[00:00:05] Welcome to My Nuclear Life. I'm Shelly Lesher. Today I'm speaking with Ann Finkbeiner, a freelance science writer who has written articles for magazines such as Discover and Sky and Telescope. And she really enjoys writing articles about scientists. She's also the Finkbeiner of the Finkbeiner Test, which is a test for writing about women in science. I heard about this test, but I didn't actually know the name.
[00:00:30] In order to pass this test, the story cannot mention the fact that she's a woman, her husband's job, her childcare arrangements, how she nurtures her underlings, how she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field, how she's such a role model for other women, how she's the quote, first woman to unquote.
[00:00:53] Okay, now I need to go back and listen to some of my old podcasts and see if I pass this test, but we're not here to talk about this. We're here to talk about a book she wrote back in 2007 called The Jasons, The Secret History of Science's Post-War Elite.
[00:01:12] I know it's a pretty old book, but it's the only one out there that discusses this elusive group. And we've talked about the Jasons a lot in this podcast, so I figured you were just as curious about them as I was. And so I really wanted to get someone on the podcast to talk to us about who this group is.
[00:01:40] So, Ann, I invited you here because we have spoken about the Jasons a lot on the podcast. And you have written a book about the Jasons. Hopefully, you can tell us more about who they are and what they do and tell me how I can become a Jason because that is my dream job. Well, first of all, I'd like to know why you're mentioning them at all. People don't generally mention them.
[00:02:10] Oh, okay. So we talk on this podcast a lot about the Cold War and about nuclear Cold War, nuclear bombs. Yeah. And so the Jasons have come up in relation to missile defense, and I think that's where they've come up the most. Okay. All right. Okay. And they seem to be this very mysterious organization, almost like a secret society.
[00:02:37] Well, they are, but that's not—that's—I have my usual problem of wanting to say 60 things at the same time. And I can't. I can only say one thing at a time. It's the way— Okay. We'll go in order then. —the speech works. Okay. By the end, we'll see if I still want to be adjacent. I think I do. I think I still want to be adjacent.
[00:03:01] Okay. All right. The reason they seem so mysterious is because about half and maybe more of the things that they study are classified subjects. So they can't talk about them. It's in their best interests to keep a low profile. That's how to say it. Is it because they do this secret work, and if they're too known, then the agencies won't want to work with them?
[00:03:31] That's number one. Number two, they're actually a little bit—personally, anybody who knows classified defense stuff has to know that there are people who would like to know that stuff.
[00:03:43] So it's a little scary. The reason I hear most is that they contract out to different agencies and offices in the government, very often the Defense Department.
[00:04:03] So they work the way any government advisor does, the same principles. You give the government advice. The government pays for it. The government owns the advice once you give it.
[00:04:17] Now, that is a really tricky proposition, and we can talk about that later. But if you tell some office in the government that the question they've asked is a stupid question and that their answer to it is stupid and that they should be going in an entirely different direction, that office doesn't want that in the newspapers. It doesn't want podcasters talking about that.
[00:04:47] But we love talking about that. Yes, right. But the government doesn't. Have the Jasons told the government that basically they were stupid and they're doing stupid things? I think all the time, yes. In a very nice way, I'm sure. Well, in a science-y way, right? In a very science-y way. They want to be free to keep doing that.
[00:05:13] And the bargain is that they won't publicize what their advice was. That's what I hear. Now, that's really a tricky issue. The more you think about it, the trickier it gets. Because the Jasons are all academics. And that's the strange part. We should introduce who the Jasons are. Maybe we should. Yeah, I tend to get right into it and not start from the beginning. So let's start from the beginning. Who are the Jasons?
[00:05:42] Okay. So they've been in business since 1960. They first formed. They're a group of maybe 30 to 50 people. At the beginning, they were all physicists. They have diversified. They're sort of freelance contractors for whoever in the government. And generally, it's DOD. Whoever in the government would like some scientific advice. That's what they do.
[00:06:12] They have this process where the government comes and asks them a question. The Jasons and the government negotiate the question so that it makes good scientific sense to answer it. It isn't just a, this is our problem. Oh, yeah, that's your problem. It's not one of those studies. It's a study that has a scientific answer.
[00:06:34] Then the Jasons spend the summer doing a study and come up with a report by October. And then go on to the next question. I'm a freelance science writer. That's how I operate. I work for a bunch of different magazines and I work out the story assignment with each magazine and deliver it on time and go on to the next one.
