technology intersect nearly every facet of American life, members of Congress have little personal experience to draw on. If you walked the corridors of the House and Senate office building over the course of the last half century, the odds are you never encountered a single member of either chamber who had an advanced degree in engineering or the natural sciences. Since 1950, there have been only six House members with doctorates in any of those fields: three physicists,⁵⁶ one chemist,⁵⁷ one mathematician,⁵⁸ and one electrical engineer.⁵⁹ The Senate lays claim to only one, a geologist and former astronaut.⁶⁰

In 1973, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) initiated a program to help address the paucity of scientific and technological expertise on Capitol Hill. If scientists and engineers were not running for office and serving in Congress, AAAS hoped the community could at least provide technical assistance to House and Senate offices and committees. The AAAS Congressional Science and Engineering Fellowship program⁶¹ was a bold experiment. Would professional scientists and engineers be willing to give up a year of their careers to spend 12 months toiling away in a warren of small cubicles to help inform the legislative process? Would members of Congress and their staff welcome scientists and engineers into their fold? And finally, would AAAS fellows be able to adapt to a culture and an environment that differed dramatically from the ones to which they were accustomed?

Science demands precision, perseverance, and evidence-based objectivity. Congress, when it is functioning properly, depends on compromise, timeliness, and political exigency. When AAAS began the fellowship program, it was not obvious the gap between the two sets of principles could be bridged. But with more than four decades behind it, the AAAS experiment, which drew the financial support of many scholarly science and engineering societies, has proved to be an extraordinary policy winner. Over the course of that period, the program sponsored more than a thousand fellows, each on a one-year grant. At the conclusion of their stint, some of the fellows returned to their home institutions; some of them elected to remain on Capitol Hill, becoming regular staff members; some of them took positions in federal agencies; and one of them—Rush Holt—took the political plunge, running for Congress and serving for a dozen years.

For much of the AAAS program’s history, science and technology policy remained above the political fray, although there were a few occasions when partisanship intervened. Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or “Star Wars,” as liberals derisively called it, and stem cell research, which religious conservatives, mostly Republican, opposed, are two examples. But, other than disagreements over where federal responsibility for research ends and private responsibility begins, Republicans and Democrats tended to work together, especially on big picture items.