The US appears to be losing the race for global scientific leadership to China, but it could buck that trend by adapting to the emerging research environment and trying “new approaches,” according to a senior US science official.
During her inaugural State of the Science address in Washington last month, Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), said the US was still the world’s largest investor in research and development, but that it would not be long before China took over that position.
The U.S. spent $806 billion compared with China’s $668 billion on R&D in 2021, but China’s investment rate was double that of the United States, said McNutt, a geophysicist and the first woman to chair the NAS since its founding in 1863.
McNutt is also the first female editor-in-chief of the journal Science and was elected a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2019.
Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has been “not just world leader, but world dominant” in science and engineering, accounting for nearly 60 percent of all Nobel Prizes ever awarded, she said.
Meanwhile, China has been rapidly catching up in both the quantity and quality of papers published, while doubling the number of patents filed by the US in 2021. “All of this suggests to me that there are very worrying trends.”
Various ranking methods, including those used by analytical institutions in the US, Britain and Japan, all suggest that China has surpassed the US in the number of most cited papers, a key measure of research impact.
According to McNutt, the US has become “exceptionally dependent” on international students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), including from China and India.
Not only do international students outnumber domestic students in graduate programs at American universities, 65 percent remain in the U.S. for at least 10 years, maintaining the country’s STEM workforce, she said.
“We literally wouldn’t be able to fill our STEM jobs if it weren’t for these international students coming and staying in the U.S.”
However, as China’s R&D efforts have grown, American universities have seen a decline in the number of Chinese students in recent years. “International students have a lot of options, and we’re not the preferred destination anymore,” McNutt said.
McNutt recommended protecting America’s leadership in science by strengthening its own STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education in K-12 and building a domestic science workforce for the future.
The tradition of having other nations — especially those in Asia — invest in their K-12 education and then “stealing their students to come here” must be changed, he said.
According to McNutt, the U.S. must also work to attract “the best and brightest talent” from around the world by reducing red tape for student visas. A top-down national research strategy is also crucial to help coordinate R&D spending by government agencies and the private sector, he added.
Fan-Gang Zeng, an auditory scientist at the University of California, Irvine, said McNutt’s speech presented many good ideas, but implementing some of the recommendations would be challenging because of different goals or competing interests.
“Some may even be inherently incompatible, such as federal versus industry support, domestic versus international students, and national security versus international collaboration,” Zeng wrote on his LinkedIn account.
Via South China Morning Post
Source: https://www.ocafezinho.com/2024/07/10/cientistas-americanos-alertam-governo-que-china-pode-ultrapassar-os-eua-em-breve-em-desenvolvimento-tecnologico/