[00:07:03] So that's the model. But there's 30 of them working together to do this. So that must be a little harder to manage. Yes, I think it is. 30 people don't work on every study. One of the things that keeps them in business, both from the government's point of view and from their own personal points of view,
[00:07:30] is that they are completely independent and free to give whatever advice seems to be appropriate to them, seems to be most scientific to them. That answer is an answer to a lot of different questions is the problem. The question then becomes, how did they get their name? Because it's a weird name for a group of scientists that give advice.
[00:07:57] I mean, there's a jokey answer and then there's maybe a real answer. No, there's a real answer. One of the founders was a high energy physicist named Murph Goldberger, Marvin Goldberger. Murph Goldberger and two of his friends wanted to do summer consulting. As you know, academics often have their summers off. Their salaries are fine, but not princely.
[00:08:25] And a lot of physicists, especially back in the Cold War, a lot of physicists worked sort of freelance during the summer. They did it individually. These guys wanted to form a sort of little company that would freelance. So they needed to work through some entity the way an academic applies for whatever grants they want,
[00:08:55] but needs to work through their university's grants office. So effectively the grants office, the administrator, would be an outfit called the Institute for Defense Analysis, which is still business, in business, named Ida. It's called Ida. So Charles Towns was at Ida at the time. And Murph and his pals asked Ida if they would.
[00:09:20] And Ida said, yeah, sure, but you should be nonprofit. I mean, you can make money, but you should be nonprofit. You shouldn't be a company. You should be effectively freelance. And you shouldn't have any one customer. So you should accept whatever customers you want and whatever studies you want from those customers.
[00:09:47] The individual Jasons decide which studies they want to work on. And if they don't want to work on the studies, they don't work on them. And if enough of them don't want to work on a study, the study doesn't get done. So there's an independence baked in to the structure of Jason, which is why I got so interested in the structure.
[00:10:09] It means that they are not controlled by or beholden to anybody that hires them. Now, their name, Murph, came home and told his wife, whose name was Mildred, that they were going to call this little company Project Sunrise. They had been talking to the Defense Department,
[00:10:35] and the Defense Department said, yeah, we're going to call you Project Sunrise. And Mildred said, that is a really dumb name. And I know she said that. I agree with Mildred. She told me she said it. And Murph and his buddies said, yeah, that is a really dumb name. It sort of sounds like a bomb or something, right? And it's not what we want.
[00:11:03] So Murph said to Mildred, so what's a better name? And she said, Jason. And she was thinking of the Greek hero, the mythic hero, Jason, who was, as she said, sort of golden-haired and strong. None of them look like that.
[00:11:32] No, they're all kind of short and pudgy. No, I mean, they're not all kind of short and pudgy, but, you know, Murph was. So golden-haired, strong heroes who battled the forces of evil, that's what Mildred had in mind. And the name stuck. I like the name. And what I really like about it is that it's singular and plural. Yes. Right. Which adds to the mystique.
[00:12:02] Yes, yes. Now, they complicate it by always writing it in capital letters. Then it looks like an acronym. And it's not an acronym. It does. It's just a name. Jason. Who said physicists don't have a sense of humor? Right. They definitely do. They definitely do. But when I read about this structure and the advent of this structure and why, it was really
[00:12:31] interesting to me because academia has changed. In the 60s, the research structure that we have now didn't exist. So faculty were off doing freelance work for the government, where now we have grants that we are paid to do our research in the summer. So academics don't really do freelance work like this anymore. Now, we're still paid nine months. So yes, we have our summers free, but we also don't get paid for the summer. We only get paid for nine months.
[00:13:01] The phrase summer salary. Exactly. So a lot of faculty now get their summer salary from research grants. So I wonder if they have problems finding Jason's now because academics now want to pursue their own research instead of doing this consulting work. Yeah. Jason has had to change a good bit. And the answer is yes.
[00:13:27] Finding people who can spend time during the summer. They meet for six weeks. So the way they do this is they actually get together physically out in La Jolla and they have offices out there that they rent and they meet for six weeks and they work on whatever studies they're working on this summer.
[00:13:54] I think at the beginning, the people that Murph and his colleagues knew and asked to join the first Jason studies were theorists, theoretical physicists, who didn't have experiments that had to be watched over the summer. That makes sense. Who could just pack up and go out to La Jolla for the summer? Doesn't that sound nice?
[00:14:24] Just being able to pack up, take your wife and kids, not worry about anything. Exactly. And the wife doesn't work. Close your house up. She didn't have a job. Right. So that's what they did. And that worked very well. And in fact, the kids got to know each other and sort of thought of each other as cousins. It was a lovely thing. But it didn't make it into the modern era.
