[House Hearing, 115 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION PART II:
FUTURE OPPORTUNITIES AND
CHALLENGES FOR SCIENCE
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
MARCH 21, 2017
__________
Serial No. 115-08
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Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov
__________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
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COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY
HON. LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas, Chair
FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas
DANA ROHRABACHER, California ZOE LOFGREN, California
MO BROOKS, Alabama DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois
RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon
BILL POSEY, Florida ALAN GRAYSON, Florida
THOMAS MASSIE, Kentucky AMI BERA, California
JIM BRIDENSTINE, Oklahoma ELIZABETH H. ESTY, Connecticut
RANDY K. WEBER, Texas MARC A. VEASEY, Texas
STEPHEN KNIGHT, California DONALD S. BEYER, JR., Virginia
BRIAN BABIN, Texas JACKY ROSEN, Nevada
BARBARA COMSTOCK, Virginia JERRY MCNERNEY, California
GARY PALMER, Alabama ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado
BARRY LOUDERMILK, Georgia PAUL TONKO, New York
RALPH LEE ABRAHAM, Louisiana BILL FOSTER, Illinois
DRAIN LaHOOD, Illinois MARK TAKANO, California
DANIEL WEBSTER, Florida COLLEEN HANABUSA, Hawaii
JIM BANKS, Indiana CHARLIE CRIST, Florida
ANDY BIGGS, Arizona
ROGER W. MARSHALL, Kansas
NEAL P. DUNN, Florida
CLAY HIGGINS, Louisiana
------
Subcommittee on Research and Technology
HON. BARBARA COMSTOCK, Virginia, Chair
FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois
RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois ELIZABETH H. ESTY, Connecticut
STEPHEN KNIGHT, California JACKY ROSEN, Nevada
DARIN LaHOOD, Illinois SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon
RALPH LEE ABRAHAM, Louisiana AMI BERA, California
DANIEL WEBSTER, Florida DONALD S. BEYER, JR., Virginia
JIM BANKS, Indiana EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas
ROGER W. MARSHALL, Kansas
LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas
C O N T E N T S
March 21, 2017
Page
Witness List..................................................... 2
Hearing Charter.................................................. 3
Opening Statements
Statement by Representative Barbara Comstock, Chairwoman,
Subcommittee on Research and Technology, Committee on Science,
Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives........... 4
Written Statement............................................ 6
Statement by Representative Daniel Lipinski, Ranking Member,
Subcommittee on Research and Technology, Committee on Science,
Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives........... 8
Written Statement............................................ 11
Statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Ranking
Member, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House
of Representatives............................................. 15
Written Statement............................................ 17
Witnesses
Dr. Joan Ferrini-Mundy, Acting Chief Operating Officer, National
Science Foundation (NSF)
Oral Statement............................................... 19
Written Statement............................................ 22
Dr. Maria Zuber, Chair, National Science Board
Oral Statement............................................... 32
Written Statement............................................ 34
Dr. Jeffrey Spies, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer,
Center for Open Science and Assistant Professor, University of
Virginia
Oral Statement............................................... 42
Written Statement............................................ 44
Dr. Keith Yamamoto, Vice Chancellor for Science Policy and
Strategy, University of California, San Francisco
Oral Statement............................................... 52
Written Statement............................................ 54
Discussion....................................................... 63
Appendix I: Additional Material for the Record
Statement submitted by Representative Lamar S. Smith, Chairman,
Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of
Representatives................................................ 82
Document submitted by Representative Daniel Lipinski, Ranking
Member, Subcommittee on Research and Technology, Committee on
Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives.. 85
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION PART II:
FUTURE OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES FOR SCIENCE
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TUESDAY, MARCH 21, 2017
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Research and Technology,
Committee on Science, Space, and Technology,
Washington, D.C.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:04 a.m., in
Room 2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Barbara
Comstock [Chairwoman of the Subcommittee] presiding.
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Chairwoman Comstock. The Committee on Science, Space, and
Technology will come to order. Without objection, the Chair is
authorized to declare recesses of the Committee at any time.
Good morning and welcome to today's hearing entitled National
Science Foundation Part II: Future Opportunities and Challenges
for Science. I now recognize myself for five minutes for an
opening statement.
For nearly 70 years, the National Science Foundation has
served a mission that made the United States a world leader in
science and innovation. The key question before us today: How
can NSF keep us and continue to keep us at the forefront of
science and innovation for the next 70 Years?
Today we will hear perspectives on how NSF can meet the
challenges and opportunities of the future and ideas for ways
that NSF can improve.
We will examine particular challenges such as setting
priorities during a time of budgetary constraints, and ensuring
that all taxpayer-funded research is high quality,
reproducible, and conducted with integrity.
We will also look at the vast opportunities created by
technology, which allows science to be more accessible and has
created more data than ever before. I look forward to hearing
how we can make science more open and harness that data to
solve real-world problems.
There are also great opportunities for innovation where
science disciplines intersect. How can we encourage more
transdisciplinary approaches to solving some of our toughest
challenges, from cybersecurity to traumatic brain injuries or
Alzheimer's, diabetes, and so many more issues that we know
you're addressing and that we've addressed here in the
Committee and elsewhere throughout Congress. But the best
breakthroughs come when we break down those silos.
Finally, we have a great opportunity and challenge to
develop a new generation of STEM workers. A study by Georgetown
projects 2.4 million job openings in STEM through 2018, where
Virginia will lead the nation with 8.2 percent of its jobs
being STEM related.
By 2018, there are projections that Virginia will need to
fill 404,000 STEM jobs. These are good paying jobs, and we need
to prepare students to fill them. And I'm happy to say that we
have a Dominion student here from Virginia today at our hearing
who is shadowing us here today to hear from our great
witnesses.
So this is the second of two hearings the Research and
Technology Subcommittee is holding on the National Science
Foundation, NSF, this month, to provide input into a
reauthorization of NSF later this year. The first hearing held
on March 9 with Director France Cordova covered issues
addressed in the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act,
including accountability and transparency, large facility
construction management reform, research misconduct, and STEM
education coordination. I should actually emphasize it with
preventing the research misconduct there where we're addressing
that.
The AICA, signed into law in January, demonstrates that
there is a strong bipartisan commitment on both sides of the
aisle to the mission of NSF and to supporting basic and
fundamental research.
I hope this Committee can continue to work together on
making sure we maintain our nation's leadership in science.
Innovation is about seeking new methods, new ideas, and new
breakthroughs. We want to make sure that the way we fund,
support, and conduct science is as innovative as the research
it produces.
And with that, I look forward to hearing the testimony of
our guests.
[The prepared statement of Chairwoman Comstock follows:]
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Chairwoman Comstock. And I now recognize the Ranking
Member, the gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Lipinski, for his
opening statement.
Mr. Lipinski. Good morning. Thank you, Chairwoman Comstock,
for holding this hearing on the future opportunities and
challenges for science. I also want to thank our panel for
being here this morning to inform our discussion on the
important issues facing the U.S. scientific community.
As a scientist, I chose to be on the Science Committee, and
this Subcommittee in particular, because of the key role I
would be able to play with my colleagues in promoting and
overseeing the National Science Foundation, the world's
foremost facilitator of top-quality scientific research. As
Chair and now Ranking Member of this Subcommittee for more than
eight years, I am proud to--proud of what I have been able to
help the Foundation--how I've been able to help the Foundation
fulfill its critical mission.
All of us in this room want to maximize the benefits that
we can reap from federal investments in science, but we
sometimes differ on the best way to do this. Some believe that
federal investments in particular fields of research are a
frivolous use of taxpayer dollars and that funding for these
projects would be better utilized in other areas of research. I
believe that there is unambiguous evidence to the contrary and
that NSF investments across all fields of science and
engineering have yielded tremendous societal benefits over the
past 70 years.
I want to say a few words about a primary target for some
criticism: research funded through the NSF's Social,
Behavioral, and Economic Sciences, or SBE Directorate. I have
heard the argument that, in the wake of proposed cuts to the
SBE directorate, if social and behavioral science research adds
value to an interdisciplinary initiative--cybersecurity, for
example--the other NSF directorates participating in the
initiative could fund the SBE element of the project. There are
a number of problems with this approach.
First, program officers face strong competition for
research funding within their own directorates and are thus
very reluctant to divert funding from their own field to
researchers in another field.
Second, NSF currently only supports the highest quality SBE
research, guided by the expertise of the scientists in the SBE
directorate, many of them supported directly by the SBE budget.
If SBE research were to be supported only as an add-on to other
projects, the quality of the research would inevitably suffer.
And an engineering program officer, no matter how good they are
in their field, cannot be expected to have the expertise to
assess the social science component of a proposal.
I also want to point out that SBE funding accounts for only
4.5 percent of the total NSF research budget, or $272 million
out of over $6 billion.
When I was a political scientist, I was one of the
strongest proponents of interdisciplinary research. I believed
that fields of study were oftentimes too siloed. But I also
understood that groundbreaking interdisciplinary research
required that those involved in that research needed to bring
the best expertise in their own fields to the table. If SBE
funding is gutted, progress in the social sciences will slow
and its community of experts will shrink along with its
capacity to add value to other research initiatives. As a
result, in the long term, America's capabilities in
cybersecurity, medicine, military planning, disaster
preparedness and aid, and countless other fields will suffer.
