Dear Commons Community,
The following editorial written by Heather Wilson, president of The University of Texas at El Paso and a member of the National Science Board, appeared in the current edition of Science.
Tony
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Science and America’s challenge
Heather Wilson
More than at any time since World War II, the United States is being challenged scientifically on the global stage. Unfortunately, the nation is not meeting the moment. With a new administration in the wings, the country must begin to monitor scientific advancements to avoid technological surprise and develop strategies to close the critical technologies gap.
Despite a substantial increase in privately and publicly funded research over the past 30 years, Western democracies are losing the technology competition. In 2023, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute began tracking the pace of scientific advancement and found that China leads in 37 of 44 critical technologies—from advanced materials and quantum physics to robotics, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence. This reversal demonstrates that the United States and Western countries are losing scientific leadership. The consequences are not merely academic. If the trend does not change quickly, risks to economic stability and national security will grow.
There are a few things that the United States can do immediately to start turning things around. It must develop a robust way to monitor science and technology advances around the world to prevent surprise. US intelligence agencies are designed to track real-time threats such as the launch of ballistic missiles, the massing of land forces, or incremental improvements in existing weapons. But none of the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies is tasked with systematically scanning the scientific and technological horizon to determine where innovation is most threatening. Although most in the intelligence community and military agree that this is important, no one thinks it’s their problem to fix. Congressional action is needed to set in motion a solution.
The situation also calls for legislation that supports education and training that better prepares a US workforce to thrive in fast-paced fields across the sciences. This strategy has a strong precedent. In 1958, in response to the space race with the Soviet Union, the US passed the National Defense Education Act to bolster the country’s education system and meet the demands posed by competition in science and technology. An equally bold action today could reignite this ambition. Partnerships with states and private industry would be essential for this push to succeed. Indeed, many state leaders have recognized the connection between economic opportunity and talent development by investing in research and higher education. Texas is second only to the National Institutes of Health in funding cancer research, for example. And most states heavily subsidize college education at public universities. In New Mexico, oil and gas tax revenue pays university tuition and fees for students willing to work hard. This renewed effort should prioritize advanced education for precollege teachers in science and mathematics and offer an array of scholarships for undergraduate and graduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), particularly at public universities that have kept the cost of quality education reasonable.
It’s also time for a national science strategy that invigorates public interest in, and enthusiasm for, science. This strategy must attract American students to pursue advanced education in science and engineering. Today, 20% of high-impact academic papers in STEM fields are written by researchers in China who were educated in the West—often at US taxpayer expense. This is an alarming indication that the West may be slipping in the kind of scholarly leadership that drives innovative thinking, knowledge generation, evidence-based problem-solving, and societal progress.
America will build the massive data centers and generate the energy to power them. These will be critical to America’s future. It is expected that artificial intelligence will accelerate hypothesis formulation, experimental design, and data analysis. The limiting factor will be people to conduct the research suggested by AI-generated hypotheses at Western universities. Well-educated Western researchers must have access to computing power and data to accelerate discovery.
It often takes a crisis or a substantial failure to galvanize national sentiment and inspire leaders to meet new challenges and threats in a substantially different way. The United States can take comfort in knowing that it has strong alliances in scientific research with like-minded states, which must be fortified as part of its national science strategy. But it is time for the nation to critically examine its own current place in the world of science and consider the perils of allowing this new status quo.
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