[00:14:53] No, I can't imagine it making it. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. So now they sign up for a study. They go out to La Jolla to work together for a while, but not for the whole six weeks. If any Jasons are listening, I just want to say again, I am available. Okay. I mean, I can make myself available however long they need me. It's definitely an old boy network.
[00:15:24] I'm sure it is. And there are now some women. What you want to know is not how many women, but whether they're in representative numbers. And physicists' idea of representative numbers of women, as you know, is pretty low. But other of the sciences, and there are now way more people than physicists, way more scientists than physicists on Jason, is much higher.
[00:15:54] So I don't know if the women are there in representative numbers or not, but I suspect not. I mean, there just aren't that many women Jasons. But there are women Jasons, and there are more of them in the past few years than there were when they started. We can all have dreams. Yeah. As hard as unrealistic they are, we can have dreams. It's not as much, does Murph know you anymore?
[00:16:24] Anyway, Murph died a number of years ago. I was going to say, Murph doesn't know me. No, but they choose themselves. And they choose each other. So it's a self-selected bunch. And so you just need to know some of the Jasons. Okay. So I have to develop a strategy then to know the right Jasons. Okay. And endear myself to them. Well, give a talk.
[00:16:52] Give a talk and impress the daylights out of them. Okay. And then have some skills that they need also. I'll work on that this summer then. That'll be the new plan. Okay, fine. Good. All right. So I want to ask you about, you mentioned that the Jasons like proving things wrong. Could you give me some examples?
[00:17:18] That was kind of there from the beginning because the more physicists you have in a group, the more that group is likely to want to tell you that you're wrong. I mean, it is a trait of physics. Yes. Although with the Jasons, I've talked not only to the Jasons, but to the people that hire them.
[00:17:40] And they say, everybody says that the Jasons kind of, that they are the kind of scientists who enjoy being wrong. They like finding out when somebody else is wrong. But when they thought something and it turns out not to be true, that's surprising and interesting and wonderful. And isn't that great?
[00:18:07] So they are more curious than they are arrogant. That's a wonderful quality to have. Isn't it? Isn't it? Did you ever meet Freeman Dyson? No, no. Not at all. Well, he was a quintessential Jason. Sort of. I've heard a lot of stories though. Yeah. Yeah. And he loved it when you told him something that he didn't know.
[00:18:37] Or when something he said was wrong. Now, he thought a lot of things that a lot of people think are wrong. And he probably stopped listening after a point. But you get this look of delight on his face. Well, but that's what I think of when I think of scientists is that they're curious. Yeah. Yeah. And so it sounds like Jasons are just curious people. Yes, they definitely are. They definitely are.
[00:19:04] And they're curious about a whole lot of different subjects. So they're hyper-specialized people because that's what academics are. But they really like learning about things they didn't know about.
[00:19:23] So I remember one of them, a physicist, who learned about how oceans were stratified the way the atmosphere is. So oceans exist in layers. And the layers are density layers. So differing amounts of salt. So differing densities. And they stack by layers.
[00:19:51] And the reason they're interested in that is that sound travels differently in those different layers. He learned that, this one physicist. And he was just so happy to have learned something about the world that he just didn't know. And that made such sense. So that's an example of what I'm talking about.
[00:20:16] But also, they tend to, even the experimentalists, the people who are not theorists, tend to not work on applied subjects. So they don't say, this is how to take that knowledge of how airplanes stay up in the air and apply it to an airplane itself. They like applied stuff.
[00:20:46] And they don't get to work on it. And a lot of the Jason studies are pretty applied. That's another answer to your question. So going back to some of these applied studies, what are some of the studies that they're kind of most famous for? Granted, a lot of the studies we don't know because they're still classified. Exactly, exactly, exactly.
[00:21:10] And I don't know them because I don't have any clearances and I didn't want any. In their history, in the story of the Jasons as a group, they started out with working on your subjects on missile defense. And on all the issues involved with nuclear proliferation.
[00:21:39] So all of the things you'd need to do and know if you are going to sign treaties to ban nuclear tests. Over the years, they do a little less missile defense. And although they ought to be working on Golden Dome if they're not. But probably there's not much that new in missile defense. I don't know. I don't know. I'm making that up. I just see fewer missile defense studies.
[00:22:09] But they're still doing those nuclear proliferation studies. Because all the countries have stockpiles of nuclear weapons in there. They sure do. And they're walking around saying, you know, we need to. Certainly the current administration and the Bush administration all wanted to make new nuclear weapons because the old ones were getting old.
