(00:00:00) Story number one I'll just go straight in and start telling you there are six of these what I call cautionary tales. So I begin with 31 from each of the three worlds into which our planet is divided. The Tails have various models. There is morals. One of the models is that human nature is the same all over the world in all the three worlds. We're the same people making the same mistakes whether we will happen to belong to the third world the second world or the first world the Tails have other models, which I'll discuss later but let me tell you the stories first the stories should speak for themselves after you hear the stories. You can decide for yourselves what the models ought to be. So the first story comes from the village of God, that's the third world a village in central Africa where my daughter Mia spent some time as a Peace Corps volunteer three years ago. My information comes from an unpublished report which Muir wrote after she came home Mia was in gone as an employee of the office of community development of the Republic of kamistan. Rune our official function was to assist and encourage local initiatives leading to the Improvement of Public Health and education. The main problem in God is water. The village is several kilometers away from the nearest source of potable water night and morning the women of the village must walk to the spring and back with heavy water pots balanced on their heads during the dry season, the spring degenerates into a muddy swamp in 1985 the official Committee of the Village Development composed of prominent residents of Kong and three neighboring Villages met to consider the problem of a water supply. The meetings were conducted according to the traditional rules of African Hospitality. The Village Chiefs private presiding their wives keeping the delegates supplied with food and drink my daughter as an honored guest seated among the Chiefs. The villagers mostly belong to the bulu tribe and her have their own bulu language, but they have been educated for three generations in French the committee of Village Development in keeping with its official status conducted its deliberations entirely in French. Two causes of action were available out call them plan a and plan B plan a was to engage the services of a professional. Well Digger who happen to live nearby the fee he charged was high by Village standards, but not prohibitive he would design and direct the construction of an adequate. Well, including a bathhouse and laundry using the villagers as his labor force. My daughter had made inquiries about his work in other Villages and found the results were generally satisfactory. Plan B was to write a formal proposal to the central government in Yaounde, which is about 300 kilometers away along very very questionable roads. For a massive water reduction system. It sounds better in French, of course using Urban technology. The chance that the proposal would be accepted with small many hundreds of villages were competing for the central government's limited resources. But if God should happen to be the lucky winner. The rewards would be great, especially for the members of the committee of Village Development. The decision was made unanimously to proceed with Plan B, as a result. God still has no water supply and the women are still walking to the to the spring. After the meetings were over my daughter went back to the village and spoke privately with the Villagers trying to understand why they had made what seemed to her a clearly wrong decision. She found that everybody including the women who carry the water pots to and from the spring was in favor of Plan B in the end. They almost convinced my daughter that plan be made sense. After all as one of the women said nobody in God ever dies of thirst the problem of the water supply is not a matter of life and death. The problem is a matter of status on the one hand the act of writing an official proposal to the government would enhance the status of the village and of the committee of Village Development, even if nothing ever came of it. It would open a Channel of communication and create contacts between the villagers and the political authorities in yon day in the long run such contacts are more important to the life of the village than a communal bath house. On the other hand the act of making a deal with a backwards. Well Digger would be Unworthy of the Dignity of an official committee. If these arguments had not been sufficient there was an even more cogent reason for rejecting plan a the well Digger happens to be a Fulani. He belongs to the wrong tribe. The boo lose of negara settled agricultural people they have lived from time immemorial in villages and they consider themselves civilized. The Fulani is our Northerners Nomads cacao herders. No, self-respecting bulu would want to take orders from a Fulani. So I leave the villagers of gone on the whole they are a happy and contented people they were always friendly and hospitable to my daughter even when they found her ideas a little strange I passed on now from the third to the second world. To represent the second world. I choose the great Soviet astronomical Observatory at cell and chooks Kaya in the Caucasus Mountains. I visited the observatory in 1977 the 6 meter telescope the largest optical telescope in the world was then brand-new and just beginning to go into operation. I spent three days and nights up on the mountain and enjoyed my stay very much the astronomers that cell and shook Scalia were as friendly to me as the villagers of God were to my daughter. They talk frankly about the 6 meter telescope and its history 20 years earlier a committee of the Soviet Academy had met to discuss with the political authorities