For interdisciplinary research to be transformative, the core
research it draws from must be strong.
The evidence bears out that unfettered research driven by
key questions and approaches within a discipline that is
carried out across all fields of science and engineering serves
as the best foundation for discoveries and technological
innovations. This is the philosophy the NSF has followed, and
it has produced outstanding benefits for our economic and
national security.
Perhaps more important, it is that unfettered ability to
pursue the best and most compelling ideas that attracts and
nurtures our nation's and the world's greatest scientific
talent and keeps them here on our own shores, contributing to
our nation and developing the next generation of American STEM
talent. If we start to suffer the brain drain that other
countries such as the UK and Germany suffered in decades past,
we may never fully recover.
We can all agree that we want to maximize the return on
federal investment in science, and there are ways of doing this
that we can agree on. It is important to ensure that research
is reproducible and conducted with integrity. We can make
certain that data obtained from federally funded research is
made available to other scientists and to the public. And we
can encourage interdisciplinary collaboration while maintaining
support for core research. WhileCongress should set priorities
for our investments in science, it does not have to be at the
expense of scientific inquiry or the viability of entire
research disciplines.
Madam Chairwoman, before I yield back, I want to ask
unanimous consent to put in the record a document that majority
and minority staff received yesterday from the NSF Inspector
General, Allison Lerner, in regard to the number of incidents
of research misconduct over the past 12 years.
Chairwoman Comstock. So directed.
Mr. Lipinski. And if the Chairwoman----
Chairwoman Comstock. Without objection.
[The information appears in Appendix II]
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you. And if--allow me to go on another
minute?
Chairwoman Comstock. Sure.
Mr. Lipinski. I just want to talk a little bit about this,
what I just inserted for the record. In her testimony before
the Committee two weeks ago, Ms. Lerner stated that there were
175 cases of research misconduct reported in the OIG semi-
annual reports over the last four years. Immediately after the
hearing, she notified the staff that she had erred in her
testimony and there were only 75. At the same hearing, she
testified that there had been a significant increase in the
number of substantial allegations of research misconduct in
recent years. Committee staff followed up the same day by
asking her for the data, and yesterday she shared a 12-year
history of allegations, investigations, and findings of
research misconduct at NSF.
When you look at the data, you will notice two striking
things. First, it would be very hard to discern any clear trend
over the last decade, let alone a significant increase. Second,
looking just at fabrication and falsification, which are
arguably much worse than plagiarism, and what the IG claims to
have been referring to her in testimony, you will see an
average of 12 OIG investigations per year for the past 12
years, 15 cases per year if you look just in the last five
years. When it comes to actual agency findings of misconduct,
the average is 2.6 per year over 12 years and 3.2 over the last
five years. It is important to point out that these numbers
apply to all NSF proposals, not just funded grants. NSF
receives 50,000 grant proposals per year. Fifteen cases of
substantive allegations of research misconduct represents 0.03
percent of all of those proposals; 3.2 findings of research
misconduct per year represents .0064 percent of all proposals.
Research misconduct is a very serious issue, but I think it is
important to keep these numbers in mind.
I look forward to discussing all of these issues. I thank
all of the witnesses for being here today, and I yield back.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Lipinski follows:]
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Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. And Chairman Smith has a
schedule conflict this morning, so we have a statement for the
record to submit on his behalf.
[The prepared statement of Chairman Smith appears in
Appendix II]
Chairwoman Comstock. And I now recognize the Ranking Member
of the Full Committee for a statement. Ms. Johnson?
Ms. Johnson. Thank you very much, and good morning. I want
to thank the Chairwoman and Ranking Member Lipinski for holding
this hearing, and welcome to our very distinguished panel of
witnesses.
I believe that the stated purpose of this hearing is
something we can all support. The process for setting research
priorities at the National Science Foundation has always been a
combination of science-driven and policy-driven, or bottom-up
and top-down. The Congress does have a role to play.
Reproducibility is a well-documented challenge across all
STEM fields and one for which this Committee can help promote
progress. Research misconduct is the rare exception.
Nevertheless, we should remain vigilant and promote good
policies, including education and training, to minimize
misconduct everywhere.
I strongly support open science and data sharing. For the
last two Congresses I cosponsored the Public Access to Public
Science Act with Representative Sensenbrenner. To this date we
have been unable to convince the Chairman to take it up in a
Committee. I hope that we will continue to look forward to
considering it. Along with every other Science Committee
Democrat, I also cosponsored with Representative Tonko's
Scientific Integrity Act that promotes open science and data
sharing while protecting privacy and confidentiality. I
encourage the Chairman to take that bill up as well.
However, data sharing is never as simple as it sounds, and
our witnesses will help shed some light on the complexity.
While the core STEM disciplines remain essential, many
scientific frontiers are at the boundaries between disciplines.
We must continue to look for policies and funding incentives to
promote transdisciplinary research. National Science Foundation
has come a long way just in the last decade. However, unhelpful
stovepipes between disciplines remain, especially at our
research institutions. Finally, there are few topics that I am
more passionate about than developing a new generation of STEM
workers. On all of these topics, I have no doubt that the
experts sitting before us today have many wise recommendations
based on many decades of collective experience. Those of us
sitting on this side of the dais would be most wise to heed
their recommendations.
For example, I am quite confident that none of these
witnesses will endorse slashing funding for the geosciences or
social and behavioral sciences in order to increase funding for
other fields. I also doubt that any of these witnesses confuse
research reproducibility with research misconduct, yet I often
hear the rare cases of misconduct being used as a sledgehammer
to impugn scientists broadly.
We can set priorities and develop good science policies
without stifling scientific inquiry or shutting down entire
fields of research. If we truly care about developing a new
generation of STEM workers, if we truly care about our nation's
economic and national security, and if we truly care about the
well-being of our children and grandchildren, we will listen to
the experts before us today and the many other scientific
leaders who have so thoughtfully developed recommendations for
the future of the National Science Foundation and U.S.
leadership in science and technology.
I so look forward to the testimony from our panelists
today, and I thank you, Madam Chair, and yield back.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Johnson follows:]
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Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. I'll now introduce our
witnesses. Our first witness today is Dr. Joan Ferrini-Mundy,
Acting Chief Operating Officer of the National Science
Foundation.
Prior to this role she served as Assistant Director of the
NSF for Education and Human Resources since February 2011 and
has been at NSF in various capacities since 2007. From 1999 to
2011 she held an appointment at Michigan State University where
she was a University Distinguished Professor of Mathematics
Education. She was elected a fellow of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science in 2011. Dr. Ferrini-Mundy holds
a Ph.D. in Mathematics Education from the University of New
Hampshire, and she is a resident of the 10th District in
Chantilly. We welcome you here today.
Dr. Maria Zuber, our second witness, is Chair of the
National Science Board. In 2013, Dr. Zuber was appointed Vice
President for Research at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology where she oversees more than a dozen
interdisciplinary research laboratories and centers. Dr. Zuber
was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal in
2004, and in 2008 she was named to the U.S. News list of
America's Best Leaders. She received a Bachelor of Arts in
Astronomy from the University of Pennsylvania as well as a
Master of Science and Ph.D., both in Geophysics from Brown
University.
Dr. Jeffrey Spies is our third witness, and he is the Co-
Founder and Chief Technology Officer for the Center for Open
Science and Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia.
Dr. Spies was recently named the Association for Psychological
Science Rising Star for early career scientists whose work has
already advanced the field and signals great potential for
continued contributions. He completed his undergraduate work at
the University of Notre Dame where he also earned his Master's
Degree in Psychology and Computer Science. He also holds a
Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology from the University of
Virginia.
Dr. Keith Yamamoto is our fourth witness, and he is the
Vice Chancellor for Science Policy and Strategy at the
University of California, San Francisco, where he joined the
faculty in 1976. He chairs the Coalition for the Life Sciences
and sits on the National Academy of Medicine's Executive
Committee, the National Academy of Sciences, Division of Earth
and Life Studies' Advisory Committee, and the Executive
Committee of Research America. He is also an elected member of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science. He
received a Bachelor of Science from Iowa State University and a
Ph.D. from Princeton University.
I now recognize Dr. Ferrini-Mundy for five minutes to
present her testimony.
TESTIMONY OF DR. JOAN FERRINI-MUNDY,
ACTING CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER,
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (NSF)
Dr. Ferrini-Mundy. Thank you. Good morning Ranking Member
Johnson, Chairwoman Comstock, Ranking Member Lipinski, and
distinguished Members of the Subcommittee. My name is Joan
Ferrini-Mundy, and I am the National Science Foundation's
Acting Chief Operating Officer. Previously I served as the NSF
Assistant Director for Education and Human Resources. Before
coming to the National Science Foundation, I was a Professor of
Mathematics and Education and an Administrator at Michigan
State University.
I appreciate the opportunity to testify as the Foundation
celebrates nearly seven decades of funding scientific
discoveries. The mission of NSF is to promote the progress of
science; to advance the national health, prosperity and
welfare; and to secure the national defense. I will highlight
four features of NSF's approach to enacting the mission that
have served science and the nation well since our beginnings:
fundamental research, flexibility, partnerships, and people.