[00:22:37] And the Jasons have done study after study after study on how nuclear weapons age when they are kept in storage. Right. Right. And they keep saying, the weapons are fine. You don't have to make new ones. Yeah. You don't have to make new ones. And then the next administration comes in and tries again. And Jasons say, you don't have to make new ones.
[00:23:04] So those two, at the beginning of Jason, those were the two big subjects. The nuclear one is still a big subject. They're still working on that every summer. Since the 60s, they've been working on nuclear stuff. Yeah. I bet the administration is still asking them if they need new nuclear weapons. Well, you can read it in the news. This one certainly is. I don't know that the Jasons are working on that.
[00:23:32] I don't know that anyone has asked them to work on it, but I wouldn't be surprised. During the Cold War, those two general subjects were right at the top of everybody's list. But then during the Vietnam War, I mean, that's a different kind of war. That's not nuclear war. No. That's missiles and nukes.
[00:23:59] That was the kind of war we fight now, which are just insurgencies inside cities. I mean, they are just different rules, different kinds of war and different weapons. So the Vietnam War was arguably maybe the first of this new kind of warfare. And the Jasons thought that they could help wind down that war.
[00:24:28] It was just going on and on and on and on and on the way wars do now. And nobody was winning. And what was happening was that the North Vietnamese were running supplies and soldiers down a series of jungle trails that were all connected. It was called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but it was a whole series of trails.
[00:24:53] And the Jasons thought, if you could somehow tell when people and materials were going down those trails, you could bomb the trails, right? They invented, as far as I know, this idea of putting sensors on the trails. The sensors would have little antennas, and the little antennas would signal an airplane that just sort of flew around and around and around overhead.
[00:25:23] And then the airplane would relay the signals from the sensors up to the airplane to a computer. And the computer would say where those sensors were, and the Air Force would go bomb them because they now had targets to bomb. This was called the electronic barrier.
[00:25:49] The Jasons thought it would slow infiltration down enough that the North Vietnamese would have to negotiate. And did it? No. And part of the reason it didn't was that the armed forces, that the military, used it differently than the Jasons were expecting it.
[00:26:18] The military thought, wow, sensors to tell you where the enemy was, and just ran with it. And in fact, I think it's got to be the basis of electronic warfare now, right? That's the way we fight now. We have sensors, and then we have shooters.
[00:26:39] And honestly, even during Vietnam, the time from the sensor going off to the shooter coming in was minutes. And now it's just remote warfare, and it's awful. It's terrible. But at the time, they used it, but not the way the Jasons wanted them to. Were the Jasons known for this at the time?
[00:27:04] A few years later, after they did it, I'd say within five to ten years, maybe five, within five years, the Pentagon Papers. It came out, and this report was in the Pentagon Papers. The Jasons just caught hell. Because these are academics, and they're on academic campuses.
[00:27:28] And there was a lot of protesting and strife on academic campuses during the Vietnam War. So how did this impact their work, knowing that they had developed something that was being used in a contentious war? Yeah, yeah, it did. A few of them quit Jason. A few of them sort of just dropped off the radar of Jason and then went back later. They really hated it. They didn't like the war themselves.
[00:27:58] They hated being protested by their students. They hated being protested by their colleagues. They just had a lot of trouble with it. And as a result, after the Vietnam War, they didn't stop working for Department of Defense. But they started diversifying into, like, climate. They started working on climate studies.
[00:28:27] When you switch from pure or applied physics over to climate, physicists can be as arrogant as they want. They still aren't climate scientists, right? They have their limits. Yeah, they have their limits. And so they had to find some oceanographers, some atmospheric physicists, climate scientists.
[00:28:57] That meant they couldn't be pure physics anymore. Now they had to diversify. I have a question about what happened during the Vietnam War. And if you have a consulting group that consults with the Department of Defense, how do you not think that your work is going to be used in war? Are they that naive? They were. At the time, they were.
[00:29:23] These guys definitely bought it. One of the Jasons was a guy named Richard Garwin. Okay. He was another quintessential Jason, but you've never heard of him. He died recently. I think he was pushing 100. He said he was very, I don't know how to say it, very plugged in and knew everybody and understood things in the ways that the more academic Jasons didn't.
[00:29:54] And he said, when you give a sponsor, a customer, a deliverable, that's the word he used. Yeah. A deliverable. It's not up to you how they use it. Exactly. And the Jasons didn't know that with the electronic barrier. I mean, with any of their work, you're not working for like the happy pony puppy department, right?
