Of Mice and Men

Bruce Ames Interview

Virginia Postrel from the November 1994 issue

(Page 5 of 7)

Reason: Do you consider yourself a very political person?

Ames: Well. I like to read economics and think about these things. I'm trying to be a wise man in my old age, which is hard because everything is so specialized, so again maybe it's part of being a generalist.

Reason: Are there particular books or thinkers...

Ames: I was influenced by reading [economist F.A.] Hayek and people like that and thinking the way economists think about trade-offs and optimizing. There is an optimum level of pollution, but most environmentalists throw up their hands. They want no pollution. Having dealt with EPA and FDA and these government bureaucracies, I'm fairly disillusioned. When we developed our test system for detecting mutagens, I thought industry would fight it and the government would have everybody using it. It was just the reverse, because industry has an interest in not making mutagens and carcinogens. It's bad for the business. And government bureaucracies are hard to turn around on anything.

Reason: You accept no money from industry.

Ames: No. If I give a talk at Du Pont. I have them send the honorarium to charity.

Reason: So the research money comes from the government?

Ames: My research money all comes from the government. It's fiercely competitive.

Reason: Over time, the government, especially the federal government, has acquired a near monopoly on the funding of scientific research...

Ames: As a sort of crypto-libertarian, I worry about that. And in a way, scientists have a self-interest in jacking up the government funding of science. But I think the people get their money's worth from it--the U.S. has the strongest science in the world, and all kinds of industries come out of research, so it's good for the economy, it's good for human knowledge, it's good for our health. I once had dinner with Milton Friedman, and he started off the conversation saying that he thought they should abolish the EPA, the FDA, and government funding of science. The first two I could have at least considered, but the government funding of science didn't fly. Probably what Friedman would say is if you didn't have government funding of science, industries would think much longer term and they'd fund basic research, because it would be in their interest to do it in a technological society. But there are some things that are very long-term, and in a way having government funding is good. As long as it's competitive.

And so far it's been fiercely competitive. You have committees of your peers judging all these things. They don't always make the decisions that I think that they should make, but at least it's a reasonable system where merit wins out. Now you could politicize that and start getting one representative from each state or whatever. But then it becomes less a meritocracy, and if there's too much of that the system's going to go down.

Reason: You seem extremely optimistic both about scientific research and about understanding cancer.

Ames: I'm incredibly optimistic because science is growing so fast. There are millions of scientists in the world, and every new rich country needs them and trains them. And everybody's communicating. Life expectancy gets longer every year, and it's going to get even longer, and it's due to modern science and technology. All these romantics are trying to paint science and technology as the thing that's dooming the world--I just don't believe that either. Everything I know says the opposite.

Reason: Do you think that science is threatened by those kinds of ideas?

Ames: Oh yes. In some fundamental way, a lot of environmental extremists are anti-science, anti-technology. They want to go back to some imagined, idyllic world that never existed.

Comments

nfl jerseys|11.17.10 @ 3:04AM|#

xthx

منتدى العرب|3.9.11 @ 8:46PM|#

Thank you

دردشة العراق|5.21.11 @ 4:10PM|#

thnx u man