NSF 1989 superconductor-only funding directive

NSF announced in 1989 that only high-Tc superconductor proposals would be funded for a year; within one year, half the MIT Materials Science faculty pivoted into the field. Four of the five faculty who had prior superconductor experience stayed out, knowing the critical-current problem was unsolvable.

At that time there were five faculty in this department who had worked on superconductivity, out of about 30 faculty, at some time prior in the previous 30 or 40 years. And the four who did not — almost everybody — there's this lemmings-heading-to-the-cliff. The National Science Foundation announced in 1989 that the only new proposals they would entertain would be on superconductivity. So if you had any other topic — ceramics, polymers, metals, didn't matter — if your topic wasn't high-temperature superconductors, they were not going to fund you for a whole year at National Science Foundation. Everybody was telling Congress this was going to transform our whole energy landscape. Within one year, half of the faculty in this department — it went from one person doing active superconductivity research to about 20. Of the five of us who had worked on superconductivity before, only one of the five continued to work on superconductors. That was a guy named Dave Redman. He was an assistant or associate professor and he continued to work on superconductivity because it was an important field and he was in it. The four of us who already had tenure wouldn't touch that field with a 10-foot pole, because we knew enough about it that we said this is not going anywhere.