For nearly 70 years, NSF has focused on investing in
fundamental research across all fields of science and
engineering. When grants for fundamental research are made, it
is often impossible to immediately see what the direct impact
on society will be. Yet, NSF investments have benefitted the
lives and livelihoods of generations of Americans. NSF
investments drive U.S. economic growth, strengthen our nation's
security, and give the country the competitive edge we need to
exert our global leadership.
A second hallmark of NSF's approach is maintaining the
flexibility to fund the very best scientific ideas from
wherever they may come. This means having evolving mechanisms
for investing in ideas and solutions that span existing and
established scientific fields and lead to new ones that cross
disciplinary boundaries and that are high risk for potential
for high reward. Our gold standard merit review process ensures
a fair and expert hearing for each of those ideas. Flexible
collaborations across our disciplinary directorates ensure that
we are able to make awards for the very most promising ideas.
Third, I wish to highlight the centrality of partnerships
in NSF's effectiveness. We partner across government with the
U.S. and international scientific community and with the
private sector.
Through the NSF Organic Act of 1950, the Foundation is
established as a partnership between the National Science Board
and the National Science Foundation Director. Our nation's most
distinguished and respected researchers prepare decadal surveys
and synthesis reports for the National Academies of Science.
The pool of nearly 50,000 NSF proposals received annually and
the reviews that we obtain for them from partners in the
scientific community provide a rich snapshot of the directions
and trends of U.S. science and engineering. The private sector
relies on the steady stream of basic science that fuels their
efforts at innovation and enhances their efficiency and
productivity.
NSF promotes the growing emphasis on open science through
its policies for sharing publications and managing data.
Finally, and I know of great importance to this Subcommittee,
are people. Government, universities, colleges, business, and
industries all depend upon a steady supply of well-prepared
people in science and engineering, drawing on talent from
across the diversity of our nation. All should have the
opportunity to be inspired by the wonders of science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics through learning
opportunities in K through 12 schools, community colleges,
universities, as well as in informal, self-directed, and
lifelong learning environments.
NSF has a unique role to play to nurture the next
generation of STEM talent. That generation will carry the
mantle of discovery and innovation into the future.
NSF looks forward to its continuing responsibility for
advancing the frontiers of discovery, innovation, and learning.
I thank the Subcommittee for your support of the Foundation.
This concludes my oral testimony. More detail on the four
points I have briefly highlighted today can be found in my
written statement. I will be pleased to answer any questions
that you have.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Ferrini-Mundy follows:]
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Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. I now recognize Dr. Zuber.
TESTIMONY DR. MARIA ZUBER, CHAIR,
NATIONAL SCIENCE BOARD
Dr. Zuber. Good morning. Thank you very much. Chairman
Comstock, Ranking Member Lipinski, and Members of the
Subcommittee, I appreciate the chance to speak with you on
challenges and future opportunities for science. I would also
like to acknowledge Chairman Smith in absentia and Ranking
Member Johnson.
In 1945, after radar and the atomic bomb changed the course
of World War II, Vannevar Bush outlined a vision for the
future. In Science, the Endless Frontier, he wrote, scientific
progress is one essential key to our security as a nation, to
our better health, to more jobs, to a higher standard of
living, and to our cultural progress. Bush's vision resulted in
the National Science Foundation.
For nearly 70 years, NSF has trained scientists and
catalyzed discoveries in all fields of science and engineering.
Our unwavering commitment to promoting the progress of science
has opened new windows on the universe, made possible new
industries, and improved the lives of all Americans.
NSF investments have given us the internet, touchscreen
technologies, and better natural disaster warning systems.
These discoveries have put millions of Americans to work and
improved our nation's prosperity and security.
The question before us is will the world's richest, most-
powerful nation continue to invest in our future? Do we still
want to be the first to know, to understand, to discover, to
invent? The Board is fully aware of these challenges: budget
constraints, questions about priorities in the role of
government, and of course, growing competition. Our government
plays a unique role as a supporter of basic research. The
private sector will not, cannot, invest large sums in open
questions for 20-plus years as we did for the LIGO
gravitational wave detector, for example.
The discoveries of the past 70 years were made possible by
Congress, presidential administrations, and the research
community working together with a common purpose. We cannot
allow today's challenges to unravel the partnerships that have
supported NSF's core mission and benefitted our country.
I offer three suggestions for how to move ahead. First,
maintain the Federal Government's unique investment in
discovery research across all fields of science and
engineering. Second, prepare a STEM-capable workforce so that
all Americans can participate in and benefit from scientific
progress. And third, for the research community, maintain the
trust and confidence of the American public.
One of the Board's key responsibilities is to help NSF
realize its vision. The Foundation must continue to push the
frontiers of science investing wisely without fear of failure.
This means in part identifying and setting priorities that will
serve our long-term national interest. NSF has not picked
winners and losers or determined in advance what discoveries
will emerge in a project or even a field of science. Instead,
NSF must continue to take advantage of the creativity and
ingenuity of the best minds in America to drive science
progress and let discovery be our guide.
While the education and training of scientists and
engineers remains at the heart of NSF's mission, to secure our
future, we need a STEM-capable U.S. workforce at all
educational levels. On the farm, the factory floor, the
laboratory, and everywhere in between, workers are using STEM
capabilities to innovate, adapt, install, and debug. This
workforce must include women, underrepresented minorities, and
blue-collar workers who have been hard-hit by automation and
globalization.
NSF is realizing this future through its unique integration
of basic research and education and through its investments in
fundamental research into STEM. Investing in people not only
ensures that all Americans have the tools to thrive but it also
guarantees that U.S. businesses will have the talent necessary
to compete in a global economy.
Finally, the scientific community must do its part. We must
be champions of transparency. Our processes, institutions, and
the conduct of research itself must be unassailable. We must
work together to stamp out fraud, be forthright about the
limits of our knowledge, and hold ourselves to our highest
ideals. We must publish our data and describe our methods
clearly so our peers can critique our results. For NSF, this
means ensuring the integrity of merit review, advancing the
best ideas, and promoting the progress of science in a way that
is transparent, accountable, and can be understood and
appreciated by taxpayers.
As this Committee has recognized throughout its history,
promoting the progress of science is essential to America's
future. We look forward to working with you toward a
reauthorization of NSF that empowers the nation's scientists to
explore those endless frontiers. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Zuber follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you, Dr. Zuber. Now we'll hear
from Dr. Spies.
TESTIMONY OF DR. JEFFREY SPIES,
CO-FOUNDER AND CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER,
CENTER FOR OPEN SCIENCE AND
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
Dr. Spies. Chairwoman Comstock, Ranking Member Lipinski,
Ranking Member Johnson, other Members of the Subcommittee,
thank you for inviting me to speak with you today.
I'm the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of the
Center for Open Science, a non-profit technology company
missioned to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility
of scholarly research.
NSF has had a tremendous record of success by trusting
sound scientific process. My recommendations today are in
service of making an already-efficient process work better. To
be clear, the issues that I will describe are not the same as
headline-grabbing cases of fraud or misconduct, which are
relatively rare. Science doesn't have an honesty problem. It
has a communication problem.
Scientific results gain credibility by demonstrating that
evidence can be independently reproduced. This means that
someone else can obtain similar evidence with the same data or
with the same methodology. Reproducibility requires that the
process used to obtain a result is described in sufficient
detail. But science is complex. Brief descriptions of
scientific papers cannot provide enough detail to capture the
nuance necessary to facilitate reproducibility.
We need to fall back on two simple concepts that everyone
learned in elementary school: show your work and share. Because
if much of the scientific process is open as reasonably
possible, the materials, methods, data, software analyses, then
replication can occur more easily, more frequently, and with
greater efficacy. Openness should be the default for scientific
communication, but currently it is not. The reward system in
science is built around publishing. Getting published, however,
has very little to do with research being reproducible. It has
to do with novel results and clean narratives. But science is
often messy and ambiguous. And if we hide the messiness away,
we hamper scientific progress. We need to show our work and we
need to share.
These same solutions can also prevent and correct those
rare cases of misconduct. And even when we can't show all of
our work, for example when data must be kept private, there are
still incremental steps that can increase credibility.
Openness has another benefit. If paired with outreach and
education, individuals who would otherwise not be able to
participate in science would now be able to do so. And because
these individuals are likely to be from groups typically
underrepresented in science, we would see greater efficiency
not only from an increased number of contributors but from the
benefits that diversity brings to collaboration and innovation.
NSF has already taken steps to encourage openness. In my
written testimony submitted for the record I detail
recommendations to expand upon that process. These fall into
five categories.
First, metascience. NSF could fund investigations of
reproducibility and reproducible practices.
Second, infrastructure. NSF could fund technology that
could, for example, facilitate open reproducible practices or
enable the analysis of data that must remain private.
Third, training. NSF could add reproducibility training to
its research fellowships and trainingships.
Fourth, incentives. NSF could encourage the release of
preprints for rapid dissemination of research. It could also
fund pilots, like registered reports, where publication and
award are based upon the importance of the research question
and quality of the methodology, rather than the outcome.
And fifth, community. NSF could convene stakeholders to
discuss and adopt guidelines that would increase the pace of
change.
