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clothes clean, we find that enterprise not managed, as NASA is, in a central and systematic way. Instead, it consists of a series of interacting components and subcomponents, which include the appliance industry, the textile industry, your neighborhood service dry cleaner and laundromat, the soap and chemical industry and the like. I remember in years gone by the soap and the appliance and the textile people used to argue about why it was women were unable to keep their clothes clean. They had many meetings on this point, the textile people claiming it was the appliance manufacturer's fault, and the appliance manufacturer claiming it was the inability of the soap producers to produce soap, and all of them blaming the women for being too stupid to run the machine.

In 1960 I remember going to the Whirlpool Corp. with the idea for a solvent washer which would handle clothes that were usually washed or drycleaned. They did not laugh it off. Instead they related it to a coin-operated drycleaner, which they were just thinking about bringing out onto the market. They had thought about it before but had not introduced the product because of the problem of ironing. Women hate to iron. Whirlpool was afraid that if you drycleaned more clothes in the home, that would increase the ironing load and women would reject it. At just about that time, however, the textile industry was beginning to come out with wash-and-wear fabrics which could be finished without ironing, after having been drycleaned. That released the coin-operated drycleaner. When the coin-operated drycleaner came onto the market, Norge and Whirlpool competing neck and neck, it had lots of our clothes going around in the same machine at room temperature. There were bacterial problems, and that created the opportunity for a new class of bacteriostats which came onto the market. The presence of coin-operated drycleaners in the neighborhood forced the existing service enterprises to industrialize, or else to go into a highly customized kind of operation.

I go through this for the following reason:

Keeping clothes clean costs about $5 billion a year-just like getting men to the moon. But the system that is related to that objective is a very complicated kind of dynamic in which a new product represents the reaction of one component of a system to what another component is doing. What we are now beginning to see happen is that companies are diversifying, not in the sense of acquiring unrelated businesses, or simply making more shirts, or buying up additional textile companies, but taking entirely new cuts at the system, so that in California-from which all new things come--it is now possible to contract for shirts of a certain size and a certain style. You establish your performance. specifications and you receive clean shirts regularly to your size and style. You do not know whether they have been cleaned or made new, and the make-or-buy decision rests with the producer who controls or is connected to all of the elements of the business system that are required for that purpose. The connecting together of these elements gives him opportunities for innovation, which he would have on no other basis.

When we talk about companies moving into the city business, as GE and Sinclair Petroleum, and others, like Westinghouse are now doing, we are talking about a similar kind of movement. It is the

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definition of a business, not around a product, but around a large cluster of products related to a major human function.

I would argue that on this basis the standard industrial classification manual becomes obsolete. The nature of American industry radically shifts, and the concept of what we ask of technology in a rural area shifts as well.

In the rural area with which I began this excursion, the interesting possibility is a hookup between large food companies with holders of land capable of producing vegetables at a cost lower than those companies can obtain, tied to an institutionalized feeding business and a prepared food business. The industrial facilities associated with processing foods are also located in the agricultural producing area. The State's contribution of infrastructure and of certain regulatory provisions makes this attractive and possible. This kind of a hookup has many precedents in American industrial history. But it has not, so far as I know, been actively pursued as a way of trying to be innovative about the use of technological innovation for rural problems.

Let me quickly move on to say that there are two other ways in which I think it is appropriate to think about technology in connection with rural problems. One has to do with the delivery of services to people who are sparsely settled in rural areas. This is a radically different kind of problem than the problem of delivering services to people who are intensely concentrated, for example, in an urban ghetto; and it is a problem that lends itself to technological solution at least in part. Dartmouth College currently is establishing a television network with a series of small rural New Hampshire towns, so that local general practitioners can communicate with specialists in Dartmouth as a way of getting at consultation for patients. Technology to improve use of very scarce professional resources lends itself to the problems of rural areas.

One final point: One way to think about technology and its use with respect to rural problems has to do with what we might call the technology of relocation, or the technology of movement of people.

