28 Sep 2001 9:51 AR AR143-02.tex AR143-02.SGM ARv2(2001/05/10) P1: GSR 28 28 Sep 2001 9:51 AR AR143-02.tex AR143-02.SGM ARv2(2001/05/10) P1: GSR Annu. Rev. Energy Environ. 2001. 26:29–48 Copyright c 2001 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved AUTONOMOUS SCIENCE AND SOCIALLY RESPONSIVE SCIENCE: A Search for Resolution Harvey Brooks Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138; e-mail: [email protected] Key Words nuclear energy, reactor safeguards, energy and environment, technology assessment, science, and public policy ■ Abstract I reflect on a career that has featured developing an advanced torpedo for submarine warfare during World War II, designing alternative nuclear reactors at the advent of nuclear power, guiding the development of the first institutions for technology assessment, assisting several of the early efforts at environmental policy analysis, and promoting experiments that have led to insights regarding the humanization of work. A recurring concern of mine, still unresolved, is how to give due weight, simultaneously, to two different visions of the scientific enterprise: an endeavor that must remain autonomous and an endeavor that must be driven by societal needs. CONTENTS FAMILY BACKGROUND AND EARLY EDUCATION ...................... 30 GRADUATE EDUCATION AND WORLD WAR II .......................... 30 POSTWAR AND GENERAL ELECTRIC—EARLY INVOLVEMENT WITH NUCLEAR POWER ............................. 32 HARVARD .......................................................... 35 ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON REACTOR SAFEGUARDS ................... 35 THE PRESIDENT’S SCIENCE ADVISORY COMMITTEE ................... 36 COMBINING NATURAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES ........................ 38 INTERNATIONAL VENTURES: OECD, GERMAN MARSHALL FUND, IIASA, ICIPE, AND VITA ........................... 42 COMMISSION ON SOCIOTECHNICAL SYSTEMS ........................ 44 CONAES ............................................................ 44 1980–1990: R&D AND INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION .................. 45 THE HARMAN PROGRAM ON TECHNOLOGY, PUBLIC POLICY, AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT ........................ 46 REFLECTIONS ....................................................... 47 1056-3466/01/1022-0029$14.00 29 28 Sep 2001 9:51 AR AR143-02.tex AR143-02.SGM ARv2(2001/05/10) P1: GSR 30 BROOKS FAMILY BACKGROUND AND EARLY EDUCATION I was born and brought up in Cleveland, Ohio, the oldest child in a relatively well-off household. Both of my parents were from old Cleveland families, going back several generations. My grandfather on my mother’s side was the owner of a shipping line, the Harvey H. Brown Company, which carried iron ore from Duluth, Minnesota, on Lake Superior to various Lake Erie ports on its way to the midwest iron and steel cities. I have vivid memories from my early boyhood of taking several summertime family expeditions from Painesville, Ohio, east of Cleveland, through the locks at Sioux St. Marie, to Duluth, and back in rather plush family quarters on one of my grandfather’s boats. My grandfather on my father’s side was a partner in a luxury furniture busi- ness, and my father a mechanical engineer who, after graduation from Yale, took a masters degree in mechanical engineering at Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland. After finishing his degree, he joined the National Malleable and Steel Castings Company, a small specialty steel company in Cleveland, which mostly made equipment for the railroad industry. I was educated in a newly launched private school, the Hawken School, in about the fourth class to enter after it started. The classes were small and the education was classical, with lots of personal attention from very good teachers, some of whom later went on to become well-known scholars. I remember that my first grade class was very small and that I had the incorrigible habit of constantly raising my hand with the correct answer ready should any child falter in his or her recitation. I then went to The Hill School, a boys’ private boarding school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and from there I went to Yale, in the Class of 1937. I skipped the seventh grade at Hawken but took a postgraduate year at The Hill School before going to college. As a boy I was quite bookish. From an early age I read semipopular books on philosophy and science—Eddington, Bertrand Russell, Alfred Whitehead, Einstein—and I was always at the top of my class. At about the age of 12, I became fascinated with theoretical physics and from that time on thought I would be a physicist. As my father and most of the males in my mother’s extended family had gone to Yale, it was regarded as natural that I would follow in their foot- steps, which I did. At Yale I majored in mathematics but took all the physics I could, including the advanced course in theoretical physics given