State of Basic Research Funding

March 21-25, 2005 By Dr. Jack Horgan
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On March 16, 2005 the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) issued a press release warning that the coming transition to nano-scale semiconductor devices means that leadership in information technology is up for grabs. SIA called for stepped up support for basic research in the physical sciences to assure continued U.S. technology leadership. Experts believe current semiconductor technology could run up against physical, technological, and economic limits around 2020.

Craig Barrett, chief executive officer of Intel Corporation, commented that “U.S. leadership in the nanoelectronics era is not guaranteed. It will take a massive, coordinated U.S. research effort involving academia, industry, and state and federal governments to ensure that America continues to be the world leader in information technology.”

Steve Appleton, chief executive officer of Micron Technology and 2005 chairman of the SIA said “Federal funding for R&D as a percentage of U.S. gross domestic product has been almost cut in half over the past 20 years. We must return to the investment levels of the mid-1980s in order to compete for leadership.”

Specifically, SIA called for
- Increases of 7 percent per year in the research budget of the NSF for 10 years, doubling the research budget over that period;

- An appropriation of $20 million to match the semiconductor industry's support for the Focus Center Research Program, which supports pre-competitive research on microelectronics technology at 30 universities to ensure continued U.S. leadership throughout the remaining years of the CMOS era;

- An increase of $20 million to enhance the nanomanufacturing and nanometrology research capabilities of NIST; and

- An increase in funding for the Math and Science Partnership program of the No Child Left Behind act.
Appelton added “U.S. leadership in technology is not inevitable. Leadership in information technology is a cornerstone of our national strategy for economic growth, an improving standard of living, and national security. The actions we take today to ensure continued U.S. leadership will determine the quality of life enjoyed by our children and grandchildren”.

The SIA is hardly alone in expressing concern over the state of education in science and engineering, the loss of jobs overseas and the amount of federal funding. For example, in a well publicized speech given to the Business Software Alliance in October 2003 Andy Grove bemoaned the lost of jobs in the software and service industry and predicted a fate similar to steel and semiconductors markets. He identified the decline in numbers of US science and engineering graduates, the poor performance of US students in science and math, the drop in federal funding of academic R&D, and IP litigation costs as contributing factors.

Are things really that bad?



US Higher Education

One measure of technical potential in the US is the number of Doctorates granted in relevant fields. The tables below come from the National Science Foundation Division of Science Resources Statistics and are based upon Survey of Earned Doctorates. Over 91 percent of the doctorate recipients in 2003 responded to the questionnaire. Over the period 1994-2003, the response rate varied between 91 and 95 percent.


Overall what is striking is the flatness of the data. The number of doctorates in Science and in All Fields has gone down modestly in a decade but the number of doctorates in Engineering has fallen nearly 10%.

If one examines the data on woman earning doctorates, one sees increases in percentage everywhere in 2003 relative to 1994. In the sciences woman earned 8,576 doctorates in 2004. This was 44% of the total. Of this number 30% were in biological sciences, 26% in psychology and 21% in social sciences. Woman accounted for only 17% of doctorates in engineering.

Non-US citizens accounted for more than one third of doctorates in science and nearly two thirds of engineering doctorates in 2003. In 2002 graduate students with temporary visas accounted for 32% of all graduate enrollment in Science & Engineering, 40% in Physical sciences 48% in computer science and 49% in engineering. Since 1992 graduate enrollment by US citizens in engineering has dropped 19%, while graduate student on temporary visas studying engineering has increased 40%. Graduate enrollment by US citizens in physical sciences has declined 14% since 1992, while graduate student on temporary visas studying physical sciences has increased 2%. Graduate enrollment by US citizens in computer sciences has increased 2% since 1992, while graduate student on temporary visas studying physical sciences has increased 121%.

The percentage of bachelor degrees in science and engineering versus the total number of bachelor degrees has fallen 35.6% in 1970 to 31.8% in 2001. In absolute terms the number in science and engineering has grown from 284, 230 in 1970 to 400,206 in 2001. The percentage of master's degree in science and engineering versus the total number of bachelor degrees has fallen 25.6% in 1970 to 21.2% in 2001. In absolute terms the number in science and engineering has grown from 53,695 in 1970 to 98,986 in 2001.

Princeton-based Educational Testing Service, which conducts the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), recently declared that the number of international students registering for GRE in 2004 for admission in fall 2005 has dropped dramatically. The drop was 37% for Indians, 43% for Taiwanese and 50% for Chinese. The Council for Graduate Schools has found that applications from international students to US graduate schools for the September 2005 session are down for the second year in a row.

