Ever since World War II, the American economy has been bolstered by public funding of basic research, which translated to many advancements in our daily life. Vannevar Bush’s 1945 document “Science: The Endless Frontier” helped establish the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Health (NIH) and later the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as funding agencies to university researchers in the U.S. There is incontrovertible evidence that such a strategy has kept this country at the pinnacle of innovations and assuring an economic advantage that no other country could match for at least the past six decades since 1945. Our present course of science funding seems to imperil our advantages in this regard.

At the height of the federal R&D spending on science in the early 1970s, 1.2% of GDP was spent on it. However, ever since then an erosion of spending has occurred, and in 2016 the spending was down to 0.8%.  This is a troubling trend since the federal R&D is what sustains almost all the basic research in this country.  Whereas 70% of aggregate R&D was federal in the 1960s, now it is only 29%.  Although the 71% of total R&D is now industrial, it is mostly developmental (D) instead of research (R). Private sector funding is mostly short-term for the immediate development of a product, and seldom fund long-term research or support risky endeavors.  Basic R&D, supported by the federal government has been the bulwark of our economic engine that propelled us to the envy of the world.  The seed corn of our innovation is federal R&D funding, which in time translates to technologies that keep us at the forefront. To date, we have fallen to 10^th place in total R&D investments among the OECD nations. China, India, Korea and other developing nations are outpacing our investments and it is predicted that at the current rates, China will surpass USA by 2025. This will be tantamount to squandering our existing advantages in sustaining innovation that stimulates new discoveries and leads to job growth.

Let us consider a few examples of investments that have provided huge returns as far as our economic prosperity is concerned.

• The first example is from the digital technology improvements that have simplified a lot of our daily activities. It is no surprise to point out that we now live in a digital world where every aspect of our daily lives are tracked, stored and measured. The iPhone is one device we rely on every day to conduct our daily life. Yet, not many people realize how many of the components of this elegant device were developed through government funded research. Practically, every major element in it is a result of university or federal laboratory research. The economist Mariana Mazzucato elegantly pointed this out in her book “The Entrepreneurial State”.
• A second example worth noting is the evolution of the “hydro-fracking” technology and the resulting abundance of natural gas resources that has changed our country from an overall importer to the largest exporter of natural gas.  This technology was seeded by grants from the Department of Energy in the 1960’s and further refined through both university and industry research. This has certainly made us much less reliant on foreign imports and also revolutionized our chemical and petrochemical industry.
• A third example is the on-going revolution in genomics. Starting with the delineation of the structure of DNA, there have been continual efforts at determining the genomes of various species. A majority of these basic research efforts were publicly funded through the National Institutes of Health and assisted by private foundations. As a result, we have now reached the stage of determining our entire genetic composition at prices as low as a few hundred dollars. The primacy of public funded research in understanding various diseases and their treatment is undeniable.

As I pointed our earlier, most of the funding for basic research from federal sources has been continually declining for the last three decades.  The industry funding has not made up for this lack of resources.  The universities have been increasingly spending their scarce resources to stem the tide, but with little effect. The recent NSF document (https://ncsesdata. nsf.gov/herd/2016/ ) clearly showed that this is the case. Universities cannot sustain this effort any longer due to both steady disinvestment of public funding by States and increasing financial pressures on universities. As spelled out in the 2012 National Research Academy report “Research Universities and the Future of America: Ten Breakthrough Actions Vital to Our Nation’s Prosperity and Security”, there has to be a complete re-think of the priorities of the U.S. legislative and executive branches on how much extra and sustained spending on basic research has to be maintained in the coming decade so that we retain our inherent advantages in the scientific and technological fronts.