When we look at the efforts currently being undertaken to move people or to encourage movement of people from poor rural areas to cities, where there are jobs, I think we discover something very interesting.

There is a process that you might call the national process of migration. It is a very confused sort of process. A man may go to a town for several months, come back to his hometown, go back the following summer, come back again, take his wife, come back again, take his wife and friend, come back again; the whole family may move, they may move in a series of steps. The process seems to make no sense. How much nicer it would be if we could have a simple process of connecting people and jobs. There are people in the southern part of North Carolina, there are jobs in Louisville, we will move them. And we do that. What we discover is that after 2 months they are back again in southern Carolina; and that in fact the process of migration serves some rather major functions relating to cultural needs, and has to do with the establishment of urban villages. When people move, there is a lot more than the simple economic motivation of jobseeking that goes into the movement.

What was discovered when the simple matter of man-to-job matching was attempted is that people have to begin to worry about finding housing, they have to begin to worry about moving the family, they have to begin to worry about social services, they have to begin to worry about health services, they have to begin to worry about helping rural people to negotiate the systems of the city. By the time these things are done, the cost of a single move is such as to make an entire program of such moves prohibitive.

So that the original natural migration process, irrational as it seems, is not completely disfunctional. What this raises as at least a question, I think, is the exploration of new approaches, new strategies, for the deliberate movement of people from rural areas to jobs in urban ones. One possibility, for example, is a shift upward in the level of aggregation of what it is we think the unit is that we are moving-for example, the movement of whole communities; or second, new approaches to the beginning, the middle, and the end of the migratory pattern, so that we are working not only in a supply area but in receiving areas, and are able to tag these who leave the supply area and support the movement to and settlement in the rural

area.

These it seems to me are some of the kinds of possibilities we should include when we are thinking about the use of technology to work on the problems of rural areas.

It is clear that, underlying all of this, there are theories about what is now happening in the rural-to-urban movement; there are theories of value, particularly as related to the problems of minority groups, which are critical, and there are political positions to be taken. And there are underlying views about the relationship of social and economic change. What I would argue for here is that none of the technological possibilities I have outlined be explored without some pretty clear position-taking on these underlying problems. [Applause.] Dr. POOLE. Thank you, Mr. Schon. Our next panelist is Frank Lehan, Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology, Department of Transportation.

Biographical Sketch: Frank W. Lehan

Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology, Department of Transportation; president, Space General Corp.; executive vice president, Space-Electronics Corp.; associate director of Electronics Laboratory, Space Technology Laboratory; chief of telemetry, chief of telecommunications, and chief of electronics research, Jet Propulsion Laboratory of Caltech: Sigmi Xi and Tau Beta Pi; presently, serving as a panel member of the President's Science Advisory Committee and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers; member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science; associate of the California Institute of Technology.

STATEMENT OF FRANK LEHAN, ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY, DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION

Mr. LEHAN. Thank you. First I would like to reintroduce myself, if I may. I read my résumé in the brochure, and it really did not sound much like me.

So let me identify myself as one of the animals that has been discussed a technological entrepreneur. Furthermore, to make matters worse, let me identify myself as coming from California.

Some of you may know Jim Fletcher, the son of Harvey Fletcher. He and I started our own company several years ago; we managed to make it grow to a reasonable size, and sold it-thereafter Jim became president of the University of Utah, and somewhat later I went to Washington. It is difficult to decide which of us has gotten into more trouble.

I am not going to present an organized speech, the kind that the rest of the panelists have been making. I am going to rather toss out fragments of thought. These fragments are not going to be too well connected, so I will apologize in advance.

First let me make a negative observation on the subject of this panel, "science and technology."

I observe a tendency in many places, of course not here, to invoke the incantation, if you will, of science and technology as though it were some black magical phrase. That merely by saying the words some problem or other would disappear. Of course we all know that this is nonsense-if we recognize that it is being done.

