Word: basically
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...those were just isolated cases, they would be easy to dismiss. Such stories, though, have become disturbingly common. After more than a half-century of unchallenged superiority in virtually every field of science and technology, from basic research to product development, America is starting to lose ground to other nations. It's still on top for now; the U.S continues to lead the world in economic performance, business and government efficiency and in the strength of its infrastructure. As recently as 2001, the U.S., with just 6% of the world's population, churned out 41% of its Ph.D.s...
...though. Responding to an increasingly insistent drumbeat of lobbying over the past few months from industry leaders, scientists and legislators, Bush announced in his State of the Union address last week the launch of what he called the American Competitiveness Initiative. The plan: double federal funding of research in basic areas like nanotechnology, supercomputing and alternative energy; make permanent the R&D tax credit; and train 70,000 additional high school science and math teachers. Aboard Air Force One the next morning, the President told Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican Senator who has been pushing the idea hard...
That means not only that Americans have to be better than the rest of the world at inventing things but also that we have to be better at the basic research that precedes invention. Back in the 19th and early 20th centuries, people like Edison, Morse and the Wright brothers proved that Americans were pretty good at creating useful technology. But all of it was based on fundamental science done in places like Britain, Germany and France, where the true intellectual action...
...learned that pure research like atomic and electromagnetic physics, combined with massive government funding, could lead to dramatic breakthroughs in military technology. Because the Soviet Union almost immediately became just as ominous a threat as Nazi Germany had been, Congress created the National Science Foundation in 1950 to fund basic and applied science, mostly at universities, "to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense ..." In 1958 it founded NASA in response to renewed fears of Soviet technical competition ignited by the launch of Sputnik the previous year. Also...
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...