Dear Commons Community,
H. Holden Thorp has an editorial this morning’s Science entitled , “America is ceding the lead in creating the future.” He cites Peter Drucker who stated: ”the best way to predict the future is to create it”—a view that applies to science as well. Thorp goes on to lament that current Trump policies regarding research are ceding leadership in science to other countries. Here is an excerpt.
The renowned American management consultant and author Peter Drucker is often credited as saying that “the best way to to predict the future is to create it” much as to the business world. It implies that gaining insights and ideas that lead to new discoveries and technologies allows victory in the marketplace, ahead of the competition. As the Trump administration continues to drastically defund and dismantle basic science in America, the United States is presenting other countries with opportunities to take the lead in seeing farther ahead, anticipate where scientific and technological prowess is going, and create the future, while the United States stands on the sidelines. This is a matter not only of scientific prestige but also of economic vitality. The country will no longer be at the forefront of commercializing breakthroughs and leveraging them for maximum economic and societal benefit. Moreover, this will trigger a massive transition for the global scientific community and alter the framework that shapes how the world’s economies connect and grow.
Measured by its share of published research, the United States was already falling behind before the latest cuts and attacks. For example, the percentage of papers published in Science with at least one corresponding author with funding from the US federal government has been declining over the past 7 years (2018 to 2024), decreasing from 54 to 44%. By contrast, the number of published papers originating from China has doubled during this time. In Science Advances, the number of papers published from China and the United States in 2024 was roughly the same. If this trend continues, the same will be true in a few years for Science and is likely to happen even sooner as the US government retreats from supporting research and China and other countries continue to increase their investments.
For now, the United States arguably remains the leader in the hot areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing, with many of the advances coming from US-based corporate entities such as Google DeepMind and Microsoft. But commercial success in these areas grew out of basic research in computer science and solid-state physics in universities, funded by the federal government. With a bottom line to consider, for-profit businesses likely would not have started these disciplines from scratch. The recent market panic caused by the advances in AI by the Chinese company DeepSeek shows that this leadership is far from guaranteed. Moreover, applying these technologies in medicine and elsewhere will rely on still more basic research— research now threatened by sweeping cutbacks inflicted by the Trump administration.
The United States will no longer have the same window into the technologies of the future that will allow it to shape and anticipate commercial and societal advances.
A world where the United States is no longer leading the scientific enterprise will still benefit from science. Human creativity flourishes everywhere, after all, and other countries and cultures will have greater opportunities to shape the future in new ways. The global enterprise will adapt to the lack of American leadership, but the steep loss for the country itself is unambiguous. The United States will no longer have the same window into the technologies of the future that will allow it to shape and anticipate commercial and societal advances. This will eventually reduce the market successes and global leadership that the United States has boasted since World War II.
At a US Senate hearing in April on the importance of biomedical research, bipartisan support was expressed for continued investment, although whether senators in the Republican party will defy the president and rectify the cuts remains unknown. In his testimony, Sudip Parikh, the chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, the publisher of Science), noted that the language of chemistry used to be German and that only in the past 50 years did the German language stop being a requirement for chemistry degrees in the United States. “Twenty years from now,” he said, “what is going to be the language of science? Is it going to be English? I don’t know that for certain.” It is a sobering thought. Scientific knowledge is, fortunately, a public good, and as such, its benefits transcend international boundaries. But relinquishing its prominence in creating the future is nothing short of devastating for the United States.
So True!
Tony
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