The Gamut

The New York Times > Science > U.S. Is Losing Its Dominance in the Sciences

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.

Gosh, whatever could have brought this about? We have an administration that replaces scientific reports with business-friendly propaganda, that promotes abstinence-only birth control education and creationism over evolution, that creates such unattainable technical goals as manned missions to Mars by 2013 and universal broadband by 2007, and that calls all of the overwhelming evidence for global warming "junk science" and pulls out of international treaties designed to curtail it. Why, they've done everything in their power to revive the dark ages short of jailing Copernicus and burning the Library at Alexandria.

Thank goodness for Europe.

Permalink

|