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Dr. McDouGALL. Or leader or national interest, and perhaps put- 

 ting some flesh on the skeleton of that vocabulary is what your 

 task force inquiry can do for us all. 



Yes, an example of that would be, say, the 30-20 gigahertz tech- 

 nology that the Japanese and others have developed. 



Now, one thing I want to clarify— my remarks may have given a 

 false impression — first of all, I am not a scientist, so I cannot judge 

 these matters, but it is my impression that the United States is not 

 behind in any strategic, military, or economic technology that I am 

 aware of. 



So, in using the British analogy, I don't want to give the impres- 

 sion that I think the United States is falling behind. But in areas 

 like the 30-20 Comsat technology, we are failing to market technol- 

 ogies which we have developed, which other countries have also de- 

 veloped, but they are able to market them, and they have institu- 

 tional structures for getting the stuff out and competing with us in 

 given markets in ways that we so far have not. 



If we do deem a given technology as commercially important, as 

 important for the economic health of this country in the near or 

 median future, then yes, indeed, we have to move ahead, and I 

 think that that would be— see, in putting together my remarks on 

 which fields are critical, I used the gimmick of life, liberty, and 

 property. Originally, of course, property would not have been in- 

 cluded in that. 



The Government of the United States moved into the field of sci- 

 ence very slowly, gradually, over the course of its first 150 or so 

 years. Interestingly enough, I believe the first area, aside from de- 

 fense, but even then there was not much done in the way of R&D 

 on defense until perhaps the Civil War— the National Academy of 

 Sciences was formed— but particularly World War I, when the 

 NACA was formed— the first area in which the Government got in- 

 terested in science was in the environmental aspect, wit large; that 

 is to say, not pollution control, to be sure, in the 19th century, but 

 control of rivers, study of the Lewis and Clark expedition, explora- 

 tion, surveying, building the railroads, doing the various kinds of 

 geological work needed to build the railroads and so forth. That 

 was the first area, and then later on, medicine, life. 



Only since World War II— indeed, I think it is safe to say, really, 

 only after Sputnik did the U.S. Government decide that it has an 

 important role to play in property; that is to say, in funding re- 

 search deemed to have an economic benefit in the future. 



Perhaps Comsat technology— well, nuclear technology would 

 come first, and then Comsat technology perhaps was the next large 

 commercial area in which the Federal Government got involved, 

 and that, of course, is why the Comsat Act was so important, be- 

 cause the Government then had to decide what to do with this 

 technology that the taxpayers had paid for. How are we going to 

 market this? How are we going to fold that into our system of free 

 enterprise? And whether the Comsat Act will prove to be a model 

 for future systems like a commercial Landsat system or other 

 things on the horizon that we cannot now see, I don't know. It is 

 something that Congress will have to decide. 



But, yes, that is a long way of saying that I would certainly in- 

 clude economic and commercial technologies or basic research 



