Are We Losing Our Edge?

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Not in this country, anyway. But other nations, realizing how successful the U.S. model of scientific research has been, have begun to copy it in earnest. Finland decided back in the 1970s to focus on electronics and a handful of other high-tech industries, and now has the most research scientists per capita in the world. South Korea decided to concentrate on reproductive technology, and although the research of superstar Hwang Woo Suk has been exposed as mostly fraudulent, the country has plenty of other world-class experts in cloning and stem-cell research.

Singapore, meanwhile, with its Biopolis project, is pulling in top biomedical scientists--not just Edison Liu but Americans like geneticist Sydney Brenner and, most recently, husband-and-wife cancer researchers Neal Copeland and Nancy Jenkins, who are leaving the National Cancer Institute after two decades. They turned down competing offers from Stanford and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center because, Copeland says, "what's going on over there is amazing. There's plenty of funding and a lot less bureaucracy." Moreover, says Liu, "In the U.S. the state government says, Let's do one thing, while the Federal Government is trying to stamp it out." Singapore, by contrast, has a single set of reasonably permissive regulations.

Small, economically developed countries aren't the only ones that have created science-friendly cultures: 54% of the staff at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and an astonishing 81% of the scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences are people who have returned from abroad. Deng Hongkui's story is typical. When he went to the U.S. in 1989 for postgraduate study in virology, he thought he would go back to China only to visit family and friends. But in 2000 he returned as director of one of Peking University's newest research centers. Deng was promised his own team of students and faculty members and whatever state-of-the-art facilities he needed to pursue his research on stem cells. It clearly wasn't the same country he had left 11 years earlier. "It was more exciting, more dynamic," he says. "Before I never [thought] about doing research there because I needed resources, but it looked to me that resources were available. The whole environment was changing."

Those countries offer more than just funding. They're also determined to reproduce the spirit of wide-open inquiry that has made U.S. science so appealing and successful, says Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and a 1997 Nobelist in physics. Wherever he goes, administrators at foreign universities ask him how to create an American-style learning and thinking environment. "They are catching up quickly," he says.