Defense Department Agency Severs Its Ties to an Elite Panel of Scientists

The Pentagon has countless in-house scientists and engineers to assess its security strategy. But since the days of the hydrogen bomb and the “missile gap,” Jason has been one of the few — and certainly the most prestigious — sources of advice outside the defense establishment, looking for developing threats and assessing futuristic weaponry. Its 40 to 50 members include Nobel laureates and some of the brightest young scientists in the nation…

According to members of Jason, the Defense Department agency wanted the panel to accept two Silicon Valley executives and another Washington insider with an engineering degree into its ranks. When the panel refused, the agency, called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, ended the contract.

Though Darpa refused yesterday to confirm the dispute over the nominees, a spokeswoman said the move was in fact a reflection of Jason’s inability to adjust its priorities to a post-cold-war world, where the physical sciences are no longer as important as information and computer sciences to the nation’s security… But Dr. Steven Block, a Jason member who is a professor of biological sciences at Stanford, said those contentions were a smoke screen in front of an attempt to place political appointees to a scientific advisory panel. “Darpa’s attempt to turn Jason into a political patronage job challenges the very independence that makes Jason so useful,” Dr. Block said. Citing what is now regarded as a prescient 1999 study by Jason on bioterrorism, and others on nanotechnology and information, Dr. Block denied that the panel focused too exclusively on physics. The events of Sept. 11, he said, made the group’s blue-sky strategizing even more critical. NY Times [thanks, Abby!]