The plea for balance in the public funding of science

Recent calls from within the scientific community for a more balanced portfolio of public investment in science have argued the need to complement an increased funding of biomedical research with increases in physics, computers, and materials research, along with enhanced support for higher-level science education. Such arguments presume that science is an unqualified public good. The present paper, however, suggests that science may more properly be conceived as a qualified good, one that on occasion exists in tension with other goods. In any general consideration of the relation between science and government and of what constitutes an optimal balance in the public funding of intellectual activity, it is desirable to include perspectives from the arts and the humanities alongside those of the sciences. © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.