in Moscow the facilities for optical astronomy in the Soviet Union, the 6 meter telescope was their plan B. Plan a was to construct 405 modern observatories of modest size at optically excellent sites in Central Asia one example of a plan a Observatory already existed at Pura can in Soviet Armenia as everybody knows the Armenians are the Fool on he's in the Soviet Union. I also visited Burek on and saw there a 2 meter telescope with a Fulani by the name of mockery on in charge mockery on was using his telescope to great effect taking pictures of the sky with an objective grating and picking out objects that have strong emission in the blue and violet parts of the spectrum many of the most interesting objects in the universe were first identified by mockery on and still carry Mark Ariana's catalog numbers. Builder Khan has been for 30 years in the hands of foulon. He's who know how to do important science with limited means Unfortunately, there are no other observatories like build a con in the Soviet Union instead Plan B prevailed the assembled academicians decided to build the biggest telescope in the world. 6 meters was chosen as the mirror diameter because it had to be decisively bigger than the five meter telescope at Palomar. The manufacturer of the telescope was entrusted to a heavy industrial outfit in Leningrad, which had little previous experience with astronomy. The Observatory was under construction for 20 years when I visited it in 1977, one of the Soviet astronomers remark that the structure was built out of leftover pieces from dismantled battleships. Another another Soviet astronomer told me that this one instrument had set back the progress of optical astronomy in the Soviet Union by 20 years. It had absorbed for 20 years. The major part of the funds assigned to telescope building and it was in many ways already obsolete before it began to operate it deprived a whole generation of young astronomers of any opportunity to put their skills to use since then 11 years have gone by and the telescope is now setback Optical astronomy in the Soviet Union for another 11 years. No exciting observations have ever been done with it. One of the factors which the committee planning the observatory did not worry about was the zelan shook scale weather. I was on the mountain for three nights and did not see the sky even at Palomar one may be unlucky and run into a string of cloudy nights, but it's Ellen took Skye of the weather is consistently bad for the greater part of each year. The site is far too close to the high Caucasus Peaks, which regularly stir up storms and clouds the committee probably chose this site because it is easily accessible by Rail and Road the sites with good seeing in Central Asia may have been excluded because they have no Road suitable for the transport of a super massive structure. That's telling jokes Korea. The roads are good because there is a skiing Resort in the same Valley. Of course the snow which makes the area good for skiing also causes problems for the telescope when I was there a great mass of accumulated ice had blocked the action of the Dome. So the slit could not be opened even if the sky had been clear. The telescope would not be never would not have been able to see it. I gave a theoretical seminar to the astronomers in a lecture hall where the temperature was minus 10 Celsius The situation did not look good for anybody who wanted to do serious work in astronomy. During my stay there. I look for Clues which might explain how this scientific disaster had happened. I found the essential clue in the visitors Gallery. Some of you may have gone as tourists to visit. The five meter telescope at Palomar Palomar has a visitors Gallery a glass enclosed area inside the Dome where tourists can see the telescope but cannot pollute the air around it with the heat and humidity of their breathing at telling jokes care. They they also have a visitor visitors Gallery like the one at Palomar only about 10 times as big the Dome is much bigger than the Palomar Dome and the visitors Gallery is bigger, even than the Palomar Gallery would be if it were scaled up in proportion to the Dome and behind the visitors Gallery at cell and chooks Kya. They have a white wall for visiting dignitaries to write their names on Instead of a visitor's book. They have a wall and they invited me to write my name on the wall. The wall is huge about a hundred feet long and still I had a hard time finding an empty space big enough to write my name on every square inch of the wall is tightly packed with names. When I saw that wall, I understood for the first time what the observatory was for the government officials who decided to build the observatory 20 years earlier did not care much about astronomy. They didn't mind keeping the astronomers waiting for 20 years while the telescope was being built. Even when the telescope was finished. They were not in a hurry to get the Dome and stack so that the astronomers could get to work for those officials the things that mattered were the visitors gallery and the wall the visitors gallery and the wall must have been given high priority. They must have been in full swing for many years before the telescope was finished. For years and years before my visit busloads of school teachers and Factory workers and party chairman were trooping through that visitors Gallery admiring this latest Triumph of Soviet science and writing their names on the (00:12:53) wall. (00:12:56) Plan B. Gave the political authorities in Moscow what they wanted a tangible symbol of Soviet greatness plan a might have been better for science plan a might have saved the whole generation of astronomers from frustration, but with plan a the political authorities would