Every two years, the National Science Board reports to the president and Congress about the state of the science landscape. This year’s Science and Engineering Indicators report was presented to the White House on January 15. The chairman of the board’s Science and Engineering Indicators committee, physicist Louis Lanzerotti of the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, recently spoke with staff writer Laura Sanders about how the lay of the science land has changed.
Overall, is this report good news, bad news or interesting news?
Overall, I view these data as good. The United States is still very strong in research and development, and I think the data show that. But they also demonstrate that there are areas we need to look at and adapt to. The rest of the world is catching up to us in many instances — China and some of the Far East countries, for example.
In what ways are others catching up?
For example, the United States expends approximately 2.7 percent of its gross domestic product every year on research and development. Japan has always exceeded that over the last 10 years or more with an investment of about 3.4 percent of its GDP. South Korea has now crossed Japan, and as of 2007, is spending about 3.5 percent of its GDP on research and development. So both of those lead the United States in terms of their expenditure of GDP. Since 1996, China has increased its percentage of research and development expenditures from about 0.6 percent to currently about 1.5 percent of GDP, and it continues to rise rapidly.