10 



And it can be questioned as being too much to spend, since it 

 equals or exceeds the combined government R&D budgets of Ger- 

 many, France, the UK, and Japan. 



Our R&D — that is, the FS&T budget — is on a par with what 

 these countries spend and how they define their own R&D pro- 

 grams. 



We all agree that in our collective experience, the part of the $70 

 billion conventional R&D budget that deals with new weapons was 

 hardly ever tapped as a major source of funds for fundamental 

 science and technology transfers. It most often went the other di- 

 rection — from fundamental S&T to the weapons categories. 



I would like now to turn to Mr. Mahoney to continue our con- 

 tribution. 



STATEMENT OF MR. RICHARD J. MAHONEY 



Mr. Mahoney. Thank you, Frank. My name is Dick Mahoney. 

 Until last April, I was CEO of MONSANTO in St. Louis, a position 

 I held for 13 years. 



I suspect the reason that Frank asked me to serve on this panel 

 was because my company is among the more research-intensive of 

 American corporations. And that's in many fields — food, pharma- 

 ceuticals, agricultural products, automotive products, housing, and 

 a whole variety of industrial applications. 



R&D has historically been 7 to 9 percent of sales at Monsanto, 

 in the range of $600 to $700 million, and we've done that through 

 thick and thin. And that's against a general industry average of 

 something under three percent for industrial corporations. 



We withstood the alleged Wall Street onslaught into long-term 

 thinking because our R&D had a good measure of success, but not 

 until many, many years of very patient investment. 



New crops like insect-resistant cotton and insect-resistant soy- 

 beans are just now coming to the market and that took about 15 

 years from the start. 



Of interest perhaps to the Committee on our background, the re- 

 search at MONSANTO consists generally of three parts — in-house 

 scientists, and we have several thousand. Strong university collabo- 

 rations. We have been among the leaders in that area. We were 

 spending, for example, over the past decade, more than $100 mil- 

 lion with Washington University in St. Louis on collaborative work 

 in biotechnology. 



And we have been heavy investors in venture capital. We were 

 in on the start-up of GNX, Genentech, Biogen, Cologen, all done in 

 the early days in an attempt to get a window on these new tech- 

 nologies. And it led us into these investments that we made in bio- 

 technology. 



But, frankly, my passion on this panel has been my belief in pull- 

 ing R&D together to prioritize it, weed out the less promising, 

 pouring the coals to the best ones, and all the while encouraging 

 new ideas to bubble up from the best source we know, and that's 

 the scientists themselves. 



I agreed to serve for a year or so on this panel, first because of 

 my great admiration for Frank Press, and he told me this may be 

 the most important undertaking of the academy in some time. And 

 importantly, because I believe that in times of fiscal constraint, and 



