Science and Public Policy: Agency Mission 35 



into neat little packages, each of which can be related uniquely 

 and bodily, as it were, to the mission of one agency. Two sci- 

 entific investigations which begin by asking the same questions 

 and using the same methods may end up at an entirely different 

 point merely because of the environment and the communica- 

 tion network within which they are conducted. One should 

 look at mission relevance not in terms of mutually exclusive 

 compartments, but rather in terms of distribution functions 

 with different centers of gravity but substantial overlap in 

 the tails. It is precisely this overlap which provides the internal 

 communication within science which is responsible for the 

 rapid application of science. 



The conventional wisdom deals often with the debt of tech- 

 nology to science, but speaks less frequently of the debt of 

 science to technology. Some of the most challenging and funda- 

 mental problems of solid state physics or molecular physics 

 have arisen from studies which were originally suggested by 

 technological needs. Scientific work involves a multiplicity of 

 choices of direction, many of which depend on very small 

 influences in the mind of the investigator. Even in a system of 

 complete scientific freedom the cumulative effect of the small 

 biases placed in the mind of the investigator by his sponsor 

 can have a profound effect on the direction and impact of his 

 research. The mere need to defend what he is doing to a 

 particular sponsor may be the factor which will trigger an 

 important application. It seems to me no accident that both 

 versions of the maser and the laser were conceived in university 

 laboratories devoted to the broad advancement of electronic 

 communications, and sponsored by the military services. 



But the invention of these devices, and the race to develop 

 and improve them, also opened up a host of new fundamental 

 questions regarding electric and magnetic interaction in crys- 

 tals, some of which led far afield from the original device 

 applications. In fact it is striking that each solid state device 

 invention has opened up a new branch of pure solid state 

 research, whose existence was scarcely suspected until the 

 appearance of the device formed the entering wedge into the 



