Economics, Psychology and Social Relations, and History of Science, among other departments, "will all feel the blow terribly if anything close to the Reagan cut is approved," Richard G. Leahy, associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said. He added that he expects a 50-percent cut in grant money from the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities as well.

NSF Fellowships

One area of particular concern to researchers in both "hard" and "soft" sciences is the threatened loss of NSF fellowships for doctoral candidates. More than 150 GSAS students receive NSF fellowships, and the program has been placed near the top of Reagan's cut list. "We will seriously impede progress if we cannot train people in the labs," David M. Green, chairman of the Psychology and Social Relations Department said, adding that he expects to lose at least 30 per cent of the approximately $900,000 his department received this year from the NSF and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Although Reagan has said their province will remain protected from tremendous cuts for the time being, researchers in fields such as medicine, chemistry, and physics fear that the government will not raise their level of funding to meet rising costs. Some expect cuts at least as severe as those in the social sciences.

The Reagan budget does not, for instance, include the $75 million grant for improving university laboratories and instrumentation promised in the budget proposals submitted by Jimmy Carter before he left office. Harvard had lobbied for years to get the grant approved, "but it looks as if it was a waste of time," Donald J. Ciappenelli, director of the University's chemical laboratories, said.

Ciappenelli said he had hoped to receive "at least $2 million" to renovate 53-year-old Mallinckrodt Lab, which is "falling apart while at the same time all of the equipment is wearing out."

"Work in many fields that is already bogged down is in danger of becoming obsolete all together without an immediate infusion of federal money," Richard V. Jones, McKay Professor of Applied Physics, said.

Government claims that private corporations can undertake high level research at a lower cost than universities are misleading, Jones added, saying. "The private sector is not the bad guy: it just does not have the patience to search for novel new phenomena, and it does not undertake the responsibility of training the next generation of thinkers."

The NIH supports more than 80 per cent of the research and training at the Medical School and School of Public Health, and despite his "generally optimistic attitude about our area," Harold Amos, chairman of the division of Medical Sciences, said researchers "cannot help but be concerned by the messages from Washington."

Reagan has recommended a slight increase in the NIH budget for 1982 which falls short of the allocations proposed by Carter.

Despite Amos's qualified optimism administrators in the Med School and the SPH fear that Reagan's promises to eliminate aid for students in the health professions currently authorized by the department of Health and Human Services will slip past Congress