Scientists' Spinoffs: Federal Labs Give Out Fruit of More Research For Commercial Uses --- Program Is to Help Industry, But Critics See It as a Way To Push Star Wars Plan --- How Navy Aids Brain Scanner
WASHINGTON -- For years, the Navy, seeking a breakthrough in anti-submarine warfare, bankrolled a plan to detect subs by sensing their magnetic emanations.</br></br>So far, this technology has failed for the Navy, but the Navy encouraged Biomagnetic Technologies Inc. to incorporate it into a brain-scanning machine. The device, called a neuromagnetometer, can detect brain disorders such as Alzheimer's disease or epilepsy simply by reading the magnetic discharges from nerve cells.</br></br>"We helped BTI and other Navy contractors commercialize their products in the knowledge that what helps them would eventually advance technology helpful to the Navy, too," says Donald Gubser at the Naval Research Laboratory here.</br></br>Such assistance reflects a government effort to plant the fruits of publicly financed research in the marketplace. The huge U.S. trade deficit stirs concern that the U.S. doesn't turn discoveries into products quickly enough. "We win the Nobel Prizes, but the Japanese get most of the profits," says Sen. Ernest Hollings, a South Carolina Democrat who heads the Senate Commerce, Science and Technology Committee. Seeking to make U.S. industry more competitive, Congress passed the Federal Technology Transfer Act of 1986, which requires the government to speed diffusion of technology from its labs.</br></br>But the military-reform lobby, cynical about the administration's motives, charges that the program is a way to promote President Reagan's controversial Strategic Defense Initiative. "This is part of the administration's attempt to sell Star Wars as the road to America's technological renaissance," says Brian McCartan, a senior analyst at the Washington-based Center for Defense Information. "As for the Pentagon's recent spinoff record, it isn't all that great."