Ever since the 2008 presidential election, people around the world have been speculating about what the change in U.S. leadership may mean for them. The Institute is no exception, and many Caltech faculty and administrators have been trying to gauge how the Obama administration will influence the ways in which the Institute carries out teaching and research. With Obama taking swift action in many areas just weeks into his presidency, Caltech News asked several members of the Caltech community whose agendas are likely to be directly affected by changes in government policy to share their thoughts about how science and engineering research and education may change over the next four years.

JEAN-LOU CHAMEAU became Caltech’s president in 2006.

President Obama’s vision for science and technology and the role they play in society is exhilarating. He shares our belief in the importance of science in policy making and of scientific research to the health of the economy and general welfare of the country. The president’s closest advisors are talented and experienced, reflecting a breadth of knowledge across a wide range of science, engineering, and social science disciplines. It should be a good time to be a scientist or an engineer in Washington!

While the economy, of course, is an urgent concern, I expect we are going to see sustained, long-term investments in science and technology during his presidency. As an early positive indicator, the stimulus package recently passed by Congress includes significant investments in federal agencies supporting research, such as DOE, NSF, NIH, NASA, and others. I’m glad we have momentum in our efforts at Caltech to focus on science and technology that will have a disproportionate impact on society in areas such as energy, the environment, earth science, and medicine. While we have budget concerns of our own, I believe our strategy for maintaining our investments in research and education, combined with our vision for enhancing our research in these areas, will put us in the right place at the right time to make the difference that the new administration is looking for.

Finally, I’m hoping President Obama, his cabinet and advisors, and our leaders in Congress will take actions that will inspire generations young and old to engage in science and engineering as a form of service to our nation.

CHARLES ELACHI PhD ’71, a longtime member of the Institute faculty, has been director of JPL since 2001.

The Obama administration is clearly putting more emphasis on funding scientific research and having scientific inputs to key decision making. This is clear by the appointment of highly respected scientists/engineers to key positions in the administration, including the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy; secretary of energy; and administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In addition, the Recovery and Stimulus Initiative, independent of how it is perceived economically or politically, includes significant funds for scientific and technological investments, reflecting the philosophy of the administration.

Specifically, in the space program there is renewed emphasis on Earth observation from space to help better understand and to quantify the changes in our environment. A recent decadal plan for Earth science and observation, which was developed under the aegis of the National Academies, is getting renewed interest and stronger financial support. This will enable NASA and NOAA to field a number of space programs to continue long-term observations and put in place more observational capabilities to better inform policy makers about how to address issues of global change.

On inauguration day, many members of the Caltech community turned out to watch the parade and presidential swearing-in ceremony on TV monitors while enjoying breakfast in the Chandler cafeteria.

DAVID BALTIMORE, Caltech’s president from 1997 to 2006, is currently the Institute’s Millikan Professor of Biology, and past president (2007) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The Obama administration has a full plate. With the economy in tatters, the involvements abroad, and the promises he made for a domestic reinvigoration, there is simply not enough money to do everything he wants, at least not all at the same time. Meanwhile, he has put together quite a wonderful team, with outstanding people in so many jobs. Each will want to find the funds to optimally carry out his or her function. Some will be frustrated.

Looked at from a Caltech-centric viewpoint, we care about being able to move forward the frontiers of science and technology. The previous administration squeezed science, often funding short-term investments rather than building the base of knowledge and innovation. In the all-important area of energy research, the administration simply underfunded it and did not support the types of programs that would lead to breakthroughs in generating or storing energy.

Obama has promised a huge program in energy research. He has appointed a Science Advisor and a Secretary of Energy who, in the past, have both encouraged major efforts toward harnessing energy sources that will make us independent of fossil fuels. Will they be able to realize their dreams? I think this is one area where Obama will deliver. If he funnels the bulk of the funds through the Department of Energy, its new head, Dr. Steven Chu, will have to reorganize the whole research effort of the department to make it more innovative in its thinking and more flexible and nimble in its procedures. This is a tall order for a mere physicist, but Steve is an impressive guy and I would bet on him. For Caltech this should be positive but we should, perhaps, more aggressively position ourselves to play an important role in energy research.
Obama appears to understand the importance of basic research and did promise increased funding for NSF and other science agencies. Had he chosen a Science Advisor who had a wider perspective on science, I would be a little more sanguine about the ability to follow through on this promise. While global competitiveness is a driving force for maintaining U.S. dominance of basic science, I suspect that this investment will not be the first one he chooses to make.