When this black magical phrase does not work of itself, of course people are disappointed and science and technology gets another black

eye.

In common with other black magic incantations, there is another bad implication to the effect that science and technology are evil per se, just as black magic is evil per se. I am presently somewhat sensitive to this, because the newspapers of late have talked a bit about the Department of Transportation's "high-speed train," running between Washington and New York. That train has been notable by being late. The newspapers have talked about applying high-science and high-technology. Even about applying aerospace techniques.

But 2 days ago I sat in the conference room at the Department of Transportation. We watched a beautifully done movie on the Tokaido train, the Japanese high-speed train. And it was obvious, looking at that movie, that not only was the movie well done, but the train was a marvelous technological achievement-very high technology.

The Japanese Government spent $1 to $11 billion on that train. For your information, the New York to Washington train is a largely commercial endeavor, the Federal Government to date has spent about $2 million, and is presently scheduled to spend about $10 to $15 million when the train is done.

I think there is a message here, and that is that science and technology, if they are going to solve problems, cost money.

There is another high-speed or rapid transit train that is being built. That is the Bay Area Rapid Transit System. The Bay Area Rapid Transit System will cost-and you will get debates on the exact numbers-but in the neighborhood of $1 billion when finished. That is going to serve the communities around the San Francisco Bay. I wish to make an interesting observation. At the national level. Japan was able to marshal forces to get themselves a high-speed train. We have been able to marshal these forces, at least in the San Francisco area, at a local level. I suggest that perhaps there is a political problem as well as a science and technology problem in this phenomena.

I think that the aerospace industry must bear some of the burden for implying black magic in the terms "science and technology." or "aerospace technology." Let me tell you very honestly that, at least in the California aerospace industry, although there have been some very good people involved, that their very top systems-engineer have not yet been fully involved in these programs. I am afraid industry has been guilty of talking about aerospace techniques, but when it came to application, the program was given to a group or an engineer that you would not have given the entire responsibility for a communications satellite system, for example.

I kid my friends, who are very good engineers, at NASA about "fall out" from NASA, that is the popular phrase. I kid them in this fashion. I say that you know, I think the kind of fall-out from NASA that is required would be in a box about so by so, and when you open the box, there will be stacks of paper and the paper will be green, and will crinkle. This is semiserious kidding, because we both know that money alone won't do it.

I would like to just fly a trial balloon here. We need good people, we need facilities in many of the technology problems associated with urban life, associated with rural life.

I see no reason, as time moves on, and as we get to the moon, and a few other programs get done, why the resources of NASA, these resources being people and equipment, cannot be brought to bear on some of these civil systems problems.

Let me use an example from transportation, Air Traffic Control.

I have now toured around the country, looked at our traffic control system. I have been exposed to their advanced thinking, the advanced programs-the work that is going on-talked to the people, very competent and very dedicated people. Also from past experience I have some familiarity with what I will call the Space Traffic Control System. And let me just assure you that these two programs are orders of magnitude apart in the technological vigor with which it has been possible to pursue them.

I mentioned earlier, and in a question that was asked yesterday of Dr. Shapero, that there is a growing viewpoint that technology is some kind of an evil being with a life of its own. That has been a popular theme over the last several years. I would contend that that is not the case-that science and technology are part of a pretty exciting evolutionary process that is happening, and that this process is one of competition and one of evolution. Science and technology is merely embedded in the process, as are many other things.

I would submit that we need to understand this evolutionary process, and can shape its destiny in reasonable and proper ways, consistent with our culture.

From the short time I have been in Washington, let me make an observation about Washington-in a sense it deals with one of the reasons that I went there.

I do not know how many of you are familiar with these-if you studied the new math of your kids, you probably are these set theory logic diagrams, in which the interior of circles are used to represents various clusters of things or ideas. Let me suggest such a Ven diagram to your mind. It is going to consist of three circles-nonintersecting and nontouching.

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