The scientific process that continuously improves our
current understanding of the world is itself continuously
improving. Critique and new evidence lead towards
understanding. When we invest in NSF, we're investing in this
process. When we invest in openness and reproducibility, we are
making the path towards understanding easier to navigate. This
path leads us incrementally towards the next innovation that
will increase the quality of life here and abroad. I would like
to see us get there as quickly as possible, and I believe that
an increased focus on openness and reproducibility will do just
that.
Thank you for this opportunity, and I look forward to your
questions.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Spies follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Comstock. And now we will hear from Dr.
Yamamoto.
TESTIMONY OF DR. KEITH YAMAMOTO,
VICE CHANCELLOR FOR SCIENCE POLICY AND STRATEGY,
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO
Dr. Yamamoto. I am Keith Yamamoto, Vice Chancellor for
Science Policy and Strategy and a molecular biologist
researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.
Thank you for the opportunity to discuss with you today two
topics important for consideration of the future of NSF. First,
the opportunities, imperatives, and barriers to achieving
transdisciplinary science, and second, the wisdom and perils of
prioritizing research around scientific or societal needs and
challenges.
First, transdisciplinary science which is virtually a
merger of the physical and natural sciences, engineering, and
computation as distinct from interdisciplinary or
multidisciplinary interaction or cooperation between distinct
endeavors.
Reports from the National Academy of Sciences and the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences call for the construction
of a computational knowledge network that detects the
relationships between different concepts, data, and
technologies, enabling assembly of transdisciplinary teams,
each team member with different specialized expertise working
together to tackle difficult, important problems.
Importantly, the role and need for specialization is
maintained, but a general transdisciplinary literacy would fuel
network approaches to solving problems that are invisible or
intractable within siloed disciplines. Transdisciplinary teams
would elevate the risk profile of academic research and
increase the number of spectacular, unexpected advances.
Of the 25 or so federal agencies that currently support
scientific research, NSF is the best situated to establish
transdisciplinarity, thanks to Vannevar Bush who we heard about
before who proposed creation of the NSF in his remarkable
report, Science, the Endless Frontier.
He proposed the NSF as the sole federal agency to support
all U.S. basic research and education programs. It is wholly
possible, wholly probable, he said, that progress and the
treatment of refractory diseases will be made in subjects
unrelated to those diseases, perhaps in chemistry or physics.
Support of all basic research and advanced science
education should be centered in one agency because separation
of the sciences in more than one agency would retard scientific
knowledge as a whole.
While Bush lost the battle for a single basic science
agency, today's NSF is divided into seven disciplinary
directorates that cover much of the scientific landscape
necessary for today's and tomorrow's research and education.
However, bureaucratic and fiscal silo walls establish
intellectual silos as well, inhibiting effective
transdisciplinarity.
To achieve transdisciplinary research and education,
actions are needed both within and outside of NSF. Within NSF,
I suggest creation of a new organizational layer that floats
above the directorates and are sectored into big idea or big
challenge research programs that cross directorate boundaries.
The directorates would retain most of the funds to be awarded--
let's say 90 percent--with the remainder transferred to the
idea or challenge programs which would oversee the peer review
process and supplement awards to transdisciplinary projects, in
effect, returning funds to directorates that choose to co-host
transdisciplinary teams.
Education programs would continue to emphasize specialized
expertise but would additionally build transdisciplinary
literacy to motivate team-based research.
Outside of NSF, the OSTP, for example, might be charged
with framing a few societal grand challenges with funding to
incentivize multiple federal agencies to develop joint programs
to leverage their particular strengths and resources. This
would begin to address current inefficiencies, fragmentation,
and competition between federal agencies.
My second topic examines prioritization of NSF research
around scientific or societal needs and challenges. Despite
Vannevar Bush's passionate prioritization of curiosity-driven
basic research, careful development of NSF grand challenges, or
big ideas, is justified by the urgency to address certain
societal needs and by the imperatives of social justice to
correct disparities in access to social services.
Well-enunciated grand challenges will broaden the minds of
those who participate and will broaden the tent to attract new
participants. Imagination will still rule.
The scale and scope of the challenges will determine if
they best reside within NSF or rather merit attention and
support across multiple agency boundaries.
In conclusion, NSF meets its mandate to support a broad
spectrum of basic research. However, the well-justified
organizational boundaries that separate its directorates create
barriers to achieving transdisciplinary science. Novel
organizational approaches should be considered both within NSF
and between agencies to lower those barriers.
Finally, NSF can stay true to its mission to support basic
discovery and even improve upon it by careful framing of
support programs in the context of big ideas and grand
challenges.
This concludes my testimony. I would be pleased to answer
any questions that you might have.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Yamamoto follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you all. And I now recognize
myself for five minutes.
I appreciate the three guidelines, Dr. Zuber, that you laid
out, maintain the investment. And I know we're not addressing
the budget at all today but I can say for myself and probably a
few others here, we are very interested in maintaining that
budget. And so we are seeing discussion of cuts elsewhere. I
think this is a very important time and very important work
that we need to maintain that type of investment. And of
course, the STEM-capable workforce that you mentioned is
another important area to both create that pipeline but then
also make sure those kids know that we are going to maintain
the investment. So this is going to be a continued priority for
us. And then thirdly, maintaining the trust and confidence of
the public, which you've all addressed today.
And so I wanted to focus a little bit on that
transdisciplinary approach and how we are going to take
advantage of this opportunity I think we have now where you
have the private sector very interested in investment, you need
to maintain the public investment, and how are we best going to
maximize both? And I want to emphasize that anything private is
not a substitute for the public because we still need that
basic research, and much of the private can often be a little
bit more risk taking. And I often hear that in talking to
people who are interested in the private research, that they
realize they are going to have opportunities that are a little
riskier or a little more outside the box than by nature some of
the public research.
But I wanted to follow up with Dr. Yamamoto. What has been
your experience when sort of taking outside-the-box ideas to
the National Science Foundation and how can we make that easier
for them? And what guidelines might be the best to adjust or
how do we best make that work?
Dr. Yamamoto. Right. So let me start by saying that I think
that NSF is as an agency quite welcoming to broad-based ideas.
But as I said, the barriers that are intrinsic to bureaucratic
separation of directorates in this case are problematic. And my
own experience in carrying some big transdisciplinary ideas and
approaches to the NSF was sort of met with being handed an org
chart of NSF and said go out and shop your idea around to the
separate directorates. There's not a home, an intrinsic home,
for these big kind of ideas.
So my idea would really be to create such a home, to be
welcoming of those kinds of approaches for every grant
application that's made, that currently, that when they cross
those boundaries, struggle to find a natural home and may
struggle in peer review as well for that reason. And so I think
that that is the kind of thing that is necessary. I might say
that this idea of kind of programmatic focus that floats over
the boundaries that separate disciplinary approaches is
basically the way that we've organized the research approaches
at UCSF where we have conventional departments like every other
institution that are separated by these disciplinary
approaches, and then floating over those are research programs
that really have a big say about how resources are deployed,
how we reach into different departments and bring together
investigators that can merge their skills and really go after
problems that otherwise would not be solvable or even
detectible by individual researches.
So this is an idea and a way that has been tested and I
think would help to address this challenge and opportunity for
transdisciplinarity.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. And Dr. Spies, could you
address when we have more openness and we get that, how that
both helps the public research as well as the private and how
that might help us maximize the value in both areas as well as
make them more usable, data and information, and how you would
see that working in an ideal situation.
Dr. Spies. Yeah. I appreciate the question. In an open
framework, we think about knowledge as a public good, and
therefore its accessibility and the credibility that openness
brings to it is available to anyone. Obviously we need to
facilitate that sometimes, but that basic accessibility is
still there.
We've heard many examples of what has come out of the NSF
from a basic science standpoint. So if we can increase the
quality of that and increase the efficiency of that work, the
work that comes out of this basic science programs, we can see
then these end users receiving those benefits. They'll see the
same efficiency gains. They'll see the lower risk perhaps
because the quality would have been increased.
Chairwoman Comstock. And maybe in terms of the community,
is there some of the fear as you were talking about that
everybody makes mistakes. We were talking about how we find
problems and things. But is there sort of a cultural fear of
having that out there instead of sort of understand, well,
let's have a whole bigger community that's finding those
mistakes sooner that we all make and sharing it in a way that
helps for collaboration? You know, Thomas Edison obviously had
to go through a lot of experiments before things got right. If
he was sharing this in a bigger community, it might have all
happened faster, right? Not that you don't want to--you know,
when you have your research, you want to maybe keep that to
yourself, too. I understand. But do we have a culture in the
scientific community that makes it sort of punishing to have
that information out there and shared?
Dr. Spies. This is certainly a cultural issue, and I don't
know if it's necessarily punishing, but we don't really allow
discourse around failure. Peer review happens after the work
has been done. And so there's really very little influence that
that can have because you already did the work.
And so it's a cultural issue. The perhaps fear I think is
across any area. No one wants to make mistakes, and no one
wants to be seen for these mistakes. But we need to embrace
them. That's a critical role in science. It's a very important
part of the scientific process.
Chairwoman Comstock. Okay. I know I'm over my time, but if
our other witnesses had anything to comment in that area, I
just wanted to give you an opportunity, too.
