Norman P. Neureiter

It was in 1973, that I resigned from four years in the White House Office of Science and Technology (OST). The OST had been eliminated by President Nixon, despite all the wonderful work I thought our office had done on building scientific relations with the Soviet Union and with Romania. It had even played a mini-role in preparing some initiatives for the Nixon-Kissinger breakthrough with China.

I joined Texas Instruments (TI), which at that time stood at the pinnacle of American high technology. TI had plants throughout the world: in the US, in Europe, and in Asia. Every quarter, the company’s senior management visited each of these regions to conduct the dreaded quarterly financial review. This was a frightening time for local managers, who had to get up and explain how they were doing and very often why they had missed their goal – something bordering on a mortal sin for the tough, hard-nosed Texans that ran the company out of Dallas.

Often, the Texans could not completely understood the English spoken by the Taiwanese, the Japanese, the French, the Finns, and I know that many of the locals could not understand the Texas accents of the management. But once the lights went out and the slides went up on the screen, all the electrons went in the same direction, all the circuits worked, and every engineer in the place understood the diagrams on the slides and the technology involved. Science brought everyone together on the same page.

That was the great epiphany for me. One common denominator linked together all of those people from 20-some countries sitting in that darkened room. That common denominator was electronics technology and the basic laws of physics, chemistry, and materials science that had made it possible. Science and technology were the great levelers, the bridge across the huge gaps of language and culture.

To me, this was just another validation of what OST had been doing with science engagement behind the Iron Curtain. Talking politics with Communist officials often ended in an ideological fight, but talking science with a Polish or Russian researcher reached across a cultural and political divide quite often found some common ground. And, of course, today I am even more of a firm believer that science and technology cooperation can be a superb soft-power instrument in a constructive US foreign policy.