Longtime observer sees a decadent lack of financial self-awareness in US science
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.2454
By Steven T. Corneliussen
‘We’re not going to cure cancer by doubling the money,’ predicted Nobel laureate James Watson in a recent newspaper interview. ‘We’re going to do it by being more intelligent.’ In a recent Nature commentary , science journalist Colin Macilwain similarly judged US research overall, alleging an unthinking absence of national self-criticism concerning science’s costs.
Macilwain adduced examples of such self-criticism in Japan, China, and Singapore; praised the mid-1990s Galvin commission that called unsuccessfully for closing some US federal science labs; and lamented that since then, ‘perhaps as much as $100 billion’ has nevertheless ‘poured down the drain’ to keep those labs open. Without serious fiduciary self-criticism, he declared, the argument ‘that a heavily indebted and politically dysfunctional United States can shortly resume its twentieth-century growth pattern, if only it keeps investing in research and development...strains credulity.’
The argument also lacks scholarly documentation, wrote Macilwain. He added:
[I]n the year 2000, China spent about $25 billion on R&D and produced 3% of the global scientific literature. The United States spent around $300 billion on R&D and produced 27% of the papers. Thirteen years later, the Chinese economy has expanded by 200%; the American one by 20%. Clearly the two economies are not directly comparable, but curiosity-driven research on an industrial scale is a relatively recent invention, and I would suggest that it may be a sign—rather than the cause—of a successful economy.
I’m still waiting to see a PhD thesis—never mind a National Academies report—on the economic or health outcomes of the doubling of funding for the US National Institutes of Health from 1998 to 2003.
When will ‘this troubling mist of complacency...lift’? Macilwain answered that ‘America needs to take a leaf from East Asia’s book’ with ‘a cold, hard look at how it spends its money—including the vast federal R&D budget.’ He closed by recalling a report about China from the Xinhua news agency:
‘Frugality fuels science breakthrough’...lauded a team of neutrino scientists for, among other things, finding cheap accommodation. I’ve never seen a story along these lines in Europe or the United States. And that, I’m afraid, suggests that decadence has set in.
In a letter to the editor of Nature a few weeks later, Thomas E. DeCoursey of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago protested. ‘Colin Macilwain argues that scientific research and development in the West should be contributing more to economic prosperity,’ he wrote. ‘I disagree that this is a problem in the United States.’ DeCoursey proposed that ‘big problems faced by humankind, including transportation, finite natural resources, overpopulation, environmental degradation and climate change, can be solved only by science and technology, irrespective of profit motives.’ He did not, however, rebut or even address Macilwain’s charge that the American science enterprise lacks fiscal self-criticism.
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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.