Does diminishing science funding mean declining US innovation?
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8016
National opinion leaders at the Atlantic and the New York Times recently examined and extolled American innovation, yet only incidentally noted that erosion of basic-research funding threatens it.
At the Atlantic, national correspondent James Fallows’s “The 50 greatest breakthroughs since the wheel ” synthesizes the views of a dozen “scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, historians of technology, and others” who had been asked “to assess the innovations that have done the most to shape the nature of modern life.” The article’s long opening analysis leads to a list of 50 innovations worldwide, though the US constitutes the main focus. A large proportion of the 50 resulted directly from science or indispensably involved it. In only a few does science seem irrelevant—for example, the advent of the alphabetization that facilitates information retrieval.
Fallows’s 4200-word analysis—the length of a half-dozen newspaper op-eds—asks, in part, “whether the long trail of innovation recorded” in the list “is now nearing its end.” More than a third of his analysis comes under the subheading “The future.” Yet Fallows only mentions, but never elaborates on, what he calls “the continued erosion of basic-research funding.”
At the New York Times, columnist Bill Keller’s “Toy story ” examines the US as “the world’s cradle of innovation” and as the place of origin of “an astonishing number of civilization-altering innovations.” Keller exclaims, “You might say that America itself is something of a civilization-altering innovation.”
He begins not with science or technology, however, but with the entrepreneurial story of a popular toy, the Rainbow Loom , with which kids braid colorful rubber bands into bracelets. When Keller praises the entrepreneur, Cheong Choon Ng, as a national exemplar, he lists—but omits science and research from—what he calls American innovation’s “main components":
In Ng’s story you can discern the main components of America’s success as an incubator of new things: a welcome mat for talented, ambitious immigrants. An education system that (when it is not teaching test-taking) values creativity. The availability of start-up capital. Patent laws that protect intellectual property. An infrastructure that gets things shipped and marketed. And, perhaps most important, a culture that preaches opportunity and celebrates the risk-taker, the pioneer. From the Wright Brothers taking flight, to Bill Bowerman of Nike using a waffle iron to revolutionize running shoes, to Steve Jobs and his beautiful machines, to Choon Ng, we worship the inventive spark.
In one paragraph near the end, though, Keller does at least mention “the erosion of our infrastructure—physical and intellectual,” which leads him also to mention research-funding erosion. He writes:
James Fallows, who wrote up The Atlantic’s great-inventions list (and who is an astute student of the economic cultures of the U.S. and China) worries about the dwindling of America’s publicly financed research. The budgets of the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other sources of investment in the long-term basic science that undergirds practical innovation have been slowly eroding—even before the ham-handed budget sequester and the idiotic government shutdown. “This is more maddening than the other most obvious problem, the neglect of physical infrastructure, because it would be so much easier to solve,” Fallows told me in an email. “Rebuilding bridges, ports, etc. takes a long time. Increasing research budgets is an ‘it’s only money’ issue. The sums are small on the national budgetary scale but large in their implications.”
The relatively small missing sums of research money are “large in their implications,” Fallows observes and Keller repeats. Yet they receive only incidental mention in these two commentaries examining American innovation.
--- Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.