As to my field, biomedical research, the NIH budget was doubled over five years, finishing in the first two Bush Jr. years. However, the budget then went flat to slightly down, leading to a 13 percent real decline in purchasing power. The doubling led many universities, especially medical schools, to expand greatly, bringing many new labs on line. Thus, while the doubling made new money available, the competition for it rapidly heated up and the declining funds available have made the funding situation intolerable. We need either more money or fewer investigators, along with more effective review processes.

Do I expect more money? Yes I do, but not on the scale that is needed to keep up with the increased demand. I also believe that the biomedical research community has to do a better job of selling itself—the budget was doubled but Congress finds it hard to see that much was changed. Meanwhile, we have actually seen remarkable advances in the field, led by the newly acquired power of genomics. We have a lot to sell. Also, biotechnology has been a huge American success, fueled by biomedical research. Funding biomedical research therefore has a competitiveness rationale, along with the promise of better, and cheaper health care.

Although John Holdren, the new Science Advisor, is a very smart and effective person, he is a physicist by training and an energy guru by adoption. Thus his choice for co-directors of PCAST (President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology) is a very hopeful sign for biomedical scientists. Harold Varmus and Eric Lander, premier biomedical scientists, are two of the best leaders we could wish to have in these positions. They will see to it that the needs of biomedical research are not forgotten. At this writing a new head of NIH has not been named but we can hope that it is a person who can work closely with the others and rejuvenate that agency.

One place where we have now seen a clear-cut change in policy is in the area of human stem cell research. Obama has just lifted the Bush administration’s restrictions to allow research on a wider range of cells than previously. Whether he will completely free the community from the shackles of ideology remains to be seen. There are still strong forces of opposition to research on human embyros—including derivation of new embryonic stem cell lines—and on using somatic cell nuclear transfer into human eggs to produce cell lines (not today demonstrated). To pursue these two activities would require a change in law, bringing Congress into the equation.

In summary, I believe that Obama understands that science is at the heart of American competitiveness and wants to see large increases in funding for basic science (and also for science education). However, finding the money needed to support the various initiatives will be difficult until the economic stimulus takes effect and our overseas commitments stop taking such huge allotments. Of course, then we will have to pay back the money we borrowed for the stimulus and we will have to rebuild our over-stretched military forces, so the good old days are not likely to return soon.

NATE LEWIS ’77, MS ’77, Caltech’s Argyros Professor of Chemistry, has been a faculty member since 1988, and has a long-standing interest and research program in alternative energy technologies and initiatives, particularly solar energy.

Energy is the most important scientific and technological challenge facing our planet in the 21st century. There is now widespread consensus that our traditional approaches to addressing energy needs—fossil-fuel consumption coupled with energy conservation—will not be sufficient to meet future energy demands. Energy security and environmental security have come to the forefront as both global and national priorities.

Although the world is in an economic slump now, that is almost certainly temporary, and with populations still growing, we can expect a tripling of energy demand by 2050. That will lead to more CO2 pumped into the atmosphere, leading to even more profound climate changes than we are experiencing now. Without immediate action, the world is headed for the biggest uncontrolled experiment in human history. The environmental effects created by the CO2 we produce over the next 40 years will last for thousands of years—a timescale comparable to that of recorded human history. Within the next 20 years, we either solve these problems or the world will never be the same.

Finding those solutions within that narrow window hinges upon our ability to make fundamental advances in science and technology. The Obama administration seems to be aware of the dimensions of the problem and committed to addressing it, but I hope that the President will do more than talk. We should be pouring just as much R&D money into energy as we currently expend on biomedicine and health. We’re currently spending about $1 billion a year on total energy R&D, but this is a multitrillion-dollar-a-year business. We have to see real funding support and real action.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be doing things now. In fact, we should be doing everything we know how to do now. We should be increasing both our investments in and our reliance on wind energy and solar thermal energy. We should be providing subsidies and incentives for all sorts of renewables and testing whether or not clean coal works. But at the same time that we’re developing these cheaper technologies, we need to be working on the next generation of solar cells. If we can’t figure out how to store sunlight, it doesn’t matter how many solar cells are out there because we’re never going to get energy at night from them. We can’t just take existing technologies and get to where we need to be—we need to commit to supporting the kind of research that will lead to large-scale deployable energy-storage breakthroughs. So we have to be both working on bringing a “faster, better, cheaper” approach to the things that we already know how to do now, and we have to invest in the R&D that will really make it possible to develop a robust and comprehensive new system centered on next-generation clean-energy technology.

