By WILLIAM J. BROAD
The United States has started to
lose its worldwide dominance in critical areas of science and innovation,
according to federal and private experts who point to strong evidence like
prizes awarded to Americans and the number of papers in major professional
journals.
Foreign advances in basic science now often
rival or even exceed America's, apparently with little public awareness of the
trend or its implications for jobs, industry, national security or the vigor
of the nation's intellectual and cultural life.
"The rest of the world is catching up," said
John E. Jankowski, a senior analyst at the National Science Foundation, the
federal agency that tracks science trends. "Science excellence is no longer
the domain of just the U.S."
Even analysts worried by the trend concede that
an expansion of the world's brain trust, with new approaches, could invigorate
the fight against disease, develop new sources of energy and wrestle with
knotty environmental problems. But profits from the breakthroughs are likely
to stay overseas, and this country will face competition for things like
hiring scientific talent and getting space to showcase its work in top
journals.
One area of international competition involves
patents. Americans still win large numbers of them, but the percentage is
falling as foreigners, especially Asians, have become more active and in some
fields have seized the innovation lead. The United States' share of its own
industrial patents has fallen steadily over the decades and now stands at 52
percent.
A more concrete decline can be seen in published
research. Physical Review, a series of top physics journals, recently tracked
a reversal in which American papers, in two decades, fell from the most to a
minority. Last year the total was just 29 percent, down from 61 percent in
1983.
China, said Martin Blume, the journals' editor,
has surged ahead by submitting more than 1,000 papers a year. "Other
scientific publishers are seeing the same kind of thing," he added.
Another downturn centers on the Nobel Prizes, an
icon of scientific excellence. Traditionally, the United States, powered by
heavy federal investments in basic research, the kind that pursues fundamental
questions of nature, dominated the awards.
But the American share, after peaking from the
1960's through the 1990's, has fallen in the 2000's to about half, 51 percent.
The rest went to Britain, Japan, Russia, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and New
Zealand.
"We are in a new world, and it's increasingly
going to be dominated by countries other than the United States," Denis Simon,
dean of management and technology at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,
recently said at a scientific meeting in Washington.
Europe and Asia are ascendant, analysts say,
even if their achievements go unnoticed in the United States. In March, for
example, European scientists announced that one of their planetary probes had
detected methane in the atmosphere of Mars � a possible sign that alien
microbes live beneath the planet's surface. The finding made headlines from
Paris to Melbourne. But most Americans, bombarded with images from America's
own rovers successfully exploring the red planet, missed the foreign
news.
More aggressively, Europe is seeking to dominate
particle physics by building the world's most powerful atom smasher, set for
its debut in 2007. Its circular tunnel is 17 miles around.
Science analysts say Asia's push for excellence
promises to be even more challenging.
"It's unbelievable," Diana Hicks, chairwoman of
the school of public policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said of
Asia's growth in science and technical innovation. "It's amazing to see these
output numbers of papers and patents going up so fast."
Analysts say comparative American declines are
an inevitable result of rising standards of living around the
globe.
"It's all in the ebb and flow of globalization,"
said Jack Fritz, a senior officer at the National Academy of Engineering, an
advisory body to the federal government. He called the declines "the next big
thing we will have to adjust to."
The rapidly changing American status has not
gone unnoticed by politicians, with Democrats on the attack and the White
House on the defensive.
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