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Du Pont compiles its annual research budget according to the cost, duration and number of all approved projects, usually spends about 3.5% of sales (1955 research budget: $70 million). Even so, few research ventures last the course. One-third of the studies undertaken by Du Pont's chemical department are "laboratory flops"; 50% are successful in the lab but prove impractical for production; less than 10% goes to a manufacturing division for development, and only a small fraction of these ever goes into production. RCA estimates that 90% of its research ideas are useless; from the other 10% come 80% of all the products it sells today. Says RCA Laboratories' Vice President Douglas Ewing: "Research is never a blind alley. Learning what is not feasible is perhaps nearly as important a step forward as learning what is. Research is a process that corrects its own mistakes."
The biggest problem for industry is the time and the money it must lavish to turn theory into product. A new amplifying device for transoceanic cable was tested for 20 years before A. T. & T. decided to install it in a sample cable. Penicillin, invented for $20,000, cost millions to prepare for commercial use. RCA had invested $50 million in TV before it reached the U.S. living room, has another $30 million tied up in color TV; telephone companies buried millions of dollars worth of coaxial cable, engineered with TV in view, long before they had network customers. Monsanto tested 15,000 chemical compounds at its Creve Coeur, Mo. laboratories to find a herbicide that would kill weed grasses but not harm corn or soybeans, spent six years and $750,000 on the product, which has yet to be marketed.
Nevertheless, say many scientists and industrial leaders, U.S. business is not investing enough for the basic research that nourishes all invention. These critics argue that industry should allot at least 10% of its research outlay for fundamental studies v. the 5% average. The U.S. Government, which underwrites 60% of the national research effort, also tends to emphasize practical rather than theoretical value. At least 93% of Government research money placed with industry goes for specific projects; $4 of every $5 in Government research grants to universities also specify applied research. Says Whirlpool-Seeger President Elisha Gray II: "The paucity of support for basic research could be our Achilles' heel."
Historically, the critics are right. The technological advances of the past century have stemmed from uncommitted experimentation. As G.E.'s Nobel Prizewinning Irving Langmuir points out: "Only a small part of scientific progress has resulted from a planned search for specific objectives. A much more important part has been made possible by the freedom of the scientist to follow his own curiosity in search of truth."
But the cost of research is not the only obstacle. Many industries are cramped by the shortage of scientists. Company interviewing teams comb through the new crop of graduating students each year, and educators complain that only the rejects will be left to teach. Moreover, many potential research men shy away from science because the starting pay in industry ($700 a month for a Ph.D.) is too low.