Science in 2006

When the National Sdence Board met in the spring of 2006 to discuss the budget for 2007, there was a debate about the competition between "big" and "little" sci ence. There had not been such a debate for a long time, because all areas of science were now supported by instrumentation of a power undreamed of back in 1986. Intelligent instruments were not only capable of extraor dinary resolution and sensitivity; they had attained a degree of control and a complexity of synthesis beyond the reach of science twenty years before. All science had become capital intensive. What triggered the debate was the Board's responsi bility for overseeing all US scientific operations in Ant arctica, where amazing discoveries in the biological adaptation of microorganisms had been made, and where the record of terrestrial climate variations had been