[00:30:22] I mean, you're working for the Department of Defense. Right. And there's a war going on. I don't know. I think it's awfully naive that this is just an academic exercise, that it's some sort of thought experiment. Well, at the time, it was. And I don't see that same naivete anymore. Although, as you can imagine, I asked a lot of questions. And as you can imagine, I got a lot of nebulous, vague answers.
[00:30:52] I said, are you working on stuff that keep you up at night? Are you, what do you do if somebody, if a sponsor wants something that you see as just offensive warfare? Like, how can you aerosolize anthrax better, right? So that it spreads farther. What would you do if a study like that came up and they said they don't come up?
[00:31:19] I think the sponsor asks, and I think there's a Jason management at any given time. Oh, and they just don't make it to the Jasons. Right. They just don't make it to the individual Jasons. Yeah. Jason management is Jasons, but it's like a rotating head just so low academic departments are. The department chairman is just there for a while. So they're kind of secretive.
[00:31:45] Was that before this incident or is that more so since this incident? That it's kind of hard to pin down who the Jasons are? There's no Jason website. There's no official list of Jasons. There's nothing that you can find easily about the Jasons. It's going to be very hard to impress a bunch of people I don't know who they are.
[00:32:10] If you're talking about how to become a Jason, you really need to impress only one or two people. And they will take it to the Jasons and say, she's impressive. Okay. All right. Thank you. You're welcome. While they were busy diversifying into oceanography and other things, at the same time, they're getting older. Right? Well, the original ones, the original Jasons are. Absolutely.
[00:32:38] And they haven't been adding a lot of new Jasons. So what was this? 1970s now. So they've been in business 15 years or so. And they had a few young ones. And the young ones got together and said, this is sort of being run by the old guys. And let us take over. And so there was this bloodless coup. And the young ones took over. Wow.
[00:33:07] I was going to say, at first that sounded like academia. Yes, it does. Until you said bloodless coup. Oh. And then that's not academia. Far as I can tell. I mean, this was so like, this was mid-70s now. I'm working without any documents, whatever. I'm relying on people's memories and their willingness to talk. So you can just filter the hell out of that book. Yeah. Using those filters. But I didn't get the impression that anybody needed to die.
[00:33:37] They just said, okay, I've been doing this for a long time. It's time for new ones to come in. And with that change in leadership, the topic started changing. And that's where you talked about we started getting into climate matters. Well, and then the Cold War ended. That makes a big change. I mean, they're still doing Cold War stuff.
[00:34:06] They're still doing those nuclear things. Stockpile health. But they work on studies for NSF, for the FAA, for Health and Human Services, Census. They've done a bunch of studies on the Census. The studies for the Census are really interesting to me anyway.
[00:34:26] Like, the question is, can you put together all these wonderful databases that the government has on people? Taxes together with I don't know what all. And make a database that you can draw the census from. I think. Something like that anyway. Anyway, it was just frightening.
[00:34:54] Can you put all that data in one place? And I don't know what the Jason said on that one because I didn't read that study. Another one of the Census's questions was, as you move toward an electronic census, not door-to-door people but electronic, what kind of fraud are you going to see and how can you prevent it so that the census is still accurate?
[00:35:21] And on that one, I did read that one that Jason said, you're not going to get a huge effect from individuals saying, I'm really three people. The danger is going to come from organized efforts and you're going to be able to see those.
[00:35:39] They also work on bioterror and on AI and on data science and electronic health records and they just work on everything now. So when they do this, they have to add more people with different backgrounds. Yeah. Now, their model is you go look for data scientists, but you look for the data scientists who are curious about everything.
[00:36:09] Okay. So not just data science. So not someone who is just doing AI or just doing data science. Exactly. Exactly. They have to be interested. Yes. And interested in applying data science to like, how can you remotely predict what this year's crop is going to be? That was a study for the Department of Agriculture.
[00:36:37] Can you do remote sensing of whether the corn crop is going to be any good this year? Can you? Yeah. Yes. How accurate were they in figuring this out? I don't know. See, that's one huge problem that I have that I swear the Jasons should have and they don't seem to care. And that is, how do you know what kind of impact they had?
[00:37:07] Right? Any given study, how do you know what impact it has? How do you know what the impact of Jasons in general is? They don't keep track. Their work is done when they send out their deliverable. That's right. That's it. They're done. A lot of the government isn't in place. I didn't know this. Isn't in place permanently. Some of it is. Some of them are actual employees of the government and they've been there a while.
