Aspectos Éticos

Wanted: PhD scientist to work as self-directed seeker of truth. Successful candidate will determine own work topics. Excellent laboratory and computer facilities. Competitive salary and benefits package. EOE/AA, M/F/D/V.

Scientists will tell you in a second that this job ad is fictitious. Yet many of the same scientists will turn around and tell you that they are self-directed. What is the reality? Who determines the topics that individual scientists work on?

Answering this question about scientists is important for understanding the politics of

professional work in general, because scientists constitute a land of baseline. Salaried doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers and so on are certainly no freer than scientists in deciding what problems they will take on at work. So if the scientist's curiosity is externally directed, then whose isn't?

To ask who determines the topics that individual scientists work on is to ask who in society scientists serve in their work. This is not only a fascinating question in and of itself, but it is also crucial to understanding the politics of professional qualification in science. For only by

understanding the actual role that the rank-and-file scientist plays in society can one make sense of the criteria by which an individual is deemed qualified to work as a scientist.

To see who determines research topics for physicists, we must look at industry, government and universities, the institutions that each year hire almost all of the 1,100 to 1,300 people who receive PhD degrees in physics from U.S. universities.1

Upon graduation, many of the degree recipients get temporary jobs known as "postdoctoral fellowships," in order to gain further research experience and to be in a position to get a good permanent job.2 _{These short-term appointments are usually limited to one, two or three years and}

are usually at universities or federally funded research and development centers such as Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The "postdoc" typically works extremely long hours assisting in an already-established research project directed by a professor or research group leader. There is little pretense that the postdoc has much of a say in defining the topic of investigation. As a result the experience is often disappointing. One university postdoc wrote the following assessment on an American Physical Society survey questionnaire:

The postdoc . . . has become a plentiful and captive source of cheap labor for doing the research of and advancing the careers of established academic people while offering little or no opportunities for advancement to the participants and making it more difficult for the participant to later find permanent work in a different field where professional prospects may be more promising.3

Graduates who don't become postdocs often go directly into potentially permanent jobs. Most of these jobs are in industry, and the rest are in academic institutions and government.4 _Industrial

ASSIGNABLE CURIOSITY 54

scientists get their research topics from their employers' programs of research projects. These programs, in turn, grow out of the companies' quests to develop profitable new products and their need to update old products threatened by technological advances elsewhere in the world. Also, industry performs $23 billion worth of research and development annually for the Department of Defense.5 _{This lucrative work can add to a corporations list of topics to assign to its scientists.}

A look at the General Electric Company's main research and development facility illustrates how industrial scientists get their research topics. More than 500 PhD scientists and engineers play out their careers at GEs Research and Development Center in Schenectady, New York. The stated purpose of this one-million-square-foot facility, which is one of the world's largest industrial laboratories, is to undertake work that "promises both to advance knowledge and to pay off for General Electric." In practice, however, "pay off for General Electric" takes precedence over the effort "to advance knowledge." In the blunt words of Roland W. Schmitt, speaking when he was GEs senior vice president for research and development and boss of the Schenectady facility, "If it has no payoff for General Electric, it should not be done at all." He added, "I can't truthfully say that all our work advances knowledge."6

Most people don't expect corporations to fund unprofitable research. But they may nevertheless think of scientists as people who build their careers by following the dictates of their unfettered curiosities, not by devoting themselves to topics chosen to meet goals like "pay off for General Electric." Those who buy this image of scientists might expect GE to have a hard time getting its scientists to sacrifice their own research interests in favor of the company's research interests. As it turns out, GE finds it quite easy to circumscribe in this way the careers of its scientists. The company simply makes its technical needs known, and the scientists, through a process of self- adjustment, get interested in the appropriate topics. "You can't select problems for true scientists, much less tell them how to attack the problems. But you can make sure that they are fully informed of the needs of the company businesses that pay the bill," explained the GE research

boss."7

Industrial scientists who are not content being directed by "the needs of the company businesses," market forces and the goals of contractors can do pitifully little to have more of a say in setting the goals of their own research work. Writing in Physics Today, a monthly publication of the American Institute of Physics with a wide circulation among physicists, Alfred H. Sommer shares the tricks he learned while working for over 40 years in five laboratories:

A frequent problem is that your supervisor wants you to work on a project that you don't believe in or, conversely, does not want you to pursue one that you think has potential. There is no simple solution to these problems, but I can make some useful suggestions. In the first case, if you have several projects going, it is often effective to ask the supervisor which of your present projects should be dropped to make time for the new one. In the second case it sometimes pays to work on your project during evenings and weekends or when your supervisor is on vacation or in the hospital.8

In light of the powerlessness that this description indicates, it becomes clear why many industrial scientists feel "self-directed" when their employers let them decide for themselves which of the

company's commercial or military research topics to work on.

Whether or not scientists who work in industry or government feel self-directed, they are not treated as such. Frank von Hippel, a prominent Princeton University physicist, notes that industry and government scientists are not even free enough to question the social value of their own assignments or their institution's work, which may be potentially cataclysmic. Von Hippel has

advocated that the American Physical Society help develop legislation that would enable scientists to speak out with less risk:

It is likely that the protection of the freedom of speech of scientists and engineers in industry and government would have large social benefits. Technology has become so powerful that we can no longer afford to wait to correct a problem until we can count the bodies.

The legislation would

protect the employee from being rapidly "railroaded" out of his livelihood. It means also that he can get an impartial hearing. And finally, if the outside investigator or hearing board finds in his favor, then he has some protection against being "blackballed" in his search for another job.9

The more one looks into it, the clearer it becomes that the scientist best suited for harmony in an industrial or governmental position is the one willing to accept direction uncritically in all but the narrow technical aspects of her research work. As a good professional, such a scientist accepts a research problem, tries to see it as an intriguing puzzle of captivating interest, and carries out the research with dedication.

But what about university scientists? Unlike their colleagues who work in industry or in government laboratories, university scientists pursue their own intellectual interests—they are certainly not directed to serve profit, technology or the military. Or are they?