Dr. Zuber. So I would just say that, you know, in science,
if you make a mistake, it's okay. But it's better if you
correct the mistake yourself rather than have somebody else
correct the mistake. So I think we ought to incentivize a
system where mistakes within groups are--that it's recognized
in a positive way.
Chairwoman Comstock. Okay.
Dr. Ferrini-Mundy. I would just add, and perhaps we'll have
more time to talk about this later, that issues of open science
and the ways in which sharing can occur happen in very
different ways across different scientific fields. And so
learning across fields in fields like astronomy, for example,
where public data has been a norm for so long, we have a lot to
learn about how mistakes are determined and how we can share
and accelerate findings.
So there's a lot on this topic that's of great interest to
us at NSF.
Chairwoman Comstock. Great. Thank you. And I now recognize
Mr. Lipinski for five minutes.
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you. I want to start with Dr. Spies. I
want to applaud your work on making data more open. We know
there are issues around that that sometimes there's reasons why
there have to be--some data cannot just be all put out there
directly as it is. But some have proposed that government
agencies should only be allowed to make regulations based on
studies that have posted all their data on line. But in
practice, this would make the majority of available research
off-limits to government agencies.
Are there ways the government can increase the openness of
the research it relies on without undermining its ability to
use all the available science?
Dr. Spies. Yeah, there are many cases where we simply can't
be completely open with work with respect to data privacy,
security, or even just proprietary advantage. Some people need
to maintain that intellectual property. But there are many,
many ways that you can still be open, you can still be
transparent and really, gaining that efficiency and credibility
and accessibility by taking certain steps. It's not an all-or-
nothing thing.
For example, with data privacy, there's a concept called
secure computing where the data can remain private, but you can
still analyze it. Other people can still analyze that, but the
data is never made fully available. Or you could release your
methods and materials. So keep the data private but release
everything else around it, and this adds to the credibility. It
might not add to the accessibility of that data, but you can
still have a credible experience. You can still allow people to
come into that and audit that process if need be. So we can
still gain that credibility that we need in science.
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you. I want to move on. I want to ask
Dr. Yamamoto, can you just briefly say what is the difference
in your mind between interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary
research?
Dr. Yamamoto. Sure. Transdisciplinary research really
attempts to merge the sciences. I think we have an opportunity
to do that now. It's quite remarkable, in which the concepts,
the driving concepts that are at the basis of different
disciplines are applied and used to move forward, other
disciplines that haven't had those concepts before or
approaches. And so----
Mr. Lipinski. Okay. Let me come back to you. I just want to
make sure that we had that out there because I had that----
Dr. Yamamoto. Right.
Mr. Lipinski. --question. I just wanted to make sure I
understood that that's what it was. I want to ask Dr. Ferrini-
Mundy, a few years ago there were funds that were set up to
fund interdisciplinary research at NSF, and that no longer is
there. What happened with that? How did that go?
Dr. Ferrini-Mundy. I think you may be referring to our
INSPIRE Program?
Mr. Lipinski. Yes.
Dr. Ferrini-Mundy. And that ran as a pilot. One thing that
we're finding now at NSF over time is that our work across the
directorates is just as prevalent for us as our work within
directorates. And so we have already initiated a number of
efforts at NSF that are transdisciplinary as well as
interdisciplinary, new language that is in the same family as
convergence research that brings together experts from multiple
fields.
And so I would put examples on the table. Our innovations
at the nexus of food, energy, and water systems is one of the
initiatives that we started that was meant to draw in
scientists from multiple fields to solve challenging problems.
Understanding the brain is another. Risk and resilience is yet
another, NSF includes as another.
So what we've been moving toward are a variety of efforts
that signal our serious commitment to promoting science that
cuts across disciplines in various ways.
We also do have a follow-up within our sort of options for
continuing to propose interdisciplinary research that occurs
and it's called RAISE. It's an interdisciplinary program that
has some of the same elements as INSPIRE had. It's a way that
people who bring an idea that doesn't squarely fit a particular
discipline can at least follow a set of steps to bring that
idea to the Foundation.
But what we are seeing in our efforts is a lot of interest
that spans directorates, a lot of partnerships among
directorates to encourage this kind of research.
Mr. Lipinski. And Dr. Yamamoto, do you think that this--you
had talked about some things that you would like to see. Is
there anything else that you believe NSF could do better in
order to encourage this type of research?
Dr. Yamamoto. I think what NSF is doing is quite good. I
think that my concern is that we're missing opportunities
because programs, investigators, teams of investigators that
come to the NSF with ideas that cross disciplinary boundaries
are sort of viewed as secondary, secondary case. Not as
secondary citizens but secondary case in which they really need
to find, go out and find a home.
And what I would suggest is that NSF recognize this
opportunity for transdisciplinarity by setting itself up to
welcome and support every application that comes forward in
this mode to ask where are the best ways, what are the
directorates that can best support this kind of approach that's
being brought forward to us so that it's not a special case,
that every case that comes forward recognizes that we have an
opportunity to use transdisciplinarity and that it's not
something that's new or separate.
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you. I yield back.
Chairwoman Comstock. I now recognize Mr. Hultgren.
Mr. Hultgren. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you all so much
for being here. I appreciate your work and I also appreciate
you coming here, testifying today. This is a very important
subject to me, I think for all of us. But I am grateful. Being
from Illinois, the great ecosystem of science that we enjoy in
Illinois, some wonderful universities, our great laboratories,
the cooperation that we see between them, mutual benefit. And
so with all of that, I think there's a reason why Illinois is
well-represented on this Committee. I've got some great members
that we really enjoy working together, getting good things done
in science in Illinois.
One thing that has been important to me is access for
researchers to the most advanced scientific infrastructures at
facilities such as Blue Waters supercomputer at the University
of Illinois. I've also had the opportunity to tour Stampede
down in Texas last year.
Dr. Ferrini-Mundy, if I could address my questions to you,
how does NSF look at the capabilities of a tool like Blue
Waters when taking into account the different kinds of
questions researchers are asking? Many researchers have
described to me the issues with data management being more
important than just raw speed for certain types of problems.
Does NSF need to have differing capabilities in computing
infrastructure, and how does NSF plan to address any type of
gap when one of these tools goes off-line?
Dr. Ferrini-Mundy. Thank you for your question, sir. NSF,
through its Office of Advanced Cyber Infrastructure, supports
the development, acquisition, and provision of state-of-the-art
cyber infrastructure resources as you know. Those include tools
and services, and they focus both on the high performance
computing capabilities, such as those at Blue Waters, that are
essential to the advancement of science and engineering
research as well as--so we call that leadership computing.
Those are the unique services and resources to advance the most
computationally intensive work such as what is carried out at
Blue Waters.
We also focus on what we call innovative high-performance
computing resources. So these are a set of diverse, highly
usable resources at large scale. The work at Stampede that you
mention is in that category.
So regarding Blue Waters, it's not appropriate for me to
comment here on any future solicitations or investments, but we
are mindful of the importance of avoiding gaps in our
leadership computing services. I also would point to a recent
National Academy study titled Future Directions for NSF
Advanced Computing Infrastructure. That has a number of
recommendations, one of which is that NSF should provide one or
more systems for applications that require a large, single,
tightly coupled parallel computer. And we certainly take the
strategic advice of the community very seriously.
Mr. Hultgren. Okay. Thank you. Dr. Ferrini-Mundy, I'm going
to continue with you if that's all right. But switching gears a
little bit, the average age for a first-time principal
investigator for NIH-funded research has risen to 43 years of
age. Albert Einstein, as we know, was in his 20s when he
presented his theory of relativity. He was 46 when he won the
Nobel Prize. An average age of 43 for first-time PI seems to
miss the most creative and productive years in a scientist's
career. I wondered, do you know the average age of a scientist
receiving their first regular NSF grant?
Dr. Ferrini-Mundy. So thank you for the question. We
actually do not request information about age or date of birth
in our applications, and we do make an optional check box for
people to indicate the date of their degree. So we can speak in
terms of date of receipt of the Ph.D. in terms of age. And what
we have seen is that in general, the early career, which would
be people who are seven years or less from their Ph.D. at the
time of proposal action, the funding rate for our early career
folks in comparison to those who are past that time, who are
later, is quite close, roughly 18 percent for our early career
folks, 22 percent or thereabouts over the years for our people
coming in from later careers. So that is, you know, like 18
percent of the early career applicants are getting awards
versus 22 percent of the later career applicants.
In terms of the percentages, sort of how the balance of our
portfolio looks, it's sort of about a 20/80 balance with about
20 percent of the awards going to the early career PIs and
about 80 percent going to those of later careers.
Mr. Hultgren. Would that be with regular awards or is that
special set-aside programs?
Dr. Ferrini-Mundy. Those are--that's across the full
spectrum of awards. We do have a wonderful program called the
Faculty Early Career Award Program that is meant to bring
people in within some number of years of their Ph.D., and
that's really a special program for us.
Mr. Hultgren. I appreciate the conversation. I do think
it's important for us to continue to discuss this----
Dr. Ferrini-Mundy. Yes.
Mr. Hultgren. --of making sure that we're maximizing
opportunities to those who are younger, you know, more quickly
after they've gotten their degree. Sounds like there's some
steps there, but I want to make sure that we keep that focus.
