US Losing its Scientific Dominance

ScaredSilly writes "The New York Times is reporting that the US is losing its dominance in the sciences. They cite lowering research budgets, increased military spending and 'reverse brain-drain': fewer techies staying in the US after school. I personally think that our comparatively crappy K-12 educational system, and an increased dominance of military research over core scientific research plays a big role. (It's easy to get DARPA, DoD and DoE funding, but difficult to get NSF funding). What do you folks think?"

Comments

Re:It's so much easier to bid and get cash...

[call -151]

The NSF Fastlane website (you need an account set up by your campus/organization Sponsored Reseach Office to see anything, though) is modern and reasonably efficient. You upload proposals, check on their status, file reports, make budget requests all in a reasonable way. I have NSF funding and can't say anything about applying for DOD or NSA grants, but for the NSF, Fastlane works well and is quite efficient. People complain about NSF but it is a massive improvement over the old (send 15 copies of your 150-page grant application in this very specific format, and make a table of contents by hand please, and a bunch of other tedious junk...) It's not the webpages that are sending people elsewhere to look for grant funding. It's the fact that these grants are very hard to get, and even top researchers with excellent track records of doing things with funding are not getting grants. It seems like a greater fraction of the NSF money is used for certain programs inspired by the latest trends, and there is less money for the less glamorous "basic research" that fuels scientific progress.

The NSF grant search website is far more primitive than Fastlane, but if you haven't used it to see who has NSF grants at your institution, it can be revealing. A good way to search is to look for "investigator contains ucla.edu" and "start date after 1-1-2002" to find people at UCLA who have recent grants, though only the PI's email addresses are listed under investigator, so that won't find grants where the UCLA person is a "co-principal investigator." But it's a good start.

Time Magazine Reports Opposite

[edibleplastic]

Time magazine had an article in January claiming the exact opposite situation, that US laboratories and departments were the destination for thousands of European scientists. Here are two quotes:

"Some 400,000 European science and technology graduates now live in the U.S. and thousands more leave each year. A survey released in November by the European Commission found that only 13% of European science professionals working abroad currently intend to return home."

""In soccer, if you're great, another team can buy you." Science is the same, and the big buyer is the U.S.: in 2000, the U.S. spent 287 billion [euro] on research and development, 121 billion [euro] more than the E.U."

The full article is here

Re:Working hard

[MKalus]

And isn't that how it should be?

I grew up in Germany, I worked there, then moved to the states and now Canada.

Sure, people spend more time at work here, but the actual work that gets done is at best the same.

I think I want to go back to Europe, at least there once I am done I am done and nobody expects me to do "more".