Reason: Does the general public's lack of understanding of science bother you?
Ames: Sure, but nowadays people are sitting in front of the TV, and they get what they get on the TV, which isn't very much science.
Reason: How much is it just a function of specialization that people don't know science?
Ames: You can't know everything, but you can read about some of it, and science is so much fun. You'd think people in the modern world would want to know how the cell works, what DNA is doing and all of these things. It just seems so exciting.
Reason: You've written a piece for the Social Policy Research Center about science as a spontaneous order. What do you mean by that?
Ames: It's not being planned from on top. Everybody has his enthusiasm. If I decide I want to go off on this tangent and that tangent, I can do it. Scientists are always thinking of a way to get new knowledge cheaper or faster or whatever, and so it tends to come up from the bottom. It's not some bigwig saying, I thought it all out--you do this, you do that.
Reason: How does government being a big source of funding affect that?
Ames: Well, the government does say, We're giving money for heart disease, we're giving money for cancer. So in that sense it's from the top down. But they've always been relatively good about saying, Well, since cancer is so complicated, anything that helps the understanding of general knowledge of how cells work we'll call cancer research. So it wasn't directed, which is a good thing, because all the advances come from people following their individual enthusiasms.
Reason: What would be an advance that no one would have planned?
Ames: Well, I was working in bacteria and got interested in mutations and mutagens and thought I'd set up this test system in bacteria. And then I thought that carcinogens might be working as mutagens, so that turned out to be an advance in cancer research. But I couldn't get funded from National Cancer Institute because people in the National Cancer Institute in those days weren't interested in mutagens or they weren't thinking along that line.
Reason: So you got funding from...?
Ames: Eventually from the Atomic Energy Commission.
Reason: So the fact that it's chopped up into all these different places is a positive?
Ames: The more sources of funding, the more different people with different views, the better it is. Because it's not directed from on top.
Reason: What about the criticism that a lot of scientific research is just waste?
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