[00:37:36] A lot of them are political appointees and so they rotate every four years or every two years or every six months. Yeah. Right. And the Jasons have a kind of a corporate memory because they know what studies they've worked on for that department before.
[00:37:56] So if the census comes back and says, we've got that problem solved but now we need the next one, the Jasons have an idea of what the impact of that previous one had been. So the only answer I have to that is the Jasons have a sense of whether they're successful enough to keep being hired. Right. And then the sponsors have the same.
[00:38:25] You can't get anything out of sponsors. I mean. No. No. I mean there's Freedom of Information Act but that doesn't work all the time. I mean it probably does but it's above my pay grade. And we talked about them getting hired but the Jasons have also been fired. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They've been fired twice.
[00:38:51] They've had skirmishes before that have gotten worked out. But what does getting fired mean when you're a freelance? I assume it's all your money is taken away and you're told to go home. The money they get is channeled through an agency of some sort. From 1960 until 2001 it was channeled through DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
[00:39:20] DARPA was a good fit with Jason because Jason likes advanced research projects. And DARPA fired them in 2001. Just said, we're not going to be your channel anymore and no money for you. Was there a reason or they just decided to go with someone else or just go with no one? Or did the Jasons tell them something they didn't like?
[00:39:45] The official reason from DARPA was that the Jasons were just a bunch of old-timey physicists and that DARPA wanted material scientists and information scientists. But by the time DARPA was saying that, Jason did have material scientists and information scientists and climate scientists and biologists.
[00:40:09] So I actually talked to the DARPA director who fired them at the time and I said, I know for a fact that that's not true. Right. And I'm going to say that in public. And he said, okay, we're going with the reason. That was their reason. So what is your speculation or what are the Jasons speculations? It was a pissing match. That's it? Yeah.
[00:40:39] That the DARPA director at the time, there might have been some tensions and some conflict coming up. He said to Jason that they needed to accept, I think, three people that were his friends. And Jason fell on its sword. And Jason says, we only accept our friends. Yep. Yes.
[00:41:05] Like the DARPA director friends were people that like didn't have PhDs. They would have been political appointees to keep an eye on the Jasons. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Or something. Or something. Which would have taken the whole point out of the Jasons. Exactly. And that's why the Jasons said, no, absolutely not. Yeah. We'd rather not exist than exist under these circumstances. Yes. Right.
[00:41:34] And so DARPA said, okay, then you don't exist. One of the things that the Jasons have always done very well is have members that have connections in the government. Okay. And sometimes the Jasons drop out of Jason for a while and go work in the government, generally in DOE somewhere, like the Department of Science in DOE.
[00:42:00] And then when the next administration comes in and fires them, then they go back to Jason. Anyway, so they do have people that have connections. And those connections did a lot of negotiating, including with a department, Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, and ended up having their, I don't even know what the office is called, but it's like their administrator.
[00:42:28] Instead it would be DARPA, an office called DDR&E, Defense Research and Engineering. Okay. Never even heard of it. You have to be interested in org charts in order to see what's going on here. Org charts are just too big in the federal government. They make no sense and they are just everywhere. Well, so all you need to know is there's the Secretary of Defense. And then right under him are a couple of offices.
[00:42:57] One of them is research and development. DARPA actually came under research and development. So Jason's went up one. Oh, good for them. In the org chart. Good for them. But then 19 years later, in 2019, they got fired again. Research and engineering fired them.
[00:43:18] This time, DOD's official reason was that it has other sources of science advice, which it does and has had for decades. Which is true. Which is true. But it isn't the whole truth. And again, I think it was probably a pissing match. The guy who was responsible for the decision just didn't like dealing with a bunch of independent, slightly arrogant scientists.
[00:43:48] And he said, I have the power here. And no more channel for money. Right. So Jason did its thing again. I mean, this time, Jason was completely blindsided. They really scrambled. They ended up with a temporary channel office. That's how I think of it. I don't know what they call it. For a while, it was temporary.
[00:44:13] And then they ended up with somebody, an office called not research and development, but it was on the same line of the org chart. Right. It was a sister office to research and engineering. And it was a sister office called acquisition and sustainment. And if you know what that means, you're a better person than I am. Sounds made up. So that's where they are now. Okay. And who are their sponsors now? Like, who are they working with or for?
[00:44:41] It's this same weird mix. The NSF, they've done a bunch of studies on... One of their big studies for NSF was, and this was one NSF didn't ask them for. Jason just wanted to do it, was how do you keep labs running during a pandemic? It's a good question. It's a good question.