Now, President Obama has said that he wants an 80 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, but to reach a goal like that is not a party, to quote my friend [New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author] Tom Friedman. That’s a revolution.

In fact, if we really intend to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 80 or 90 percent from 1990 levels, we might as well go the whole way and cut them by as close to 100 percent as possible. Until somebody works out how to build an electrically powered airplane, or some other alternative, we will continue to rely on fossil fuel to power our jets—which includes our air force—and our ships, unless we turn to nuclear power for every seafaring vessel in the world. But nearly everything else is going to have to run on systems that are completely different from anything that we rely on today. Obviously, this calls for an R&D revolution on a truly unprecedented scale.

Our new energy secretary, Steve Chu, understands this, and I believe that in appointing Chu, President Obama is also signaling that his intentions are very serious. Chu is a Nobel laureate in physics, who probably wouldn’t have gone to DOE without at least some assurance that there would be backing for more science and technology and R&D in energy. But while even the previous administration had proposed, in the past several years, modest increases—on the order of a few hundred million dollars—in the DOE’s Office of Science R&D budgets, in the end they were zeroed by Congress. So even modest budget increases proposed by the Bush administration haven’t made it through to the light of day. And we just see now in the recent stimulus bill that the DOE’s amount for R&D for basic energy sciences is not very large. This is not having your money go where your intentions are, and so part of the challenge facing Secretary Chu and the administration will be to convince Congress to actually fund these things. Otherwise it’s just talk.

We can look at what’s happened nationally in biomedical research as a model. Over the last few decades, the growth of the NIH has completely changed the landscape of what research universities, including Caltech, are doing in the biological sciences. You can argue that if this country really intends to get serious about energy and sustainability, it needs to make the same commitment to R&D there, significantly changing the footprint and emphasis of all research universities. Now we are seeing some of that starting to happen. Stanford has received a quarter of a billion dollars from an industrial consortium for energy research. Berkeley has a $50 million-a-year project under way just on biofuels. It’s not unreasonable to extrapolate from that and say that if our government really wanted to get serious about energy R&D, you would have significant chunks of faculty research programs nationwide focusing in a cohesive way around clean and sustainable energy technology. These would include very basic research programs aimed at better understanding the interactions of light with matter, intermediate things like building better solar cells, as well as more applied, short-term projects like using JPL expertise in robotics to build solar thermal towers that will self-assemble in the desert. The whole spectrum of activities would be fostered if we had a serious effort in energy R&D.

Am I hopeful? I’m guarded. I think the gap between intention and action is pretty clear, but I also think that the president and the public seem to understand this. It’s a question of whether or not Congress is going to authorize the funding to start closing the gap.

As for the impact that all of this could have on Caltech, I think that as a campus, we have yet to embrace our potential in this type of energy R&D. We’re doing some things, but as they say in the movie Jerry Maguire, “Show me the money!” Princeton has just received a $100 million gift to establish a sustainability institute; Stanford another $100 million from a single individual to add to the quarter billion they already have in industrial funding. So when you have places building institutes and explicitly emphasizing this as an area for their research efforts and competing to attract the faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates who want to be part of those fields and really have something to bring to the table, you need to decide if you’re going to play in this arena too. If you’re going to play, you have to play with the same face cards as everybody else.

I know there are significant numbers of faculty here—at least a dozen—who are interested in working in this area and would come together to work on it. And a collaboration of this type involving a dozen Caltech faculty would be a stupendous undertaking with the potential to make extraordinary contributions. In many respects I think we are ready to move ahead.

FRED FARINA, MS ’92, is assistant vice president for Caltech’s Office of Technology Transfer, which protects and manages the intellectual property developed on campus and at JPL and is responsible for the licensing and transfer of technologies from Caltech and JPL to the commercial sector.

Our hope is that the Obama administration’s emphasis on creating jobs and putting more money into research, at least in the energy and green fields, will affect technology transfer at Caltech in a lot of good ways.

First, there will be more research dollars that can generate inventions. But most likely it is going to take several years in these areas to figure out how to do this, and how to match the funding to the appropriate researchers who can then create inventions. So we hope that, as part of this process, there will also be more funding available for new companies in these areas—in the energy area, in particular—and that therefore we’ll be able to transfer our intellectual property (IP) into new companies.