Given the importance of education at all levels for society as well for the individual the following is not very encouraging. The Los Angels Times today reported that according to a Harvard University study only 71% of students in California graduated on time with their high school class in 2002. The percentages according to race were whites 78%, Asians 83%, Latinos 60% and Blacks 57%. Another study showed that from 1990 to 2000, the high school completion rate declined in all but seven states. In 10 states, it declined by 8 percentage points or more. The total graduation rate was 68% with only 50% of all black students, 51% of Native American students, and 53% of all Hispanic students graduating. The percentages for males in these categories were even lower. More depressing is the fact that students who drop out of high school do so in their freshman and sophomore years.



Federal Funding of Scientific Research and Development

As all schoolchildren know Queen Isabella of Spain sold her jewels to finance Christopher Columbus voyage to the New World, of course India was the target destination. The return on that investment was enormous. Over the centuries national governments have funded scientific research, development and exploration. Governments not only provide funding, they also establish agencies that provide a framework to guide and control the advance and use of various technologies. Among these agencies in the US are the FCC (Federal Communication Communications), FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) and NIST (National Institute of Science and Technology). Governments also pass legislation in support of various applications of technology. For example, there are significant limits on the legal liability for the operation of a nuclear power without which there would not have been a nuclear power industry. Governments create and sustain infrastructures that support the advance and dissemination of technology in much the same way that they support the federal highway system. In recent times government funding is usually allocated to the areas of health, space, energy, national defense and now also homeland security.

The question obviously arises as to what the criteria should be for the expenditure of public funds. National defense, job creation (“pork”) and curing diseases are favorites among politicians. Basic scientific research is more difficult to justify with voters. It lacks a powerful political constituency. Basic research has unknown long term benefits to weigh against other funding proposals with presumed short term predictable benefits or tax cuts. One can certainly argue that basic research has created enormous benefits for society over the long term. Consider where we would be in 2005 without an understanding of electricity and magnetism.

Companies are quire willing to spend money on product development. The big three EDA companies Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor Graphics spent $350 million, $285 million and $202 million respectively on R&D during their last fiscal year. However, it is difficult to explain to the shareholders large expenditures on research that has no identifiable ROI. Further, many areas of research require expenditures beyond the financial means of even the largest companies. Lastly, basic scientific research requires cooperation, information sharing and possible coordination across companies, industries and countries. Only the federal government can insure this.

For more than 40 years, the NASA Commercial Technology Program has facilitated the transfer of NASA technology to the private sectors. The resulting commercialization has contributed to the development of commercial products and services in the fields of health and medicine, industry, consumer goods, computer technology, and environment. On an annual basis NASA issues Spinoff, a publication featuring successfully commercialized NASA technology. Despite these public relation efforts many people believe that the only tangible benefits to the space program were pretty pictures, Tang and Velcro.

The table below shows the Federal budget authority for basic research by budget function over 5 years.




Federally Funded Research Programs

The remainder of this commentary covers some examples of projects that have had and/or will have significant government spending.

There are some well know examples of major government spending research programs. The Manhattan Project was begun at the urging of Albert Einstein and other physicists and led to the Atomic Bomb that ended WW II.

ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, was brought online in 1969 under a contract let by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the DoD which initially connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah). Harvard, BBN, Systems Development Corp, Stanford, MIT's Lincoln Labs, Carnegie-Mellon, and Case-Western Reserve U were soon added. The ARPANET was designed in part to provide a communications network that would work even if some of the sites were destroyed by nuclear attack. In 1985, NSF created NSFNET, a series of networks for research and education communication. Based on ARPANET protocols, the NSFNET created a national backbone service, provided free to any U.S. research and educational institution. At the same time, regional networks were created to link individual institutions with the national backbone service. NSF also coordinated a service called InterNIC that registered all addresses on the Internet so that data could be routed to the right system. The Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative is a multi-agency Federal research and development program that is developing advanced networking technologies, developing revolutionary applications that require advanced networking, and demonstrating these capabilities on testbeds that are 100 to 1,000 times faster end-to-end than today's Internet.

The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) project was intended to construct a ring particle accelerator near Waxahachie, Texas. The ring was designed to have a circumference of 54 miles and to have sufficient energy to create a Higgs boson, an elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model but not yet detected. The project was estimated to cost $8.5 billion. The project was eventually canceled by Congress in 1993 after 14 miles of tunnel were already dug and 2 billion dollars spent. The argument was that the country could not simultaneously afford the SCC and the International Space Station.