So thank you. My time's expired. I yield back. Thank you.
Chairwoman Comstock. Okay. I now recognize Ms. Esty.
Ms. Esty. Thank you, Chairwoman Comstock and Ranking Member
Lipinski and to our members of the panel for this very
important hearing today.
We had some discussion some of us last week at a briefing
with NSF and the Department of Energy about the critical
importance of infrastructure, the basic scientific
infrastructure for attracting the best minds. There's been
discussion, all of you to some extent, are talking about the
importance of supporting researchers but encouraging and
supporting that STEM workforce.
So Dr. Ferrini-Mundy, could you talk a little bit about
that? I look at the fact that, for example, the discussions we
had about the Hadron collider last week. I look at Yale
University just outside my district and the work that's being
done there on precision detectors and how that fits into these
larger investments. Could you talk about that for a moment,
please?
Dr. Ferrini-Mundy. Sure. And there are so many factors that
relate to these decisions. It's a lot about prioritization and
how the National Science Foundation, in partnership of course
with the scientific community, with the Congress, with the
National Science Board, with the Administration, how we
actually set priorities, and it's an activity that's under way
constantly with us. And one very strong commitment, of course,
for the agency has been our investment in infrastructure over
may decades through our Major Research Equipment Facilities
Construction Account where we are always looking at advice from
the community. So decadal surveys are quite critical for us as
we think about what next infrastructure is needed.
But at the same time we need to take some risks, and we've
heard about LIGO, and we know that there will be some piece of
that infrastructure investment that needs to be focused towards
the high-risk and potentially high-reward investments that we
can't predict where the science will take us.
The other balancing piece in this business of prioritizing,
of course, is in ensuring that we have the adequate resources
to fund the basic research that occurs in that infrastructure.
And so it's a constant calculation for us where we're
considering lots of inputs and lots of factors. But suffice it
to say, we're certainly committed to our role with scientific
infrastructure as we have been for so long.
Ms. Esty. Thank you, and I again want to underscore what
many of you've talked about. And it has been a bit of a
contention in the last few Congresses about whether Congress
should be directing that research or not, and frankly, I think
for the basic research, I would rather rely on scientists who
have a better sense of where the science may be going and my
commitment to continue to support that.
I know in fact many Members of Congress tend to be science-
phobes. We may not be the best people to be directing that.
That's not that we don't have an oversight role. Of course, we
do. But I think as you've amply illustrated, that the United
States has a leadership role in basic science, and we have to
follow that where it takes us.
You've all also mentioned the importance of
interdisciplinary and interdirectorate work. So a quick answer.
If people have ideas, are there things Congress should or could
be doing that would incentivize or remove barriers for that
interdirectorate work?
Dr. Zuber. Well, the most important thing that Congress
could do is not take steps to create additional silos, okay?
And so by specifying funding in directorates, that, of course,
creates silos.
Ms. Esty. Thank you. And again, that goes back to my
earlier point about deferring somewhat to the scientific
community to have the flexibility to move funding where the
research takes us.
Dr. Spies, you talked a little bit, actually quite a lot,
about the incentives to share work. This is something we
discussed a lot over the last Congress or two. Can you help us
think a little bit about--and this is probably a subject for
another hearing--this problem about publication and the
incentives to publish something novel and not to share results
that don't turn out in a novel way or that don't actually lead
to something directly actionable but in fact is really
important for other people to know about because you may know
this is not a profitable avenue. How do we square this right
now? We have this problem about needing to publish to get
research money, and yet if people are hiding their results
because it doesn't seem actionable, it means you may have
wasted money with a lot of people kind of following down that
same path. Anyone have thoughts on that point?
Dr. Spies. Yeah. We have an incentives problem around
publishing. And so we need to find a way to incentivize people
to be more open, to take the risk, to be okay with failure, to
put that out there and realize that that is adding to the
corpus of knowledge. Any evidence is valuable in thinking about
science.
And so there are ways to do this. We really need to think
more about this and test some of these things. The field of
metascience, we need more of a commitment to that to really
understand what are the most efficacious ways to incentivize
these things? Registered reports I think is a very good example
where we review the work based on the impact of the questions
and the soundness of the methodology. And then no matter what
the outcome, you still get a publication. Scientists still get
funding. They still get the publication. They still get that
reward. And so they have no reason then to need to hide things
or gloss over details to sell it to journals.
Ms. Esty. Thank you very much. I'm seeing that I'm over,
but maybe we could have a hearing on this issue because I think
it is really important and it's something we could contribute
in the field right now because a lot of scientists are very
frustrated with the imperative right now. So maybe we could ask
the Chairman and Ranking Member to do that. Thank you very
much.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. And I now recognize Ms.
Bonamici for five minutes. Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Webster for five
minutes. Sorry.
Mr. Webster. Thank you, Madam Chair. Dr. Yamamoto, I had a
question about one of the things you said. You talked about an
additional organization layer, and we here in Congress are
fantastic at doing that in government. And I'm just wondering,
does that add to maybe an inefficiency to it or give me a
little more explanation.
Dr. Yamamoto. Sure. Yeah, the kind of knee-jerk response to
any additional bureaucratic layer is that it's going to slow
things down or add complexity. The object of this additional
layer is in fact to have research programs that float over the
disciplinary directorates. And so it crosses those boundaries
in a natural way. So that would be the idea of this additional
layer and that they would define the elements of the different
directorates that would come into play, that cooperate together
to work in a given research programmatic area.
So that's the object, is to undo the damage, the natural
damage, that bureaucratic boundaries do in setting up an
organization that's necessary to have such separate entities.
But anytime you do that, you've created a silo. And so this
additional layer would float over those and cross those
barriers.
Mr. Webster. So would it be more free-flowing?
Dr. Yamamoto. That would be the idea is that every grant
application, for example, that would come into the NSF, would
flow first into these research areas. And that entity would
then say this is an opportunity to draw from these two or three
or four directorates that could best come together to address
this.
So I would imagine, I would hope, that downstream what we
would see increasingly is that teams of researchers composed of
investigators with very different backgrounds and expertise
would come to the NSF with ideas that definitely don't fit into
any single directorate. But by going into this additional
layer, they would always have a home and that that additional
layer would then sort out which directorate would be able to
contribute to that application.
Mr. Webster. Thank you very much for that answer. Dr.
Spies, would your--matter of fact, I liked what you had to say
about an open process. We need some of that here, too. But my
question would be would this open process add to or maybe
remove from the subjectivity of the grants and resources and
the distribution thereof?
Dr. Spies. Open scientific process is going to be adding to
what we know about science. And so as much as the quality of
that is increased, I would think that it would increase
decision-making. Related to subjectivity, the scientific
process doesn't care about outcome. It's not an important part
of it. The outcome is what happens from the scientific process.
And so if we focus more on the process, more on the work flow,
more on these other components that lead us to these outcomes,
which we as humans really appreciate, which you appreciate in
making policy, but if we focus on that process, then we can
have more objectivity I think just across the board. And so
again, if that can aid decision-making, then it should do so
with regards to that process, to those methods.
Mr. Webster. So you would believe that the better the
process, the more perfect the outcome?
Dr. Spies. The better the process, the smoother the way
towards understanding, whatever that is. I won't say perfect.
Science admits that it's never perfect. We are always
incrementally moving forward. But process, good process, open
process, can make that a more efficient track down that road.
Mr. Webster. Thank you very much. I yield back.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. I now recognize Ms.
Bonamici for five minutes.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you very much, Chair Comstock, and
Ranking Member Lipinski. And thank you to all of the witnesses
for being here today. It's been a very good discussion and kind
of a continuation of our earlier hearing.
One of the things I wanted to follow up on, Dr. Ferrini-
Mundy, you talked a little bit about risk taking. And that's
something that we have to recognize as policymakers when--I
share the concerns raised by some of my colleagues about the
problems of having Members of Congress decide which
directorates to fund at certain levels. Do we have oversight
responsibilities as Ms. Esty said? Of course, but making those
decisions when we don't know what's going to be at the end of
the research is something that we have to keep in mind as we're
deciding funding. Can administrations set priorities?
Absolutely, but they shouldn't be at the risk of other areas.
So I've enjoyed several times participating in the Golden
Goose Awards, an event that the American Association for
Advancement of Science, AAAS, has helped launch and organize
each year to recognize the importance of federally funded basic
scientific research. We don't know what discipline the next
innovative transformative research will come from, but we know
that NSF-supported basic research has led to advances in
technology, in medicine, agriculture, and many more fields.
Last year one of the Golden Goose Awardees was the honeybee
algorithm. So in the late 1980s, several engineers collaborated
with a bee researcher, and they studied how honeybee colonies
allocate foragers. And years later then, two researchers
applied that honeybee foraging model to shared web hosting
servers, something that wasn't thought of in the early '80s
when they were doing the original modeling. And their research
resulted in an algorithm that speeds up the process every time
we check our bank account balances, do an internet search,
check the score of a March Madness game which some people might
be doing at this moment.
So a question for all of the panelists, that the honeybee
algorithm is a great example of obscure or perhaps silly
sounding basic research that led later to technological
advances. So what might be lost by withholding federal funding
from research areas where we don't know what the benefits will
be at the outset? We don't know where that research will go.