In the health-care area, we are hoping that the reform will create a strong demand for innovation and that we can participate in modernizing the system by transferring our inventions to the public through technology commercialization. In the last few years, there have been a large number of inventions and new start-ups in the biomedical area, an area that will likely remain strong in the next few years, particularly if the administration follows through with comprehensive health-care reform. These infusions will not impact us as directly as the investment in energy. The new administration has publicly stated that we will need to invent ourselves out of the energy issues we are facing, and that will likely translate into research dollars being put to work in renewable energies to achieve energy independence. Hopefully, additional funds will be dedicated to commercializing research results so that inventions made in academia can be turned into technologies available to the public.

Concerning the effects of the new economic stimulus package, the part of the stimulus that basically puts an extra $400 into individuals’ pockets isn’t really going to affect Caltech. However, the package also includes incentives and other initiatives related to clean energy research, and that may help us.
One of the key aspects of all the technology-transfer activities is the Bayh-Dole Act, which was passed in 1980 by Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on his last day in office. The act said that universities that receive federal funding have the option to own the IP developed with this funding. Before that, the government owned these inventions. And because the government is not in the business of licensing and commercializing, most of these inventions sat on a shelf.

Inauguration-day crowds in Washington, D.C., filled out posters expressing their hopes and ideas for the new administration.

Because of Bayh-Dole, universities have begun to protect their IP and create new companies, and, supported by federally funded research, develop products that then benefit the public. There are now drugs out there, as well as various other devices and inventions in the public domain that did not exist before this act became law. The act has had a very good impact on the public and also a very deep economic impact globally.

There are some detractors who believe that because the public essentially pays for these inventions, the rights should be available to anyone to use. But when people have experience in this field, they understand that university research is very early-stage and that it takes lots of funding to get from idea to invention to product. And if you are not able to give exclusivity to someone through a patent and license for a period of time, nobody is going to invest the money required to actually bring their concept to market as a product—people have to have some incentive to do it and reward for the great risk taken.

We have some concerns that Bayh-Dole may be under threat. There have been rumors that people close to the Obama team—at least one person who is an advisor—may not have such a favorable view of this vital act, and may want to change and adapt it after almost 30 years. I believe it has been working—maybe not perfectly, but very well—and that modifying it may open the door for the detractors to make deep changes.

Overall, I think the impact of the Obama administration will be felt sooner on the research side, where there will be money available that scientists can apply for. But from our side, in the start-up area, a great deal will depend on the financial markets. The market for initial public offerings is almost nonexistent right now. And large companies are not as active as they were a few years ago in looking to license technologies from universities, because the funds are not there.

Still, you always have to look at things in a positive light. These times are an
opportunity to rethink the technology-transfer business, to make it more efficient and more robust, and hopefully at the end of the process you come out stronger, ready for a bull market, with some lessons learned to be ready for the next downturn. It will require everyone to be on their toes as far as efficiency and cutting waste are concerned.

MARJORY GOODING, director of International Offices, oversees the process that enables foreign students and scholars to come to Caltech. For more on her role and the impact of 9/11 on these Caltech programs, go here.

Caltech has always been devoted to international cooperation and collaboration in scientific research. Of note is the fact that our student body (about 35 percent), postdoctoral researchers (about 55 percent), and faculty are highly international. Caltech attracts the best and the brightest in the world. The past eight years have seen dramatic fluctuations in the bureaucratic environment in which we operate. Following the events of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration reformatted the old Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and renamed it the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). While many of the functions remained the same, the tenor of our interactions with the bureaucracy changed. There were layers of added security checks and considerable time delays for people seeking visas to come to Caltech. Research was interrupted, and prospective students and researchers were discouraged in their attempts to work their way through the red tape. Current international students and scholars stayed away from international conferences because they feared visa delays. With the help of time, the Institute’s administration, Congressman Adam Schiff (D-California), whose 29th district includes Caltech, and considerable advocacy efforts, the tension has eased somewhat, and international applications have returned to near normal.

What might an Obama administration bring? We are hopeful that the policy level discussions on the power and efficacy of “public diplomacy” will translate into less red tape and a healthier approach to working with our international partners. The Department of State sets the tone for this kind of diplomacy and administers one of the visa programs utilized by Caltech. But bureaucracy always lags behind policy and, even as the Bush administration left office, we saw last-minute regulatory moves to restrict access. It will take some time to recalibrate and change course. In the meantime, members of the Caltech community will work hard to keep partnerships operational, international students and scholars coming to campus, and to keep the ideas flowing. Caltech is, of course, a full partner in security concerns and efforts. The key for policy makers and regulation writers is to strike the right balance.