Space Program

On October 4, 1957 the Soviets launched Sputnik 1. In response the United States established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on October 1, 1958 to be responsible for advancing flight-related technology. On May 25, 1961 in a special message to Congress on Urgent National Needs President Kennedy set a goal for the country. “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

Several major space programs followed: Human space flight initiatives-Mercury's single astronaut program (flights during 1961-1963) to ascertain if a human could survive in space; Project Gemini (flights during 1965-1966) with two astronauts to practice space operations, especially rendezvous and docking of spacecraft and extravehicular activity; and Project Apollo (flights during 1968-1972) to explore the Moon. Neil Armstrong's step onto the Moon's surface on July 20, 1969 was followed by robotic missions to the Moon (Ranger, Surveyor, and Lunar Orbiter), Venus (Pioneer Venus), Mars (Mariner 4, Viking 1 and 2), and the outer planets (Pioneer 10 and 11 , Voyager 1 and 2). In addition a number of satellites were launched into orbit: Landsat for environmental monitoring and Echo 1, TIROS, and Telstar for communications and weather monitoring.

The program to achieve Kennedy's goal cost $25.4 billion over the life of the program. Only the building of the Panama Canal rivaled the size of the Apollo program as the largest nonmilitary technological endeavor ever undertaken by the United States.

In 1975, NASA cooperated with the Soviet Union to achieve the first international human spaceflight, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.

In 1984, Congress authorized NASA to build a major new space station as a base for further space exploration. Several redesigns took place during the next nine years. Then Russia, which had many years of experience in long-duration human spaceflight, joined the United States and other international partners in 1993 to build a facility that became known as the International Space Station (ISS). The International Space Station draws upon the resources and the scientific and technological expertise of 16 cooperating nations, including the United States, Canada, Japan, Russia and 11 participating member nations of the European Space Agency.

In January 2004 President Bush announced a new vision for the Nation's space exploration program. The President committed the United States to a long-term human and robotic program to explore the solar system, starting with a return to the Moon that will ultimately enable future exploration of Mars and other destinations. The President's plan for steady human and robotic space exploration is based on the following goals:
America will complete its work on the International Space Station by 2010.

United States will begin developing a new manned exploration vehicle to explore beyond our orbit to other worlds. The Crew Exploration Vehicle, will be developed and tested by 2008 and will conduct its first manned mission no later than 2014.

America will return to the Moon as early as 2015 and no later than 2020 and use it as a stepping stone for more ambitious missions. Using the Crew Exploration Vehicle, humans will conduct extended lunar missions as early as 2015, with the goal of living and working there for increasingly extended periods.



Genome Project

The U.S. Human Genome Project was a 13-year effort started in 1990 and coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. The project originally was planned to last 15 years, but rapid technological advances accelerated the completion date to 2003. Project goals were to
- identify all the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA,

- determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA,

- store this information in databases,

- improve tools for data analysis,

- transfer related technologies to the private sector, and

- address the ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) that may arise from the project.
Another important feature of the project was the federal government's long-standing dedication to the transfer of technology to the private sector. By licensing technologies to private companies and awarding grants for innovative research, the project catalyzed the multibillion-dollar U.S. biotechnology industry and fostered the development of new medical applications.

Sequence and analysis of the human genome working draft was published in February 2001 and April 2003 issues of Nature and Science. The Nature papers include initial analysis of the descriptions of the sequence generated by the publicly sponsored Human Genome Project, while the Science publications focus on the draft sequence reported by the private company, Celera Genomics.

The potential for commercial development of genomics research presents U.S. industry with a wealth of opportunities, and sales of DNA-based products and technologies in the biotechnology industry are projected to exceed $45 billion by 2009 (Consulting Resources Corporation Newsletter, Spring 1999).



Stem Cell Research

A stem cell is a primitive type of cell that can be coaxed into developing into most of the 220 types of cells found in the human body (e.g. blood cells, heart cells, brain cells, etc). Some researchers regard them as offering the greatest potential for the alleviation of human suffering since the development of antibiotics.

Stem cells can be extracted from adult tissue, without harm to the subject. Many researchers believe that such cells are not as useful as stem cells extracted from very young human embryos -- typically from surplus frozen embryos left over from in-vitro fertilization procedures at fertility clinics. Many pro-life persons believe that since extracting the stems cells kills the embryo, use of these cells is tantamount to murder.

On August 9, 2001 after considerable public debate on ethical issues President George W. Bush decided to allow research to resume in government labs, but restricted researchers to use only 72 existing lines of stem cells. By 2003-MAY, most of these lines had become useless; some of the lines are genetically identical to others; only 11 remain available for research.

In November 2004 California voters passed 59% to 41% Proposition 71 that authorizes the state to sell $3 billion in bonds and then dispense nearly $300 million a year for 10 years to researchers for human embryonic stem-cell experiments, including cloning projects intended solely for research purposes. It bans the funding of cloning to create babies. The amount of money far exceeds the $25 million the federal government doled out last year. The proposition establishes “California Institute for Regenerative Medicine” to regulate stem cell research and provide funding, through grants and loans, for such research and research facilities. The cost to the California will be about $6 billion over 30 years to pay off both the principal and interest on the bonds. Payments will average about $200 million per year.



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