Mr. Chairman, I’m Dr. Barbara Landau, the Todd Professor of Cognitive Science at the Johns Hopkins University. I am submitting testimony on behalf of the American Psychological Association – the APA – a scientific and professional organization of more than 155,000 members. Our behavioral scientists play vital roles within three agencies under this Subcommittee's jurisdiction, the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Although in my submitted testimony you will see that I am also quite concerned with another flat VA medical research budget this year, in my oral testimony I would like to emphasize what we will lose if NSF receives the Administration’s proposed budget increase of just over one percent for Fiscal Year 2002.

First, let me thank all of you and your colleagues in the Senate for your part last year in setting NSF on the path towards doubling its budget, an effort with strong bipartisan support here on Capitol Hill. As you know, NSF is the only federal agency whose primary mission is the support of basic research and education in science, math and engineering. As a member of the Coalition for National Science Funding, APA urges the Subcommittee to reinvest in the critical basic research enterprise that is responsible for many of the most important discoveries and dramatic advances in scientific understanding and technological development in the last five decades. Federal support for basic research has played a major role in the longest sustained economic growth in this country's history.

My main point is this: I am extremely concerned that although the new Administration is laudably focused on reinvigorating medical research at NIH and dramatically increasing the education budget, there appears to be less appreciation for the need to invest in the more basic scientific and educational research underpinning true educational reform and medical breakthroughs. Simply put, basic research is the engine that drives applied developments. For example, magnetic resonance imaging technology, retinal implants and automatic heart defibrillators all arose from NSF investments in basic research.

Just as basic research spawns new technologies, basic research also generates new ideas. As an example, psychologists funded by NSF have developed models for understanding the human brain, how it grows and develops, and how it can deteriorate with aging and disease. This has profound implications for understanding how young children learn and why our aging brains often forget. My own NSF-funded work aims to discover how normally developing children learn language, and how they develop other crucial cognitive capacities, such as remembering where things are, finding their way through their environment, and reading maps to help them do so. I also study these capacities in children with genetically-caused brain damage, seeking to understand how early brain damage might affect development. The insights that we gain through this kind of basic research are critical to understanding how we can avoid developmental disabilities, or remediate them when they do occur.

I urge this Subcommittee to provide $5.1 billion for NSF, a 15% increase that will keep NSF on the road towards doubling its budget by 2006 and enable this nation to meet the millennium’s educational, scientific and medical challenges.

Thank you.