Edward E. David Jr., Who Elevated Science Under Nixon, Dies at 92

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/science/edward-david-dead-science-adviser-to-nixon.html

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Edward E. David Jr., a researcher who sought to make science more relevant and accessible to presidents and to the public, died on Feb. 13 at his home in Bedminster, N.J. He was 92.

His death was confirmed by his wife, Ann.

For 28 months, as director of the federal Office of Science and Technology under President Richard M. Nixon, Dr. David successfully lobbied for the first budget increases for grants for nongovernment applied research and development in more than a decade.

He also helped draft the administration’s proposals for pollution control and alternative energy that followed passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970. He struck partnership agreements with foreign governments and private industry, reorganized the federal scientific bureaucracy, and encouraged Nixon to deliver the first presidential message on science and technology.

But elevating research to a higher government priority was problematic, as was getting the president to listen. An article in The Saturday Review of Science concluded in 1972 that “Mr. David is politically chaste and Mr. Nixon is scientifically illiterate.”

After Nixon diluted Dr. David’s authority by appointing a separate technology adviser, and just three weeks before the president abolished the science and technology office altogether, Dr. David quit in frustration early in 1973. The president said the office’s advisory and other functions could largely be assumed by the National Science Foundation, a congressionally chartered agency.

During his tenure and afterward, when he served on professional and official panels (including some appointed by other presidents), Dr. David warned of the challenges that computers posed to personal privacy, advocated a federal communications network linking local emergency services to provide disaster warnings, expressed alarm at a national learning gap in mathematics, and supported ethical standards for research.

While he pressed utility companies to impose pollution controls and explore alternative fuels, in 1972 he questioned the cost-benefit value of stringent auto emission rules and airbags.

He favored development of a supersonic transport plane and criticized NASA for relying too heavily on space shuttles as launching vehicles instead of expendable rockets.

By the new century, with nongovernment sources spending more on research, he suggested that the president’s science office, which was revived in 1976, become a “window on the private sector” rather than a more aggressive guiding force.

He also vigorously challenged the prevailing view on climate change. He and 15 other scientists were listed as authors of an article in The Wall Street Journal in 2012 that said “there is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy” and that “aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.”

Unlike the presidential science advisers who preceded him, Dr. David was an industrial scientist. Before serving in government, he was executive director of the communications systems division of Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he worked from 1950 until his presidential appointment in 1970.

He left government for Gould Inc., a technology company, and was president of the Exxon Research and Engineering Company from 1977 to 1986.

He was also the United States representative to the NATO Science Committee, a president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the founder of a consulting company.

Edward Emil David Jr. was born on Jan. 25, 1925, in Wilmington, N.C., to Edward Emil David and the former Beatrice Liebman.

In addition to his wife, the former Ann Hirshberg, he is survived by their daughter, Nancy David Dillon.

Mr. David served in the Navy at the end of World War II and earned a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1945. He received a master’s degree and a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he specialized in microwaves and noise theory.

At Bell Labs, he worked on fabricating an inexpensive artificial larynx to help restore speech after surgery and on technology to prevent airplane hijackings.

He was the author of several books. With John G. Truxal of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, he created a layman’s school curriculum titled “Man Made World: A Course on Theories and Techniques That Contribute to Our Technological Civilization,” published in 1968.

“We can’t leave science and technology to the experts,” Dr. David said in 1970.

“I look on science and scientists as the antidote to politics,” he said. “In all these arguments about pollution, energy, drugs, product safety, some group has to stand up for reality. That’s what science is all about.”

But, he cautioned, even after the great scientific strides of the 1960s — among them landing a man on the moon — science has its limits.

“I believe that by the end of the 1970s we will have solved most of the problems we perceive now: transportation, energy, pollution,” Dr. David predicted as the decade began. “It’s just that we can’t do everything.”