not have had the satisfaction of building the biggest telescope in the world and there would have been no hundred foot wall for the visitors to write their names on. My third cautionary tale will be more familiar to us since it concerns. Our own world. The so-called first world the astronomers of the United States have made a habit of setting up a committee at the beginning of each decade to plan the facilities to be built in the subsequent 10 years. The committee's are called by the names of their chairman all of them distinguish the astronomers. The first was the Whitford committee which made plans for the 1960s next came the Greenstein committee, which dealt with the 1970s. I shall talk about the third committee the field committee which dealt with the 1980s and published its report in 1982. George field business is a good friend of mine and I don't have any don't want to to make this personal if I say nasty things about his committee the field committee had a number of sensible recommendations for ground-based astronomy, which I shall not discuss. I shall talk about the problems of Spaced astronomy, the launching of operation of astronomical telescopes in orbit. While the field committee was meeting in 1978 to 1980 the situation of American space-based astronomy was roughly as follows. We had to Active Space Telescope projects with very different characteristics. We had one balute Space Telescope and one Fulani Space Telescope. The bulu telescope was the Hubble Space Telescope a grand and elaborate instrument, which had already been recommended by the Greenstein committee 10 years earlier and was supposed to be launched by the shuttle if all went well in 1985. The Fulani telescope was a small and cheap instrument called International ultraviolet Explorer or iue which had not been recommended by the Greenstein Committee. In fact, it was not recommended by any other prestigious Committee of experts iue was launched in January 1978 before the field committee started work, and it has been from the beginning like my carry-ons telescope in Armenia a brilliant scientific success. It's still going strong and still doing excellent science after 10 years in space. In fact, we had a big celebration for its tenth birthday in February this year. In the in the talk, which I would have given to you about space about space science. I would have given I would have died of described in great detail. What are you he has been doing. It's a wonderful instrument. The beauty of it is it's so real user friendly. It's a you just go there to the test. It's a joint Enterprise of the Europeans and the United States. That's why it was done. So well, it's an international thing. It's it has a to ground stations one in Maryland at The Goddard space flight center and the other in Spain. So you just go to one of the ground stations and you sit there the console and you can point the telescope yourself and actually take the data in real time isn't very little red tape the when I was there there was a young woman astronomer. Doing her stop at the telescope and it's not very hard to get in. You don't have to wait for three years to get time and at the last count this this this telescope is by far the most productive scientific instrument in the world. As far as you can measure that by counting the numbers of published papers a terrible way to measure but still that's the way the authorities like to do it so that that that single telescope produced about three times as much science as any other instrument in the world because it operates 24 hours a day it sits in the sky somewhere above Brazil and communicates with the ground. It's a small thing at the hope the whole instrument weighs 900 pounds. It's 18 inches in diameter just a good handy size for a telescope as well as being used user-friendly. It's also Universe friendly in that. I mean, it's looking at the most interesting object. It's a Ultraviolet telescope which you can't see these things from the ground. They've discovered immense numbers of interesting things with that instrument. Anyhow, I won't do go. I'll skip the technical details and go on with the sociology the field committee. Considered two programs of space astronomy, which I will call plan a and plan B. I'm here interpreting. The committee's decisions in my own way. You don't find an explicit mention of plan a and plan B in the committee report plan a was a series of Explorer missions following the pattern of iue an Explorer Mission means a mission small enough and cheap enough to be paid for out of the NASA space science budget without any special exertions. Roughly speaking each Explorer Mission cost a hundred million dollars, which for NASA is small change that about one-tenth of the annual space science budget and about one hundredth of the total net NASA budget for the year. So that's something they can afford to do without special permission from Congress. If Explorer missions were given the highest priority that would be plan a that would mean it would be possible for NASA to sustain a launch rate of Astronomical Explorer per year in addition to explorers concerned with other things such as Earth sciences and plasma physics. There are many important things for astronomical explorers to do if we had one Explorer mission in x-ray astronomy one in infrared one in extreme ultraviolet one in astrometry that's measuring positions of stars, very precisely and one in radio interferometry. The scientific Harvest would be enormous if plan a had been adopted we could have had all of these things flying in the 1980s without any stretching of the NASA space science (00:19:34) budget (00:19:36) the field committee. However, like the committee's in God and in Moscow preferred Plan B. Plan B. Consists