Are We Losing Our Edge?

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That extraordinary track record also made scientists and engineers into national heroes. They won the war, they got us to the moon, they protected us from polio and dozens of other illnesses, and they gave us a standard of living far higher than that of any other country. Young people were inspired to emulate their egghead heroes, and federal funding made that possible. Energy Secretary Bodman, for example, recalls that he went to graduate school on a National Science Foundation fellowship in 1960. "Without that fellowship," he says, "I can virtually guarantee I wouldn't have done it."

For nearly a half-century, the strategy of putting money into science guaranteed that the U.S. would lead the world by just about every measure of scientific and technological prowess. So, what changed? American business, for one thing. Competitive pressure and the need to prop up stock prices forced many companies to abandon research and focus mostly on short-term product development. Freewheeling corporate research labs that didn't contribute visibly to the bottom line--AT&T's Bell Labs, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center--have been restructured.

Much the same happened to military-funded research. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, the successor agency to ARPA) halved its funding of academic information-technology research from 2001 to 2004. "They say that because we're in a war, we need to have a shorter-term focus," laments Patterson. "But during Vietnam," he says, DARPA-funded researchers "laid the technology, the underlying vocabulary, of the Internet. They were doing fundamental, important, long-term research."

Nonmilitary research grants, meanwhile, have been essentially flat for the past 15 years. The one exception: the National Institutes of Health, whose budget doubled from 1998 to 2003. "Unless there's an emotional appeal, basic research is well beyond the time span of the next election," says Craig Barrett, chairman of Intel. "There is a very emotional attachment to research on cancer or chronic illnesses. It's much more difficult to say, What will the structure of the transistor look like in the next 15 years?"

As the size of individual grants shrinks, university researchers have to win more of them to keep research going, which requires enormous amounts of extra paperwork. "It's decreased their quality of life," says Paul Jennings, provost of Caltech and a civil engineer. When students see how much time a professor spends on bureaucratic busywork, says Jennings, they say, "I don't want to do that." It's not just red tape either, says Paul Nurse, president of Rockefeller University and a 2001 Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine. "If we compare what our best undergraduates get paid as a graduate student vs. what they get paid in investment banking, there's no doubt that there's tremendous economic pressure to suck you away from what is perhaps your first academic love." As for teaching science at the precollege level, salaries and working conditions are even more dismal.