America has been giving up its leadership in basic science, as the coronavirus shows
A new report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lists four landmark scientific achievements of the last year: the first spacecraft landing on a comet; the discovery of a new fundamental particle, the Higgs boson; the development of the world’s fastest supercomputer; and new research in plant biology pointing to new ways to meet global food needs.
Creating drugs and tests for known diseases is applied research. But “if we are to be prepared for the next viral epidemic, we need to invest in the basic research to characterize and understand all known viruses with the potential to be highly infectious,” the MIT report warned. Its words reverberate today.
As U.S. government spending on R&D have stagnated, business spending has soared--but their goals are very different.The $100 billion a year spent by U.S. government agencies is more than that of any other country’s public sector,. China’s outlay of roughly $80 billion from the public sector and $300 billion from business adds up to about 2% of its gross domestic product spent on R&D of all forms, compared to 2.7% in the U.S.
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