of a series of space missions known collectively as great observatories the Hubble Space Telescope was supposed to be the first great Observatory after that would come the gamma ray Observatory, which also was dependent on the shuttle for its launch and was then scheduled to go up in 1987. Next would be the advanced x-ray astrophysics facility familiarly known as ax F XF was in fact the highest priority item on the field committee lift since the committee assumed the first two great observatories the Hubble telescope and the gamma ray Observatory to be already in the bag. After acts up would come a fourth grade Observatory called ldr or large Deployable reflector the far infrared telescope with a mirror diameter in the 10-meter class. So plan B began with these four great Observatory missions plus a number of things left over from earlier earlier committee reports. The main emphasis in the field committee report was strongly on these great Observatory missions each great Observatory cost as much as five or ten explorers each requires protracted and difficult negotiations between NASA and various Committees of Congress to obtain the necessary funds each requires about a decade to complete its engineering Development and Construction after the funding has been authorized and each requires a shuttle launch to put it into orbit. As a consequence of the Challenger disaster of January 1986. No great. Observatories have been launched. The Hubble telescope is sitting idle in a warehouse costing just about as much to maintain on the ground as an Explorer Mission would cost to build and launch. The scientific return from the entire plan B program apart from some ground based activities, which I'm not talking about today has been zero just like in God just like insulin chokes Kaya. It's important to understand that the debacle of the great Observatory program is not simply a consequence of the shuttle accident. The great observatories were in deep trouble long before the Challenger crashed their troubles were technical as well as political the Hubble telescope the only great Observatory yet built had a long history of engineering difficulties delays and cost overruns accept the highest priority item on the field committee list has not yet been approved by Congress construction of access and the ldr has not been started even if the shuttle had remained alive and well, none of the missions recommended by the field committee and not already recommended by earlier committees could possibly have been launched in the 1980s. The fundamental flaw in the great Observatory program is ecological the great observatories are too big and too slow and too expensive to fit comfortably into the Ecology of science. They take so long to fund to build and to launch that they're unable to keep Pace with the rapid growth of science scientific discoveries emerge scientific ideas change scientific tools develop all within a year or two the great Observatory which takes 10 years to build is always being left behind the Ecology of science needs missions that are small cheap and quick enough to respond to new ideas and new questions and that remains true whether or not the shuttle crashes. So that's the end of my third cautionary Tale the model of these tails is clear. The nature of committees is the same whether it's revealed in an African village assembly in the academic politics of Moscow or of Washington the same drama is played whether it's the committee of Village Development the Soviet Academy or the field committee that takes the leading role the game of status seeking organized around committees is played in the same fashion in Africa in America. And in the Soviet Union, perhaps the aptitude for this game is a part of our genetic inheritance like the aptitude for speech and for music. The game has had profound consequences for science in science as in the Quest for a Village Water Supply big project spring enhanced status small projects. Do not in the competition for status big projects usually win whether or not they are scientifically Justified as the Committees of academic professionals compete for power and influence big science becomes more and more predominant over small science the large and fashionable squeezes out the small and unfashionable the space shuttle squeezes out the modest and scientifically more useful Expendable launcher the great observatories squeezes out the Explorer the centralized at Dakshin system squeezes out the village well, Fortunately, the American academic system is pluralistic and chaotic enough. So that first-rate science can still be done in on a small scale in spite of the committee's in odd Corners in out-of-the-way universities and in obscure industrial Laboratories are fool Anis are still at work. So I'm tempted to say the moral of these stories. Is that committees are the root of all evil. Just abolish committees and see how science will flourish. But of course life is not that simple my stories were chosen with a certain bias. I could tell you some other stories about committees, which did not do so badly. In the Ecology of science as in the Ecology of nature, there must be a balance between small and big Enterprises. We cannot all be full-on. He's even committees have a place in the ecology. So to be fair, let me tell you next the story in which plan B turned out to be right. I go back to the Greenstein report of 1972 the predecessor of the Field Report like other committees the Greenstein committee recommended a plan B in which the highest priority item was. Also the biggest. The highest priority in that report was given to the very large array or vla a huge y-shaped array of radio telescopes to be constructed in the New Mexico desert near Socorro the scientific