STANFORD UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

DEPARTiMENT OF GENETICS

November 7, 1977

Ruth M. Davis
Deputy Director

Office of Defense Research and Engineering
Washington, D.C. 20301

Dear Dr. Davis:

  I was most pleased to have your letter of October 28th and the enclosures
on DSEP.  I was glad to know that you have enlisted Bill McElroy, and if I
don't get a chance to see you in Washington,  p erhaps there might be an oppor-
tunity to connect during one of the meetings he will organize.  I found your
presentation so thoughtful and thought-provoking that it is difficult for me
to make a coherent response brief enough for you to want to read it.

  There is a grave temptation, much to be avoided, to try to remount a
a '.bandwagon' for generalized support of universities and of basic science on
national defense rationalizations.  I agree that the DOD is a most inappropri-
ate vehicle for such an effort, and even if it worked during an interval of
enthusiasm, we would end up suffering from the same seesaw effect that we
have seen in the past.  On the other hand, ultimate support of national security
should surely be one of the manifest justifications for federal investment in
higher education and basic research, through channels like NSF and NIH, for
those areas that are not clearly within the province of your department. So
one of the criteria.of choice should be whether a given area is being defacto
undervalued by other civil agencies.

Two general categories of specialty interest'may suffer in this light:
those which are too far down the continuum towards applied science to appeal to
a basic science agency like NSF, but not yet ripe enough for straight commercial
investment.  The other zone would concern those regimes that deserve extra-
ordinary additional weight from a national defense standpoint beyond their
interest to basic science.  The oceans, the atmosphere and sub-orbital space
would be the obvious candidates for this characterization.  I have surely left
out others, and a better definition of likely areas of neglect by the civil
departments is a task worthy of one of your new study groups. (Another one
that comes to mind is research into disease problems not typical of the continental
United States.  Tropical health is a world priority which is not reflected in
the research programs of our national agencies.  The decline of colonialism,
especially with respect to the British Empire, has resulted in a sharp degradation
of sophisticated interest in tropical diseases and there would be substantial
justification to sustain and enhance DOD support in this area.  The contri-
butions of existing modest efforts like NAMRU have been monumental in proportion
to their costs.)

DEP.%RTMEST OF GENETICS, STANFORD UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICISE, STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305 o (415) 497-5052


Ruth M. Davis

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November 7, 1977

  Although I may seem to have been discouraging certain levels of involvement
of DOD in basic research, my remark about the defense rationale for NSF,
NIH, etc. should be taken seriously, and ways explored of making that view
stick in the actual budgetary process.  If that cannot be done, then we
really are in "Catch-22."

  One of the underlying hinderances to a more vital relationship between
DOD and the universities is the prevalent lack of understanding of the task of
national security among academic circles.  In a sense we are stymied from the
word go.  I would hope that we would both prefer a much larger view of the
universities' responsibilities then in providing the intellectual steam for
refinement of existing weapons gadgetry.  At a place like Stanford the main
locus of attention to national security problems is in programs in inter-
national relations and in arms control.  Fortunately, we have a number of
part-time advisors to the national security establishment on our faculty,
but we are still highly defficient in teaching the fundamentals of military
strategy and the role of weapons system and military force in the international
order.  I am not sure that I have a clear-cut recommendation to make on this
point; although there might be some merit in encouraging a few universities
to establish specialized graduate programs in these areas that could help
serve educational needs for rising officers in uniform, as well as-a civilian
academic roster.  The schools have no abundance of resources at hand right
now to experiment with such programs, and modest investments on the educational
side have as much leverage as direct investment in research programs that overlap
the missions of civil agencies.

   There are, of course, any number of technical areas where the DOD does
have readily justified interest, and which are complementary to clearly
identifiable needs and opportunities at the universities.  I would hardly be
able to offer an exhaustive list, but I would think that innovations in
computers and in communications, their-interaction, and the most searching
study of command and control should have a very high priority.  Of course
they do already and this suggests that your office might be willing and able
to take an even more cogent interest in enhancinb the efficiency of develop-
ments in computer science -- especially in software -- as a matter of urgent
national interest.  I am deeply concerned that the emerging era of cheap and
therefore highly distributed computer hardware will greatly accentuate the
centrifugal tendencies of the Babel phenomenon in software development.  The
ARPANET and the way in which it has helped to .unify the TENEX operating
systems at a wide variety of sites illustrates an effective countermeasure
that I hope you will continue to foster.  In fact, even a modest step like
opening ARPANET further to wider exchange among computer science departments
involved  in the development of major computer systems and languages for the
purpose of facilitating coordination and standardization would be an important
and not very expensive step, impeded now more by doctrinal than economic con-
siderations.  It would be a simple matter technically and administratively to
invite every relevant department to submit quite modest proposals for partici-
pation whose main payoff would be access to the NET. I am sure that much
sterner measures will be required on the part of government funding agencies
to keep the larger Babel problem from going totally out of control, and per-
haps DOD could play a role with those agencies in examining the question and
furthering the necessary steps.


Ruth M. Davis

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November 7, 1977

   Above all, I would hope to stay out of a model that attempted to recruit
the universities into competing with industry as sources of purely technical
ideas within the state of the art for the solution of well-defined military
challenges.  Rather, it should be our task to be in a position to discover
problems that DOD did not realize it had, because it did not understand the
availability of possible solutions.  I can illustrate that with a brief
reference to DSTAR (see enclosure), a concept that Dick Garwin and I have
tried to further with rather little success.  As you might expect, the
responses all have to do with reasons why this approach won't work, rather than
any comprehension of the importance of finding ways to make it feasible.  The
issue has not really been engaged properly anywhere, perhaps because of the
obvious impact that it might have on the existing plans of the affected
services.  Whatever the merit of this particular proposal, I use it mainly
to illustrate the kind of initiative that one might hope to get from a better
informed academic community and one that related to the underlying issues of
national security in a way more nearly analogous to our role in health research
and similar fields.

Yours sincerely,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

Enclosure

JL:ek-f