Academics say no to fund cuts

Duke's Brodhead joins in plea to Congress to keep research funding in physical sciences

WASHINGTON -- Duke University President Richard Brodhead and other education leaders are asking Congress to find $500 million in emergency spending this spring to pay for basic research in the physical sciences.

Scientists and university leaders were shocked in December when Congress made public its major spending plan - nearly a year in the making - that left out more than half a billion dollars in basic research money that President Bush had requested and lawmakers said they supported.

"It's an attention-deficit disorder in a way," Brodhead said Tuesday. "In the end, the attention went away and something else took its place."

The research affects projects as massive as an international high-energy physics lab in Europe and as individual as a few hundred pine trees routinely sprayed with carbon dioxide in the Triangle's Duke Forest.

So Brodhead roamed the halls of Capitol Hill on Tuesday, asking for research funding not just for scientists at Duke, but for those toiling in basic research across the country.

Congress slashed funding for national laboratories, for an international nuclear fusion program, for high-energy physics and for nanotechnology. Research hours are being cut, grants will go unfunded and construction on new labs has been delayed.

"The thing that's so important is that funding for basic research. I mean, that's the seed corn upon which future technology is built," said Jim Siedow, Duke's vice provost for research.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman warned this month that more than 500 scientists and technicians could lose their jobs or their university support as a result of the cuts. Another 500 won't be hired.

Brodhead and other presidents from the Association of American Universities have been lobbying for increased research, saying the benefits will help the United States stay competitive in a global economy.

They were joined Tuesday by economic leaders who said the cuts will disrupt basic research, diminish the international scientific credibility of the United States and discourage promising university students from pursuing careers in the physical sciences.

"I don't think people in the American public really understand what's happening today in this area, and what's happening with the economy tomorrow," said Christopher Hansen, president and chief executive officer at the American Electronics Association, whose members include Microsoft and Intel.

University leaders will seek $500 million in the emergency supplemental bill that Congress is expected to pass this spring. About $300 million of that would go to the Department of Energy, while the rest would go to the National Science Foundation.

The outcome has major implications for Duke, Siedow said. In fiscal year 2007, he said, Duke's research enterprise was $620 million. Of that, $520 million was federally funded.

Though most of that is in biological and health sciences, physical sciences play a key role too, Siedow said, especially if the National Science Foundation budget stays flat.

"Grants become a lot harder to get," he said. "We've got faculty members who have lost their NSF funding, and that's a tough thing to deal with when you're supporting multiple people in a lab."

Meanwhile, other projects relying on funding from the Department of Energy also could suffer. Among those is an experiment in Duke Forest, where pine trees are fumigated routinely with sprays of carbon dioxide, part of an experiment in climate change to understand how plants handle increasing amounts of the atmospheric gas.

Brodhead is to meet today with U.S. Rep. David Price, a Chapel Hill Democrat and the state's only member on the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

Price spokesman Paul Cox said the congressman wasn't happy with the final spending bill's outcome. Still, he warned, the universities' spending request could be a tough sell.

Supplemental bills traditionally have been for need-it-now funding, including spending for the war, for example, or emergency payments in the wake of natural disasters.