purpose of the vla was to provide pictures of remote and complex radio sources with an angular resolution surpassing the best optical telescopes many of you have probably seen those beautiful multicolored vla pictures of radio galaxies and Supernova remnants on the covers of magazines such as Scientific American and sky and Telescope those pictures are sufficient proof that the vla has been an outstanding scientific success. It is now without question the finest general-purpose radio telescope in the world. It has fulfilled abundantly the Greenstein committees expectations even more remarkably in comparison with other large projects. The vla is cost-effective after the Greenstein committee recommended it in 1972. It was built for a total cost of 78 million dollars and finished in 1980 on schedule and within budget in performance. It is comparable with a great Observatory, but in cost it is comparable with an explorer. There are many reasons for the outstanding success of the vla. First of all, it is large but not disproportionately large it forms a part of a worldwide community of instruments some large and some small which conveniently share the work of exploring the radio Sky the vla did not absorb. The Lion's Share of the funds spent on astronomy in the 1970s. It did not squeeze out smaller Enterprises. In other words, it found its Niche at the top of the food chain in a well-balanced ecology. Another reason for the vla success is that it was built quickly enough so that it was not overtaken by newer Technologies. A third reason is that Jesse Greenstein himself was acutely aware of the danger of big project squeezing out small ones. He is in his own professional life a Fulani. He likes to study small dim peculiar Stars, which nobody else is interested in he made sure that in spite of the vla small-scale science got its fair share of emphasis in the Greenstein report to achieve this balance between big and small. He had to threaten to quit as committee chairman. So I quote now a few sentences from a personal account by Jesse Greenstein which he wrote 12 years later. The vla is successful its story is a useful one for aspiring rap promoters of large projects. The issue of balance between individual and natural National goals is indirectly addressed in the Greenstein report. During our final discussions. It caused me intense discomfort. I resigned for a time as chairman since I was uncertain that I could support all the recommendations. That survey report is schizoid as published. It says build large New National instrument large New National instruments, but in Brackets, please do not neglect to support University scientists that parenthetical phrase may be intellectually killer correct, but it is impotent. It has no political or budgetary clout. The individualistic style of my own research was possible that institutions founded to pursue new unplanned and often changing goals. That system was good. I remain skeptical that it is completely outmoded. So I leave Jesse grew that's the end of the quote. I leave Jesse Greenstein musing over the possibly destructive effects of that Juggernaut, which he helped to set in motion. The moral of this story is if you have to have a committee to a portion resources between large and small projects make sure the chairman is as wise and as sensitive as Jesse Greenstein. My next story is a more recent one during the last two years the community of molecular biologists in the United States has been struggling with the question whether to set up a large project to map and sequence the human genome the human genome means the set of 46 chromosomes that we carry in each of our cells which determines our her hereditary characteristics. So the human genome in principle tells the human egg how to make a human being Following the example of the astronomers the molecular biologists appointed a committee. The chairman of the committee is Bruce Albert's the micro biologist at the University of California in San Francisco. The committee published its report just a few weeks ago the report marks a turning point in the history of biology. It's the first time that biologists have had to face the possibility that big science might come to dominate their lives as it has dominated the lives of astronomers and physicists. The Albert's committee, like other committees had its plan a and plan B plan a was to continue unchanged as far as possible the existing way of doing things with mapping and sequencing activities carried on in decentralized fashion by many groups of scientists investigating particular problems of human genetics. I should say I might just explain that the difference between mapping and sequencing sequencing means to determine in detail the precise arrangement of bases along the genes that is its to spell out the letters of the genetic code Base by base along the chromosomes see acgt atg these these you probably have seen those long strings of letters which are so sort of the machine language in which the genes are programmed. And so that's what sequencing is mapping is something less. Tails, it's finding out where the genes are on the chromosomes finding out what their functions are. It's providing a road map for the geneticist to tell where the genes are what the what kinds of DNA occupies positions on the various chromosomes. So it's the sort of a large-scale map rather than no. I mean a small scale map of the chromosome rather than a large-scale map. It's a map of the chromosome with not quite so high resolution. So you don't see the individual basis, but you see the general structure and function of how it (00:33:57) works. (00:34:00) Anyhow in plan a there would be no centralized big project. No drive to sequence the three billion bases