[00:45:06] It was like maybe just as we were coming, just as the pandemic was starting to slack off a tiny bit, so they could look at all of the variables that were finally getting some data on how to control a pandemic once you've got it. And they could look at all of that and put it all together. They also did something about how can you preserve...
[00:45:32] Working with foreign scientists, foreign nationals, scientists who are foreign nationals. Yep. Because there have been some high profile, you know, foreign nationals spying on our science and taking it away and... Allegedly spying on our science. Allegedly, right. Yes. Yes. So they did a study for NSF on that. How can you work that one out?
[00:45:56] What is the process now to figure out what cases to take and moving forward in the summer? What does it look like? I love this process because it just underlines their independence. It hasn't changed since 1960, as far as I can tell. They get questions from the government, all the different agencies and offices in the government. They get questions.
[00:46:26] They work out the questions with the agency. There are people they know at the agencies and they can sit down together face-to-face and make sure that the question has a scientific answer. Not a policy answer, but a scientific answer. So that it's actually possible for them to contribute to this question. Exactly. Exactly.
[00:46:53] Once they've worked out the question, then they go through their logistics of writing it up and making contracts and stuff. And then they take it to the members and the members sign up for it or they don't.
[00:47:09] Because Jason decides which questions to work with the sponsor on refining and because the individual Jasons decide whether to work on that study or not, they're independent. They do that sort of on and off through the whole year.
[00:47:29] They meet in the spring to get briefings on the context of the problems, the context of the studies or other studies that they might not have thought about yet and they should be thinking about. They all come out to D.C. for that. And then they meet again in July, mid-July till the end of August or 1st of July till mid-August. I should know.
[00:47:57] They come and go these days. They're not all there for six weeks. In the beginning, they were all there for six weeks. But they be sure to meet when they're working on a study with other Jasons, they be sure to meet face-to-face. Because as you know, face-to-face is different. Absolutely. And these people often have different backgrounds and they can do a lot of serendipitous thinking because of that.
[00:48:26] And you have to be together. You have to be in the same room to work off each other and to discuss things. Yep. By the end of August, they've got the report done. Okay. But not written. They have it written by October. In November, they have another one of these meetings in D.C. They don't report back to the sponsors in D.C. They report back in La Jolla. And I don't quite understand why they have another meeting.
[00:48:55] But they like seeing each other. That's one of the reasons they stay in Jason is they like each other. They like seeing each other. They like working with each other. I don't go to the meetings because some of them are classified. Some of the talks that they have are classified. But they do have a reception. Where all the spouses and the hangers-on and the sponsors and the sponsors' wives. And it's one of those things.
[00:49:24] And they do let me come to that. So you get to go to the sponsor event in April? Yeah. It's a reception. It's just an... A reception. You know, it's just the way receptions work. You know, you hang around and you meet people that you wouldn't necessarily admit. But here's my question. If I can't be a Jason, can I be your plus one to the reception next year? I think you could. And the next one would be in November.
[00:49:53] I see getting my own invitation. But I can always try to just like cling on to your invitation. Well, you could meet them that way. But I think you should meet them through your science. That's what I think. Okay. Yeah. But we can talk about that offline. Among their balances, you know, they have to keep finding sponsors and keep old sponsors interested.
[00:50:24] But they have to keep Jasons interested. So they have to stay independent. And they have to stay meaningful. Otherwise, the Jasons will find other things to do during their summers. So it sounds like this is harder and harder to do. That it's harder and harder for Jasons to stay relevant. Because... I don't... Yeah. I don't think it's harder for them to stay relevant. I don't... I think... But I think it's harder for them to stay in business. Well, I mean...
[00:50:53] I guess that would be the same thing. Yeah. I mean... So does one Jasons take the responsibility to like do... To get all the sponsors and get all the projects together? Because that sounds like a full-time job there. Yeah. It is a full-time job, actually. And it's not done by a Jasons. It's done by... There is a government entity that channels their money. And now it's acquisitions and sustainment in DOD. So that's who does all... Okay. No. No. No. No.
[00:51:23] They just channel the money. I don't know what else they do. But then there is... They probably take about 15% of that money just to channel the money. I'm sure they do. If not 60. Right. I'm making that up. I don't know that they take any money at all. I'm sure they take something. There are these things, these think tanks called FFRDCs, or that's what they used to be called. Federally funded research and development centers. So like RAND Corporation.
