Interview: America's future at stake with underfunded basic research, says scientist

The United States may lose its long- held scientific lead and the country's future could be at stake if basic research continues to see inadequate funding from the government, a leading American scientist has warned.

Federal funding for basic research has kept shrinking over the past decades, but "the future of the U.S. economy and welfare of its people depend on making these investments," Marc A. Kastner, Donner Professor of Physics and former Dean of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told Xinhua in a recent phone interview.

Earlier this week, an MIT committee tasked with evaluating the "U.S. innovation deficit," which was chaired by Kastner, released a report detailing how declining investment in basic science is hurting the country's current research and development (R&D) efforts and future opportunities.

FUNDING STRAINS

The 52-page report, titled "The Future Postponed," noted that there is a "widespread concern over a growing U.S. innovation deficit, attributable in part to declining public investment in research."

According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the share of federal spending on R&D in the total annual budget has dropped to 3.6 percent in 2015 from 9.1 percent in 1968.

"Overall federal budgets have been very constrained. And the commitment to pay for entitlements ... has taken an increasing fraction of the budget, so the discretionary component of the budget where research is funded has been shrinking," explained Kastner.

"Sudden changes in funding levels such as the recent sequester" can also disrupt research efforts and cause "long-term damage," said the MIT report.

A survey conducted by the Chronicle of Higher Education last year among 11,000 recipients of NIH (National Institutes of Health) and NSF (National Science Foundation) research grants found that nearly half of them have abandoned an area of investigation considered critical to their lab's mission, and that more than three quarters have fired or failed to hire graduate students and research fellows.

Even more worrisome was the impact on the "pipeline of scientific talent," on which "U.S. research leadership ultimately depends," said the report.

Evidence suggests that many of those affected scientists and researchers switch careers, leaving basic research behind forever. And in some areas a lack of specialized U.S. research facilities is driving key scientific talent to work overseas, according to the report.

INVEST FOR THE FUTURE

"The growth of our economy over the last 40 years, which has been in large part a result of the increasing technical sophistication, has come about because of investment made in the 1960s and 70s in basic science," said Kastner.

"If we expect long-term growth, that will continue to be important," he stressed. "So it is shortsighted to worry about this year's budget and not think about the investment for the long run."

The MIT report pointed out that America's emergence last year as the world's largest oil producer was actually rooted in federally-funded research that began some 40 years ago and led to directional drilling technology, diamond drill bits tough enough to cut shale, and the first major hydraulic fracturing experiments.

"The focus of this report was to point out the specific opportunities where the investment by the government would clearly be good for the country," said Kastner. "It was one of the first times that the research community looked into the future and said what are the great opportunities lying ahead."

To compile the report, the MIT recruited "leading faculty" from across its five schools to form a special committee, and asked the entire faculty to supply "exciting ideas" about what stories to be written and included in the report.

The final copy consists of 15 stories carefully selected by the committee, namely Alzheimer's disease, cybersecurity, space exploration, plant sciences, quantum information technologies, enabling better policy decisions, catalysis, fusion energy, infectious disease, defense technology, photonics, synthetic biology, materials discovery and processing, robotics, and batteries.

"This was just an MIT view of a subset of those exciting opportunities," said Kastner, the committee chair. "And we expect there to be more stories written by other universities all over the country talking about such opportunities."

THE CHINA PHENOMENON

Interestingly, the report gave special attention to China, with key words like "China" or "Chinese" frequently appearing in its text -- and remarkably more than other major science players like the European Union, Japan, Germany and the Republic of Korea.

In its opening part, the report cited four "notable scientific highlights" of the year 2014, including two Chinese accomplishments -- development of the world's fastest supercomputer and a surge in research on plant biology. None of the four were U.S.-led achievements, it also lamented.

Meanwhile, the only and cover photo adopted by the report features China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer, with the caption describing it as "a potent symbol of China's growing science and technology power and the expanding U.S. innovation deficit."

"I think that China is a really interesting example because it is one of the few countries that are dramatically increasing their investment in basic science and in R&D more broadly," said Kastner. "And it's hard to think of a country in the world that is increasing its investment in R&D more rapidly than China."

"So it's quite natural that we will see China doing things that the rest of the world should be doing too," the professor added.

Though it's completely unpredictable what the outcome would be of basic research, "historically one can look back and say that broad-based investments in basic research pay off in terms of growth of the GDP and in terms of new technologies and innovation, " he noted.

With bigger-than-ever government spending and support, China is now "playing a growing role in the world -- often a leading role -- in some areas of basic science," Kastner observed, pointing to the fact that the country has "really taken the lead" in the production of "novel materials for things like superconductivity."

"And from what we have seen in the past, we would expect that that will lead to technological breakthroughs that will give China the lead in many areas," he told Xinhua.

A CALL FOR ACTION

In Kastner's view, the United States still has "many advantages " -- such as "our long history of the truly great universities attracting the smartest people from all over the world" -- to maintain its global scientific lead, and "that doesn't change so quickly."

"But we do have a feeling that if we don't invest, we eventually will lose that lead, though nobody knows what ' eventually' means," he said.

That seems to be why the MIT decided to do the report alone and completed it in just about six months -- it could take three times as long as a national effort, estimated Kastner.

With the federal budget for fiscal year 2016 under review and the next presidential race around the corner, "we were anxious to get this message to the Congress and to potential presidential candidates," said Kastner. "We would hope that other universities will do similar things."

Echoing a recommendation from a report by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences last fall, the professor said that he and many others hope to see a "slow, steady increase of budgets from year to year" for science.

But given the political and financial reality in Washington, the scientists may need to do more than just wait for a sudden turn of the tide.

"A wonderful thing in the United States, which I think is unique in the world, is that philanthropy plays a really major role in many things ... and it has played a critical role in science in the country for as long as one can remember," said Kastner, who recently became the first president of the Science Philanthropy Alliance (SPA), a group of nonprofit institutions and foundations dedicated to increasing investment in basic research.

"I'm trying to interest philanthropists in supporting science as well as the government," said the MIT physicist. Endite