Excerpt from Is Today's Science Policy Preparing Us for the Future?: Hearing Before the Committee on Science, U. S. House of Representatives, One Hundred Fourth Congress, First Session, January 6, 1995 The committee met, pursuant to call, at 9:30 a.m. in Room 2318, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Robert S. Walker [chairman of the committee] presiding. The Chairman. The Science Committee's first hearing of the 104th Congress will come to order. I am also very pleased to be presiding over this first hearing in the 104th Congress of the Committee on Science. As I said yesterday, I have served on this committee for 18 years, and it is truly a privilege for me to be sitting in this Chair and to have an opportunity to hear from the distinguished panel of witnesses that have come before us today. There is a little story about President McKinley, who was advised by the Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks that the office should be abolished, since everything that could be invented had been invented. I often wish that we had agency heads that would display the Commissioner's enthusiasm for cutting government, but I also would not want that kind of lack of vision to be dominant in government. But I do hope that the Patent Office would be one that we would never have to abolish, because our society will have begun to die if we can find nothing more to invent and nothing more to improve our lives. Americans have seen in the span of their lifetimes the Wright brothers fly, the arrival of the jet age, the moon landings, the invention of radio and television, digital technology and countless other advances in medicine, electronics and transportation. We should adopt as ours the goal of making the next century as exciting for the children born in the year 2001 as those who were born in the year of 1901. In the recent past, it has become de rigueur for policymakers to chastise those in the private sector for focusing on the short-term bottom line at the expense of the longer term. In reality, those of us in the public sector have often been just as shortsighted, worrying about the current fiscal year without considering the effects of today's decisions on the future. During this hearing, we will receive testimony from the heads of Federal departments and agencies over which this committee has jurisdiction. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.