of the human genome in their entirety irrespective of their genetic significance. Plan B. Would be the opposite Plan B would establish an industrial scale facility for sequencing and would aim to have the whole job done everything sequenced genes garbage everything else sequenced in detail by an army of technicians within a few years in conjunction with the sequencing project. They would also be a large centralized mapping project using the sequence data to identify all known and unknown human genes with precisely known loci in the genome. Plan B. Would require a large new expenditure of public funds with all the attendant problems of deciding who should administer the funds and who should receive them. According to Bruce Albert's the members of his committee were at the beginning sharply split with some favoring plan a and some Plan B. He himself claimed to be neutral but he is like LED Like Jesse Greenstein a strong defender of the importance of small science. He is in fact studying with a team of colleagues and students the details of the Machinery of DNA replication. He is by temperament closer to plan a than to plan B nevertheless. He observed during the year that his committee was meeting that the opinions of the members converged upon a plan. That was neither plan a nor Plan B. But a compromise somewhere in between the compromise plan was recommended unanimously in the committee's report after one member Walter Gilbert. The only irreconcilable advocate of Plan B had resigned roughly speaking. The recommended compromise plan is 3/4 a and 1/4 be so the Albert committee recommendations are as follows first no crash program to sequence the genome second mapping and sequencing activities to continue to be conducted by local groups as they are today. Third mapping and sequencing to be driven by the needs of genetic science and medicine with non-human and human genomes treated alike. Fourth mapping to have higher priority than sequencing. So far the recommendations are pure plan a but now comes a little bit of Plan B V substantial new money estimated at 200 million dollars a year for 15 years. So it adds up to 3 billion dollars. To be spent in support of mapping and sequencing sixth a substantial fraction of this money to be spent on development of new technology for radically cheaper and faster sequencing 7th centralized facilities to be set up for the two Services, which require them first a databank of DNA sequences to be collected from all over the world and stored on computers and a clone Bank of actual pieces of DNA that have been mapped or sequenced. So this data bank and the Clone Bank should be fully documented and accessible to the world community of scientists. Those should be the only Central facilities that have to be built. In my opinion these recommendations embody considerable wisdom. They are politically and technically feasible. The new money that they require is only three percent of the annual ni in NIH budget for biology and medical research and of that three percent only a fraction will go into big centralized facilities. The new facilities are not on such a scale as to squeeze out the small teams of scientists who will be doing the bulk of the work in human genetics. In spite of my bias against committees. I have to admit that the Albert's committee like the Greenstein committee made the right choices. The Albert's committee is non-committal about the main question. It was originally asked to decide whether and when the entire Human Genome should be sequenced. The committee says the complete sequence should not be a primary objective. The complete sequence should be done when and only when we have the technology developed to do the job cheaply and quickly when it can be done cheaply go ahead and do it but don't waste large amounts of money and Manpower on an objective, which is not scientifically essential. It seems to me there's a good analogy between the complete Human Genome sequence in biology and the Palomar Sky survey in astronomy. The Palomar Sky survey is some of you may know is a complete set of photographs of the northern half of the sky taken with a modest size 48 48 inch MIT telescope on Mount Palomar during the years 1949 to 1956. Was later extended to the southern hemisphere using a similar telescope in Australia at every major observatory in the world. There's a set of these Palomar Sky survey plate copied from the original plates at Palomar. The Palomar plates are enormously useful to astronomers before you decide to point the telescope at something in the sky. You have a look at the Palomar plate to see what that piece of sky looks like the plates are used by many astronomers also for statistical work for counting stars and galaxies and clusters and measuring their distributions in the sky when we have a complete Human Genome. It will be used in the same way a complete genome sequence of a of a complete Human Genome every microbiological or medical research laboratory will have a copy of the sequence handy when you want to study any particular Gene you first look at the sequence to see what the neighboring DNA looks like and the sequence as a whole will be a primary. mystical studies of human genetics and evolution the Palomar Sky survey was remarkably cheap. The entire project was funded privately by the national geographical Society without any government money it cost all together about a million dollars. And you can buy a complete set of Sky survey plates for about 2,000. Before this myth telescope was invented by Bernhard Schmidt in 1930. It would have made no sense to undertake a sky survey Bernard Smith by the way was a one-armed lens grinder very a very colorful character who had this genius for for understanding how to build