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President Obama, in his first State of the Union address, told us that other countries are making the investments needed to seize the opportunities present in meeting the world’s grand challenges, and that the U.S. risks being left behind. He’s right.
The National Science Board’s biennial Science & Engineering Indicators suggests that as early as the 2012 edition, the U.S. will no longer lead the world in total R&D expenditures – unless corrective action is taken (graph here). And Senator Jeff Bingaman, who chairs the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, recently told a Senate hearing that “…our investments in new energy technologies, and the science underlying them, have been surprisingly deficient over the last 20 years…. our national R&D investments in medicine and biotechnology, as a percentage of sales, are about 40 times greater than our research and development investments in energy.” Read the rest of this entry »
