NSF Director Continues to Steer Agency on Technological Course.

Erich Bloch is approaching the last year and a half of his six-year term as director of the National Science Foundation. He continues to carry a relaxed style and an air of command over the $1.9 billion agency. And with the weakening of centralized science and technology advising at the White House level, he has emerged as the top Administration spokesman for the country's policies in research and engineering. Bloch came to the job from a vice presidency at IBM in 1984 with some apparent handicaps. He was an engineer, not a basic researcher, and had no academic credentials as a researcher or administrator. But no previous NSF director was more experienced than Bloch in managing scientists and engineers in a technologically intensive environment. So he came to the foundation with some pretty definite ideas on what he felt was the need to take the agency into the "real world" of technological competitiveness. And never ...