Who Should Fund Basic Technology?

The US government sometimes funds research in private companies. But there has been disagreement about the type of research that should receive public money. A consensus may be beginning to emerge.

Scientists and engineers at Calimetrics, a small company in Emeryville, California, working with Energy Conversion Devices and the Polaroid Corporation in the National Storage Industry Consortium, have developed a way of storing data on a CD-ROM disk that holds ten times more information than normal, with five times the access rate. Called 'pit depth modulation', the technique stores 8 to 16 bits of information in each pit pressed into a CD-ROM, instead of the usual two bits stored in a binary system of coding.

The project received cost-shared funding from the Advanced Technology Program (ATP) of the US Department of Commerce's National Institute for Science and Technology. Yet, two years previously, Congressman Bob Walker, while he was chairman of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives Science Committee, criticized ATP as an example of "corporate welfare" and tried to bring an end to the entire programme.

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