Are You Loosing Your Edge?

Two weeks late I finally wrote the referee report I mentioned previously. For a change, it was a manuscript written in understandable English and the report was a very positive (though the paper was extremely boring). While doing so, I found the letter I wrote to the TIME article "Are we loosing our edge?", which I mentioned in a previous post. In this article, the necessity of Bush's American Competitiveness Initiative was emphasized. Though I believe that there is lots of stuff going wrong in science (not only in the US), the whole article is pretty short sighted.

Anyway, here is the letter:

One of the most attractive factor for me to come to the US for research was that my work would be appreciated. People in the US have a genuine interest and pride in their national research programs. The flip side of this is a lacking ability for self-criticism which severely worsens when funding drops. Who points out own shortcomings when fearing to loose financial support? Instead, the own achievements are overemphasized, which then misleads future decisions on funding.

I had to experience that the tolerance and open-mindedness foreign scientists are welcomed with is contrasted by an sometimes unbelievable arrogance and ignorance for the achievements of other countries. It surprises me every day anew that most US citizens really believe their "standard of living is far higher than that of any other nation". What the US needs is certainly not more competitiveness! What it needs is to acknowledge that there is intelligent life outside the US. What it needs is worldwide cooperation, in a world where progress is made most efficiently by exchanging - and not buying - knowledge and people. You conveniently forget to mention that the www, as we use it today, was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, and 'went public' at CERN, an international research organization in high energy physics, located in Geneva, Switzerland.

For those who did not read the article, the latter remark referred to a listing of innovations by US scientists, among other the internet

Internet:

After the Soviet Union beat the U.S. into space with the launch of Sputnik I, the first satellite, in 1957, the Department of Defense created the Advanced Research Projects Agency to kick-start innovation. It named Joseph Licklider to find ways to protec the U.S. against a space-based nuclear attack, and he believed a communucations network was key to those efforts. The first Net went live in Oct. 1969 with the University of California, Los Angeles, talking to the Stanford Research Institute. In 1990 the National Science Foundation expanded the system connecting university networks. It reached the public in 1992.

Had that been the whole story, you would not be reading this blog right now.