by Leigh Paige, which was mainly for graduate students and which solidified my interest in a physics career. GRADUATE EDUCATION AND WORLD WAR II At the end of my senior year at Yale, I was awarded a Henry Fellowship to attend Oxford or Cambridge, which included enough money for travel in Europe. I spent the year 1937–1938 in Cambridge, affiliated with Clare College, taking theoretical 28 Sep 2001 9:51 AR AR143-02.tex AR143-02.SGM ARv2(2001/05/10) P1: GSR AUTONOMOUS SCIENCE 31 physics courses at the Cavendish Laboratories. It was a very exciting time to be in physics at Cambridge, and I reveled in lectures from Dirac, Rutherford, Fowler, and many others. I still have the notebooks I kept. There was not much personal contact, however. My tutor at Clare was H.M. Taylor, who had numerous college administrative duties and whom, as a result, I saw relatively infrequently. The most outstanding lecturer was Dirac, whose lectures were very polished. However, I think I got the most out of Fowler’s course in statistical mechanics, based on his monumental book. The class was often disorganized. He would start a derivation on the blackboard and then get fouled up. But by the time he had straightened it out, with frequent assistance from his listeners, I felt I had mastered the material. It was almost as though he had done it intentionally as a teaching device, though I doubt that was the case. At the end of my year in Cambridge I did a good deal of soul searching about whether to stay on for two more years to get a degree, because by that time war clouds were gathering and the future of graduate study looked very uncertain. At the same time, one of the physics books I had been reading on my own with partic- ular interest and attention was J.H. Van Vleck’s Theory of Electric and Magnetic Susceptibilities. I decided that I might want to go to Harvard and work with Van Vleck, whose work particularly intrigued me. This I ultimately did, finishing a Ph.D. with “Van” in 1940. At that time I was elected to the Society of Fellows at Harvard, which assured me of at least three years of support and even the possibil- ity of a second three-year term if things worked out. It was very stimulating being among a group of scholars from many different disciplines. We met together at weekly dinners with the Senior Fellows, such as Alfred North Whitehead, Crane Brinton, L.J. Henderson, and Arthur Darby Nock, with exciting cross-disciplinary discussions on every conceivable subject. One by-product of this was the kindling of an interest in geophysics that resulted in a collaboration with David Griggs, a second-term Junior Fellow, in a theory of convection in the earth’s mantle as a component in the explanation of what later became known as the theory of plate tectonics. Because of the war in Europe and the general opinion that the United States was almost certain to get involved eventually, my experience in the Society of Fellows was short-lived. The National Defense Research Committee had been formed, and I soon began consulting with the secret Harvard Underwater Sound Labora- tory (HUSL) under the direction of Professor F.V. Hunt, Professor of Acoustics, in the basement of the Cruft Laboratory. This had been organized under a con- tract with the US government to be devoted to antisubmarine warfare. When the United States entered the war after Pearl Harbor in 1941, I took a leave of ab- sence from the Society of Fellows to join HUSL as a full-time employee, where I remained employed until VJ day. My main job at HUSL, for most of the war, was as associate head (and essentially field director) for a group developing an acoustic homing torpedo known as Fido. It was designed to be launched from an antisubmarine (ASW) aircraft and to circle at a fixed depth until it detected the noise emitted by an enemy submarine. The torpedo would then steer toward 28 Sep 2001 9:51 AR AR143-02.tex AR143-02.SGM ARv2(2001/05/10) P1: GSR 32 BROOKS the noise source in both azimuth and depth until it came into actual physical contact with the target, at which point it was supposed to explode and fatally cripple the target. This weapon was engineered for manufacture by Bell Labo- ratories and put into production by Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T). I am told it was quite effective during the closing months of the war in Europe, mostly in the Bay of Biscay off the coast of Spain and France. Operationally it became known as the Mark 24 mine. The development and testing of experimental models of Fido was conducted first from small boats off the coast near Boston, and then, when the weather got too rough and cold, at a new field station in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. For most of one winter, I commuted weekly between Boston and Miami in Eastern Airlines’ DC3s, carrying secret electronic equipment in my lap because security regulations forbade my checking it with my luggage or even letting it out of my sight in the cabin luggage bin.