Word: sputniked
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...initiative. Bush aides say the indispensable player in moving the package to the presidential podium was Bush's workout partner and close friend former Commerce Secretary Donald Evans, who made it a crusade after a fellow Texan on the National Academies committee handed him the report. "This is like Sputnik," Evans tells TIME. "We need to give this the same focus and energy...
...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 in 1957 and for the same reason, the Department of Defense started the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). And it established or beefed up national laboratories in New Mexico, California, Illinois, Washington and New York...
Even so, the U.S. commitment to science might have remained strong if the Soviet Union hadn't collapsed in the late '80s. "We don't have this shadow of Sputnik or the cold war overhanging us," says Stanford's Hennessy, "and we need a different form of inspiration." In fact, says Robert Birgeneau, a physicist and chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, it already exists, if only we would recognize it. "We have a different kind of war, an economic war," he says. "The importance of investing in long-term research for winning that war hasn't been understood...
...Asia's true economic and technological power, a status Japan has boasted for most of the last century and is loath to cede. The issue now, as China prepares to increase its advantage in manned space flight to 2-0, is whether Japan will soon experience a "Sputnik moment" and feel it has no choice but to redouble its efforts as a matter of national honor?or whether it will continue to dedicate the bulk of its vast resources to more practical priorities here on Earth...
Jackson warns that there aren't enough young people (men included) in the pipeline to replace all the talent that flooded the sciences after Sputnik. The looming shortage, she says, will hinder the U.S. economy and national security. So maybe there's a silver lining to the Larry Summers controversy. "It allows us to have a broader conversation about our capacity for innovation," she says. "My focus is on the complete talent pool. It's an all-in proposition from my perspective." --By Julie Rawe