[00:51:53] Yes. Institute for Defense Analyses. All those things that you don't know what they do. One of them is MITRE Corp. Okay. And MITRE Corp. is the administrator for Jason. It's like your university's grants office. And MITRE Corp. hires a guy to just stay in touch with who in the government might be interested in Jason's studies.
[00:52:22] That's his job. That makes sense. So it... Yeah. So the Jasons can just focus on doing the science. Yes. Yes. That's fantastic. And then talking to the government, they're the ones... I don't think that guy at MITRE figures out the exact subjects. I think he does sort of a first cut on the subjects and then takes it to the Jason and then they work it through. Hmm. I think that's how it works. They've got to keep the individual Jasons interested.
[00:52:52] It's a lot to do this extra thing during their summers. It is. The pay is good, but it's not that great. Well, and you don't go into academia for the pay. Right. That's right. You go to do interesting science. Yes. Yes. And so the Jasons will be interested in the subject and they will think the subjects are meaningful. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why they stay in.
[00:53:22] Also, they stay in because they like each other. They enjoy working together. Are many of the Jasons older or are they all various ages? Not anymore. Not anymore. They've got a policy of if you've got somebody like Sid Drell or Richard Garwin or Freeman Dyson, they are now 79 years old.
[00:53:47] You don't want to lose them as Jasons, but you want to keep new people coming in. And so they make these guys senior advisors who can sort of come in and talk now and then, but they're not regular Jasons. And the regular Jasons are, I mean, when I picture them as a group, I picture people in their 50s and 60s, 40s, 50s, 60s.
[00:54:16] They're well-established. They are. They have to be because nobody wants, Jason does not want any new sparkly young Jason not getting tenure because they didn't do their science, because they spent their summers working on something else. They want only people with tenure. And they don't want people from industry, although they've made exceptions from that. I'm guessing for AI.
[00:54:45] Yeah. Yeah. So for a while, one of them worked for NVIDIA. But I think he's back to university. I'm not sure. One works for Google. They start out in academia. And then sometimes, as you know, these guys go on to the companies. I always end by asking, is there anything that you want to mention that we haven't talked about?
[00:55:09] No, because we've kept it on what I think is really interesting about the Jasons is that they are in business. It's just fascinating. Yeah. It's fascinating that this group exists, and they've existed for so long, and nobody knows about them. Well, I understand the nobody knows about them part. They really want it that way. They didn't want me to write this book.
[00:55:35] But I've written several articles about them since, and I don't get any flack about it. I mean, they're not going to try and stop me from writing the book. But when I first got the contract to write the book, I wrote the main office and said, I want you to know what I'm up to here. And they wrote back and said, we wish you all the best of luck in your endeavors, but we're not cooperating.
[00:56:06] Wow. And so I had a breakdown, and then I decided to try anyway. Was it hard to get the Jasons to talk? Oh, yeah. Yes. And like generally, for any given article, about a third of the people I ask won't talk. I mean, is part of it because of the clearance issues? You know, I think it's leftover from Vietnam. I really do.
[00:56:33] I think there is still in academia a feeling that you really shouldn't be working for the Defense Department. And you really shouldn't be working on any applied systems that have the potential for harm. And the problem is, of course, a lot of the applied systems that have potential for harm also have the potential for non-harm.
[00:57:02] The phrase is dual use. Isn't that a wonderful phrase? Dual use. I can use this to keep you healthy and happy, or I can use it to kill you. You know. Absolutely. Whatever. Yep. Yep. I mean, even atmospheric science, which you would think would not be dual use, you can use that to control weather. Right? And you can use...
[00:57:28] So there have been weather modification and not just rain in North Dakota, but also rain in Vietnam. Swamp out all the trails. Swamp out all the trails. So everything is dual use. Everything is dual use. Yeah. Everything. All science. There's... Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. But the Jasons have thought about it, and they often don't decide to join for a while.
[00:57:57] Just thinking it through, and then they decide whether they'll work on a study or not. They all say they have not seen any studies, whether they work on them or not. They all know what all the studies are, and often go to the outbriefs once a study is done, so that they know what's going on. They haven't seen any studies that cause them moral trepidation. That's what they say.
[00:58:27] Thank you for listening. If you want to learn more, Ann's book is available on Amazon. Let me know what you think my chances are of actually becoming a Jason. Please rate and review us wherever you are listening. For whatever reason, it really helps us in the charts and allows other like-minded individuals to find us. Until next time, I'm Shelly Lesher, and this has been My Nuclear Life.
[00:59:02] This podcast was edited by Resonate Recordings.