telescopes. He had no degree and no no, no, you know no University degree in no, no academic background. He was just a great just a great inventor of telescopes the invention of the Smith camera reduced the cost of photographing large areas of Sky by a factor of a hundred before the Schmidt camera was available a complete Sky the sky very Sky survey would have taken about a hundred and fifty years to do and would have cost probably a couple of billion dollars. But before it was done after the Schmidt camera came along a small Of dedicated and hardworking people could finish the job in seven years project became so obviously cost effective that the necessary funds could be raised without much difficulty. It's likely that the human genome sequencing project will have a similar history at present. The cost of sequencing is about one dollar per base since the genome has 3 billion bases the entire sequence using present day technology would cost three billion dollars to do at that price. It makes no sense. But one day some clever inventor will find the equivalent of the Schmidt camera. If and when the cost of sequencing comes down to one cent per base, the whole sequence will cost 30 million dollars and then we'll be able to afford to do not just a single Human Genome but complete sequences of genomes of men and women with a variety of medical histories. Not to mention chimpanzees mice fruit flies frogs and bacteria the Albert's committee wisely refrains from recommending any fixed timetable for the mapping of sequencing program how fast it goes will depend on discoveries and inventions still to be made they are essential recommendation for dealing with the situation of immense promise and immense uncertainty is to stay flexible to avoid premature commitment to any rigid program that is a recommendation that ought to apply just as well to physics and astronomy as it does to biology unfortunately in the history of committees planning scientific programs such wisdom is where is rare? So I finished with my final Story the super suit the superconducting super Collider. That that that's a long story, which is not yet finished, of course, so I'll skip most of the technical details and just give you a brief brief summary of it. The SSC. The superconducting super collider is a proposed machine for doing high energy physics. It was recommended to the United States government in 1983 by a committee of famous particle physicists. Most of them my friends the committee is called he Pap high energy physics advisory panel. The SSC was formally approved by President Reagan in 1987, but has not yet been funded by Congress. I won't go into the technical details of it. The SSC is a ring-shaped proton accelerator of stupendous size. It will be of course the biggest accelerator in the world and will reach the highest energy. It will cost about five billion dollars and will take about 10 years to build after all the preliminary work of site selection and land acquisition is done. The SSC is clearly an extreme example of Plan B. The question I want to address is whether SSC is a good plan B like the very large array or a disastrous plan be like cell and Chuck's Kaya. Nobody can be sure of the answer to that question. I don't claim to be infallible when I make guesses about the future but to cut a long story short. I answered the question by saying that the SSC shows all the characteristic symptoms of a bad plan B, it's bad politically because it is being pushed by economic interests and by considerations of national Prestige having little to do with scientific Merit. It is bad educationally because it Paul's money into a project which offers little opportunity for Creative involvement of students. It is bad scientifically because the proton-proton collisions which it produces a peculiarly difficult to interpret that they are they are very they're very messy and complicated interactions and it's very hard to diagnose and see what's interesting. It is bad ecologically because it squeezes out other avenues of research which are likely to lead to more cost-effective accelerators. None of these arguments by itself is conclusive but to me they make together an overwhelming case against the SSC in summary. I think there is a serious risk that the SSC will be as great a setback to particle physics as the zelan chooks Kea Observatory has been to astronomy. But if I say this is foolish, I must produce a practical alternative. I must tell you my plan a plan a does not mean giving up on high energy physics. It does not mean that we stop building accelerators. It does not mean we stop building big accelerators. It does not mean that we lose interest in superstrings and top quarks and all those those those beautiful things. My colleagues are working on my plan a is rather like the plan recommended by the human genome committee. It says, let's put more money into exploring new ideas for building caustic cost-effective accelerators. Let's put let's build several clever big accelerators instead of one done big accelerator. Let us measure the value of an accelerator by scientific output rather than by its energy input and meanwhile while the technology for bigger and cheaper accelerators is being developed. Let us put more money into using effectively the accelerators we already have The Advocates of the SSC often talk as if the universe were one-dimensional with energy is the only Dimension either you have the highest energy or you have nothing. But in fact the world of particle physics is at least three dimensional there might be more than three dimensions, but I'll talk only about the three most important ones the three important dimensions in a particle physics experiment our energy accuracy and Rarity. Every big