So what are the problems? What do we lose by withholding
funding because of that uncertainty or that risk? Dr. Ferrini-
Mundy, let's start with you.
Dr. Ferrini-Mundy. Sure. Thank you. Thank you for the
question and the great explanation of the honeybee algorithm.
Very helpful.
First of all, it needs to be--we need to be clear that all
at NSF take very, very seriously the responsibility of
carefully investing taxpayer dollars----
Ms. Bonamici. Of course.
Dr. Ferrini-Mundy. --and being prudent and responsible. At
the same time, as you point out, it's very difficult to tell
with certain basic research proposals what the long-term impact
and payoff on the country, on our economy might actually be.
And so we have so many wonderful examples. You've pointed
out one, but there are wonderful boons to industry that started
with no obvious commercial applications. And we have results
about GPS, the internet, AI and computers where at any stage
some of that basic funding in its proposal form might have not
looked like it would lead to anything.
So I think I certainly agree that we need to stay open. We
need to use the expertise of the scientific community to select
the, you know, one in five grants that we are able to fund,
both for those that will continue to move science along
incrementally as is needed and for those that look like long
shots but that have great promise in terms of their basic
contribution. There's one other point I'd want to make on this
which has to do with choosing among areas of science. It's a
tricky business because keeping the basic investment going in
all areas of science, the fundamental research investment, is
quite important so that there is this constant pipeline and
flow of new ideas accumulating, new theories being developed,
which may then find their use someplace else.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you. I'm going to try to get in another
question. Dr. Ferrini-Mundy, the social, behavioral, economic
sciences grants have funded ground-breaking research across the
nation including at Oregon State University some important
research on how communities research extreme weather events. If
funding for the SBE grants at NSF were to be cut significantly,
some are suggesting by 50 percent, this would also result in
fewer SBE program officers within the agency. So given the
breadth of research in the directorate currently, there could
be gaps in expertise. So is that a reasonable assumption and
how might this affect the ability of the agency to review SBE
grants for their merit or potential to benefit the nation? And
maybe we can get Dr. Zuber in the last couple seconds as well.
Dr. Ferrini-Mundy. So I just want to reiterate our central
commitment to the importance of the social, behavioral, and
economic sciences investments. The benefits coming that we have
seen in cybersecurity, disaster preparedness, detecting reading
problems early on--all of these fan from fundamental research
that would be missing if we were not able to invest in the ways
that we do.
Dr. Zuber. Again, if I could just add, you know, trying to
think about research that actually serves the nation, a couple
of things in SBE--facial recognition studies actually went into
the analysis, the algorithmic analysis of identifying the
marathon bombers in Boston. And another recent study, that
violent extremism, the tendency to go into it, isn't just an
economic thing, that there are actually moral imperatives. So
if one is trying to dissuade young people from joining extreme
groups, one needs to find a moral alternative.
And another thing that I think is really the 800-pound
gorilla is that we need to think about jobs and job retraining.
And that is squarely a social science issue. And so I think at
this time where we have so many issues in the country that
really affect people, okay, that the social sciences really has
an ever more important price to pay.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you. My time is expired. I yield back.
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. And I now recognize Mr.
Beyer for five minutes.
Mr. Beyer. Thank you, Madam Chair, very much. And thank all
of you for being here. This is--the best part about being on
the Science Committee is being able to talk to you.
I wanted to pile on to Congressman Hultgren's comments
about the age mismatch. Some quick research. Albert Einstein
was 27, 1906, in Bern, Switzerland, when he came out with
Brownian motion, photoelectric effect, special relativity.
Werner Von Heisenberg was 26 when he articulated the
uncertainty principle. Marie Curie was 30 when she articulated,
discovered radioactivity.
And I'd be very grateful if you and Dr. Cordova would look
at the 80/20 mix and figure out where to make it 20/80. It's
sort of part of the--I'm not a mathematician, but I've heard
again and again that there are very few genius mathematicians
beyond age 30. Almost all prodigies are young. Doctor?
Dr. Ferrini-Mundy. Thanks so much, and I would just add to
that, we have a significant investment in young professionals
through the graduate student programs and through post-doctoral
programs, too. So we really are working very hard to make sure
that we keep that next generation ready and able to lead us in
science in the future.
Mr. Beyer. Great. Thank you. Dr. Yamamoto, I'm going to
pick on you because you're a professor of cellular and
molecular pharmacology. And I love the physical sciences, you
know, particle physics and cosmology and relativity and
biochemistry. But equally important are all these social
sciences, the SBE that we've talked about.
I'm especially thinking, you know, Daniel Kahneman, in his
Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, has gotten so much attention
about how we make decisions which, given that we're here in
U.S. Congress, is phenomenally important.
Can you look at it as a biologist, chemist, physicist, on
what you think the importance of the social and behavioral
sciences are?
Dr. Yamamoto. I can approach this through an issue that's
very important to me. I was involved in launching this notion
of precision medicine. And precision medicine has at its heart
an understanding of biological processes that is founded in
understanding the mechanisms of the ways that those processes
function. And so when you start thinking about disease, you
come up right against the complexity of biological systems and
realize that the Human Genome Project, for all the things that
it brought us, the genome is just one element that goes into
the risk of an individual for getting a disease, the course of
that disease when they get it, and so forth and other elements.
There are many other elements that come into play, objective,
scientific elements like small molecules that are in the
bloodstream, the microbiome that inhabits all of us. But in
addition, the impact of environmental factors, social and
behavioral elements that very much contribute. So what
precision medicine says is that we need to mound all of these
layers of information in a Google Maps like way that allows us
to see correlations and connections that were otherwise
invisible when the disciplines are maintained separately.
And so if we can do that, build that Google Maps and be
able to establish what the links are between a given behavioral
component or environmental component and what we see in the
gene or small molecule or a microgut's inhabiting of the
organism, then we can begin to better understand what the
various components that contribute to a biological process or a
disease.
So it's a long way of saying that I think it's really
essential that as biological scientists that are sort of bound
by collecting objective evidence, that these other components
are just as important and we really need to build that in.
So it's great that the National Science Foundation
understands that and has a directorate that really is focused
in that way.
Mr. Beyer. Thank you, Doctor, very much. And Dr. Zuber,
just a few seconds of building on that. Looking at psychology,
especially as a so-called soft science, SBE, as Chairman of the
National Science Board, what's your perspective on the
importance of investing that for America's mental health?
Dr. Zuber. So obviously it's crucially important, and NSF
of course does the fundamental science, the basic science, that
then feeds into the more directed, health-related work that's
done at the NIH, okay, and there really is very good cross-
agency discussions on these and other basic science/more
disease-related problems.
But I just wanted to make the point here that we are on the
verge of a real revolution in the social sciences. So right
now, computation in the social sciences, high-performance
computing, they're using as much in those fields as math and
physical sciences that NSF used ten years ago, okay? So
something that's considered a soft science is really becoming
very data-driven, very quantitative. And you know, we're
essentially at the beginning of a golden age here. So it would
be a shame to cut it back.
Mr. Beyer. Thank you very much. Thanks, Madam Chair.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. And I know Dr. Zuber and I
had talked about young people yesterday and the importance of
having them engaged. And I just wanted to, in addition to
having Eric Young here from Dominion High School, shadowing us
here today, I know we had some other students here. But I
wanted to just mention, because this is such an extraordinary
young man who I was able to meet with yesterday, I think he's
interested in the precision medicine area and has now been
accepted at MIT but has a few other options available. But
let's see. He just won--his name is Pratik Naidu. It's N-a-i-d-
u if I'm not doing it justice. But he is a senior at Thomas
Jefferson High School, and he was one of the ten finalists in
the Regeneron Science Talent Search, one of our nation's oldest
and most prestigious science competitions for seniors in high
school. And he created a machine learning software that can now
examine how cancer genomes interact and help with new drug
therapies. He was working with researchers up in Boston. So he
is partnering with them from his high school up in Boston. So
I'm sure they'll be thrilled if he goes to MIT and is up in
that area. It was titled The DNA Looper. And this device can
actually learn and give new insight in the ongoing search for
cures for cancer.
And then just for an add-on because he was such a charming
young man, he happened to be an Eagle Scout in eighth grade. So
clearly an overachiever here. And then also on the side he had
founded a reading group for veterans, and he called it The
Classics Project where he was studying classical war texts and
how they relate to our current society. And he was--of course,
he took Latin so he was reading these I guess in the original,
Homer's Odyssey, and then taking that and working with our
veterans.
So I think that kind of leads to the overlapping of how you
have somebody like this who whatever project he might come to
in the future, we'll want to have some type of box to fit him
in. But he clearly was a very talented young man here. So I
think it kind of brings to life all the testimony that you all
have given today. Dr. Yamamoto, if you'd like----
Dr. Yamamoto. I wonder if I could just comment on this age
issue. I think it's terrific that NSF, NIH, other agencies are
building programs to single out early investigators that are
coming to these agencies for funding. But in my view, the
harder the problem is not that we're not giving enough grants
for young investigators. It's that they're getting to the
system too late. The training is taking far too long, and I
think that we need to go back and look at sort of first
principles of what is needed for a Ph.D., for example, in the
sciences? And there's a National Academy study that is just
getting going. I'm on the committee to look at STEM graduate
education and see if we're really doing the right thing. That
is, are we really providing students with what they need to
then emerge as Ph.D.s and go out and be successful? How
important is the post-doctoral study period? What should be in
that element and how does it contribute or not? Are we just
aging our trainees because we need them to be the workforce to
do experiments in our laboratories, for example? And I think
that going back and looking at those principles is really
critical. In my view we could shorten the training period a lot
and really--my own goal would be to say can we develop a system
that goes from the first day in graduate school to being
independent investigators from what it is now to something in
the four- to six- to eight-year range, getting registered to
being an assistant professor applying for an NSF grant? And I
think that that's a very doable thing. We've been remiss in not
looking at those principles, and I think that we've fallen into
the trap of thinking that we need this mass of people to man
our laboratories and carry out our experiments, rather than
thinking about what is it that they need, when can they use
their energy and creativity in the most efficient way?
Chairwoman Comstock. Right. I think that was that ecosystem
that you talked about creating. So, thank you for that
additional insight. And I'm sorry, we had two people come back.
So we recognize Ms. Rosen for five minutes.
Ms. Rosen. Thank you, Madam Chair, Ranking Member Lipinski,
and to our panel for being here today. And Dr. Yamamoto, my
husband did his medical residency at UCSF along with many of
his friends. And so we have a soft spot in our household for
UCSF. And I thank you for all the work you do there and the
kind of graduates I know you produce. So I'll just go to that.
So I'd like to hear--I love my husband. So I have to put
that plug in, right? So I'd like to hear your thoughts on
several related topics on how we consider evaluating and
funding scientific research, the value of course our basic
research core areas and how they relate to our national
interest. Because oftentimes it's unclear. You know, I'm a
former computer programmer systems analyst who started writing
software in the 1970s. No PCs. No cell phones. There's more
right here than we could have ever imagined when I was at
University of Minnesota writing on computer card decks in the
BASIC lab in the math department, right?
So we've come a long way, and we couldn't predict it. So we
want to be able to allow for these kinds of research that have
no--that we can't even imagine what's going through. So
following up on Representative Bonamici's question, I'd like to
ask you all, what is lost to the nation if we stop funding
research in a whole discipline because somebody doesn't see the
potential? If we stop funding core fields like biology,
chemistry, or physics because we think all the discoveries have
been made, which they have not. And like you go to the
mistakes, a lot of mistakes turn out to be the foundation for
something else in the future. And if we refuse to fund a field
we've never heard of, that might be a key that unlocks
mysteries that are yet untold.
So the wholesale defunding of particular fields of science,
is that really a wise way for us to go?
Dr. Yamamoto. I think it's a disaster. I think that the
existence of the National Science Foundation as proposed by
Vannevar Bush really puts a stake in the ground for basic
research, research where you actually don't know where it's
going to lead. And we are very far from--you know, the amount
that we don't know still so vastly outweighs what we do know,
that stopping any of those investigations would mean that our
future for being able to have knowledge that we can then apply
will go away. So we absolutely have to maintain this.
I might just say one more thing about reproducibility that
bears on your question and that is at least in the biological
sciences. There's an element of reproducibility that hasn't
been addressed here that I think bears mentioning and that is
that because of past successes, we are now able to work in
experimental systems including populations of human beings that
are vastly more complex than we've been able to work on before.
So the scientific ideal for planning an experiment is to
control all the variables except the one you're trying to test,
right? We're very far from that now, and it's good news that we
are, that we understand enough to work on more complicated
systems. But we need to acknowledge that when we do that, that
when we control all the variables we can think of, underneath
that is a vast number of variables that we don't know about,
right? I call it the Rumsfeld effect. And acknowledging that
says that the attempt to reproduce an experiment, ending up
with a different result, doesn't mean that either experiment
was wrong. I have to point out that it also doesn't mean that
either experiment was right. And it simply means that the
robustness of being able to reproduce it is not there. It very
often will be it's not there because there are unknown
variables below what you've tested. So just to give you a silly
example that I think makes it easy to understand is that no
reviewer of a grant application or a finished product that is
submitted to a journal for publication would say, oh, this
looks really terrific. You've really carried it out. It's a
beautiful set of experiments. Could you please go back and do
them all again at a tenth of a degree lower temperature, right?
And that could be the variable that would change all the
results and make two attempts, two very solid attempts to
reproduce the study, come out with different results.
And so remembering this is that we don't know about the
robustness of a lot of these complex studies because of those
unknown variables. And I think it calls into question in a way
attempts to fund studies, to simply try to reproduce complex
results, understanding robustness is critical. But being able
to label something as right or wrong based on whether it's
reproducible I think is problematic.
Ms. Rosen. Thank you. I appreciate that. And I thank you
for what you're doing, especially in creating a quicker path
for people in STEM, people like myself who started their
career. It's so important that we build that people pipeline,
create opportunities as early as possible in the youngest
grades so people know it's creative and innovative and not
boring in the least sense and that they can all do it and not
be science-phobes as someone else said. We need to generate
that excitement. So I thank you for what you're trying to do
with a lot of the programs you're working on. I yield back.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. I now recognize Mr. Tonko
for five minutes.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you, Madam Chair, and I find this
discussion very uplifting, especially in light of President
Trump's budget presentation which seems to disinvest in
America, which is a troublesome notion.
I'm concerned, Dr. Ferrini-Mundy, that cuts to the
geosciences could hurt our national security, our economic
security and our public health and safety. Are you aware of any
NSF-funded research that came out of the geosciences
directorate that produced valuable results?
Dr. Ferrini-Mundy. Thank you for the question and of course
the research that goes on in our geosciences directorate spans
a very broad range of topics and areas. Fundamentally, we fund
research that helps us better understand our planet. And so let
me just give a couple of examples. We fund research to
understand how the physical and chemical processes in the ocean
and the atmosphere affect how ecosystems operate. And that not
only brings us fundamental understanding of how heat
redistribution happens, but it generates knowledge about marine
ecosystems that ultimately can have applications about informed
management of the fisheries industries, for example.
Another area where we do terrestrial research has to do
with knowledge generation that gets us understandings of
groundwater and surface water systems that contribute to
informed decisions about the use of water resources and
therefore have implications for agriculture, potable water
supplies, and recreations.
Those are just a couple of areas where investment in the
geosciences has affected our country in serious and important
ways.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you. And Dr. Zuber?
Dr. Zuber. Yes, since I'm in earth science, I can add a few
things to this. So one example is that subsurface prospecting
and the study of subsurface materials really has provided the
scientific framework for hydraulic fracking, okay, which has
brought this country really far in the direction of energy
independence.
And I will also add that NSF's earth science program also
includes the space environment surrounding Earth. And so for
example understanding solar storms and their effects on, you
know, if the GPS constellation goes out, if our cell phones go
out, if the electric grid goes out, obviously that's bad for
America, okay? And those studies are crucial in understanding
that.
Also the health of the oceans, coastal erosion factors that
affects so many people that live along our coasts. And finally
I would add that the geo program supports the polar programs
including fully the Antarctic program.
Mr. Tonko. Sounds like very valuable information that can
guide us with some very important actions that we may need to
put into place.
New York State has had a number of devastating natural
disasters in recent years including devastation from Super
Storm Sandy, certainly Hurricane Irene, and Tropical Storm Lee.
In New York's 20th District, my home district, we used to talk
about storms that came once every 100 or once every 500 years.
This type of talk is no more with devastating weather events
happening time and time again.
I've sat with families who have lost everything and have
witnessed the exorbitant costs that we are still trying to pay
off from these extreme events. Extreme weather events are
incredibly expensive to our communities and our nation. So my
question to the panel is does research in the geosciences help
to ensure better predictions or better understanding of natural
environmental hazards? Dr. Zuber?
Dr. Zuber. Okay. Well, the answer to that is yes. So
actually, there are studies that are being done and the state
of prediction, near-term weather prediction and extreme storms,
that work is underway. And it's critically important and we
need to invest greater in it. There have been some studies done
and they need to be verified that as severe storms move up the
East Coast, they typically go out to sea, okay? However, with
the loss of sea ice, okay, over the Arctic Ocean, it changes
the wind patterns so that there's a higher probability of a
storm coming up the coast, not taking a right turn.
And so one can just envision what the economic consequences
would be if we have more Hurricane Sandys coming up and hitting
the East Coast. And that's just a single example. You know,
obviously severe storms, droughts, and floods, are devastating
to the economy. And so this requires field work. It requires
data collection. It requires greater investment in high-
performance computing. So it's really, really cross-discipline.
Mr. Tonko. And I would hope it would instruct us and issues
of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.
Dr. Zuber. Well, certainly, but so you know, understanding
weather on a short-term timescale is really fundamental in
understanding if we're going to be able to extend those models
to understand future climatic situations.
Mr. Tonko. Dr. Zuber, I thank you. And Madam Chair, I yield
back.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. And I thank today's
witnesses for their testimony and the Members for their
questions. We really appreciate your insight and ideas, and I
think we certainly have more food for thought for future
hearings also. So thank you. And thank you for your good work
in this arena. And the record will remain open for two weeks
for additional written comments and written questions from
Members. This hearing is now adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:44 a.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
Appendix I
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