experimental Discovery happens on some kind of a frontier between known and unknown territory. If a discovery results from observing things at higher energy than anybody's done before then I say it's on the energy Frontier. If a discovery results from measuring things with higher accuracy than it's been done before then I say it's on the accuracy Frontier. If a discovery results from observing events that are rarer than anybody has seen before then I say it is on the Rarity Frontier in some rough sense. The three Frontiers are equally promising places to look for laws of nature. In fact, I did a little study of the Nobel prizes that have been given out for particle physics in the last 30 years and identified which Frontier those experiments were on and it turned out that it came out exactly even 3323234 the energy accuracy and Rarity Frontiers So that's what I mean when I say the world of particle physics is three-dimensional and not one dimensional only one-third of the frontier lies in the direction of higher energy. So my plan a for the future of particle physics is a program giving roughly equal emphasis to the three Frontiers. Plan a consists of a mixture of many different programs looking for opportunities to do great science on all the three Frontiers plan a lacks the grand Simplicity and predictability of the superconducting super collider and that is to my mind the main reason for preferring it there is no illusion more dangerous to science. Then the belief that the progress of science is predictable that it can be planned by a committee. If you look for Nature's secrets in Only One Direction, you're likely to miss the most important Secrets those that you did not have enough imagination to predict. Thank you. Yeah, well, I don't remember whether I ever said that but still I'll take your word for it. But I mean it certainly is true. That science is it's a skill. It's a trade that you have to learn by doing it and the sooner you start the better. It's I mean the third that the important thing is to dig you dig your hands and get your hands dirty on some real problem. Don't don't be a philosopher at a young age be a be a Workman and get the door get the feel of Science by actually do it doing something and that's what I had in mind. And whether the problem is pure or applied doesn't matter to be involved in inventing something for industry is just as good a training just as good introduction to science as doing something very pure in an academic Think Tank. The space station is certainly a prime example of Plan B. It's but it has it has a characteristic that as far as I can tell nobody really wants it. It's It was I have of course. I'm very biased of course as you can tell but I sat on a committee which was Evaluating the space station and we who's a committee of scientists and we were supposed to come up with a report telling how wonderful the space station would be for Science and NASA gave us a list of 40 scientific experiments that that they could do on the space station, which made it it's into such a great scientific instrument. So we went very carefully through these 40 missions. We found the 38 out of 40 could be done better without the space station the remaining two were involved the effect of long duration flight in the in space on human beings. And those of course could be done very well in the space station. And so we said that's fine if that's what you want to do, but don't pretend that it's any good for the rest of science. The program worked well when it was divided quite clearly into two parts as you say the part which was an international sporting event. That was the Apollo missions to the Moon which were I thought wonderful. This were a real Adventure. It was a real human Enterprise which people could participate in in the public supported it very generously and on the other hand. There was the space science program, which only took one tenth of the money and also flourished at the same time. I think that's the way it should be that what about one-tenth of the budget is what the Congress is willing to spend without public support. And I think that's right. That's the way it should be. I'm you shouldn't expect to have public support for science missions. They shouldn't be so expensive that they need public support of that kind. And so that's how I would put the balance now, of course, we came to grief because first of all the shuttle just wasn't that kind of an adventure. It doesn't it's just it's a Greyhound bus, whereas the Earth the astronauts need is of course a high-performance sports car and the astronauts really can't any fun with the shuttle that was what was lacking in the that that was what was lacking in the program, which I think the public certainly missed very much. And so I think if we're going to go ahead we should have recognition of the fact that it is an international sporting event and it should be justified on that basis. So what they should do in my opinion is to have a program for a manned lunar base a permanent base on the moon, which is something we could do quite well with the resources we have that would be I think attractive enough to get public support of been if you have people on the moon they really have something to do. It's not like just sitting in a tin can going around the Earth. On the moon they could find out how to live how to dig in and create a habitat how to grow potatoes or other things that they needed in order to survive how to make it it self-supporting Venture and I think the public would respond to that and into the bargain then we would get the 10% of funds for the space missions over the science missions, which I'm primarily interested it with 10% of the budget. We could do plenty of good science missions.