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could not believe it. They voluntarily work fifteen to eighteen hours a day and come

in on weekends. They work through holidays, because their dream is to get to

Microsoft." Li, who had worked for other American high-tech firms before coming to

Microsoft, said that until starting Microsoft Research Asia, he had never seen a

research lab with the enthusiasm of a start-up company.

"If you go in at two a.m. it is full, and at eight a.m. it is full," he said.

Microsoft is a stronger American company for being able to attract all this talent,

said Li. "Now we have two hundred more brilliant people building [intellectual

property] and patents. These two hundred people are not replacing people in Redmond.

They are doing new research in areas applicable worldwide."

Microsoft Research Asia has already developed a worldwide reputation for producing

cutting-edge papers for the most important scientific journals and conferences. "This

is the culture that built the Great Wall," he added, "because it is a dedicated and

direction-following culture."

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Chinese people, explained Li, have both a superiority and an inferiority complex at

the same time, which helps explain why they are racing America to the top, not the

bottom. There is a deep and widely shared view that China was once great, that it

succeeded in the past but now is far behind and must catch up again. "So there is

a patriotic desire," he said. "If our lab can do as well as the Redmond lab, that

could be really exciting."

That sort of inspired leadership in science and engineering education is now totally

missing in the United States.

Said Intel chairman Craig Barrett, "U.S. technological leadership, innovation, and

jobs of tomorrow require a commitment to basic research funding today." According

to a 2004 study by the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation, an

industry-academic coalition, basic research performed at leading U.S.

universities-research in chemistry, physics, nanotechnology, genomics, and

semiconductor manufacturing-has created four thousand spin-off companies that hired

1.1 million employees and have annual world sales of $232 billion. But to keep moving

ahead, the study said, there must be a 10 to 12 percent increase each year for the

next five to seven years in the budgets of key research-funding agencies: the National

Institute for Science and Technology, the National Science Foundation, the Department

of Energy's Office of Science, and the Department of Defense research accounts.

Unfortunately, federal funding for research in physical and mathematical sciences

and engineering, as a share of GDP, actually declined by 37 percent between 1970 and

2004, the task force found. At a time when we need to be doubling our investments

in basic research to overcome the ambition and education gaps, we are actually cutting

that funding.

In the wake of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress's decision to cut

the National Science Foundation funding for 2005, Republican congressman Vern Ehlers

of Missouri, a voice in the wilderness, made the following statement: "While I

understand the need to make hard choices in the face of fiscal constraint, I do not

see the wisdom in putting science funding behind other priorities. We have cut NSF

despite the fact that this omnibus bill increases spending for the

2005 fiscal year, so clearly we could find room to grow basic research while

maintaining fiscal constraint. But not only are we not keeping pace with inflationary

growth, we are actually cutting the portion basic research receives in the overall

budget. This decision shows dangerous disregard for our nation's future, and I am

both concerned and astonished that we would make this decision at a time when other

nations continue to surpass our students inmath and science and consistently increase

their funding of basic research. We cannot hope to fight jobs lost to international

competition without a well-trained and educated workforce."

No, we cannot, and the effects are starting to show. According to the National Science

Board, the percentage of scientific papers written by Americans has fallen 10 percent

since 1992. The percentage of American papers published in the top physics journal,

Physical Review, has fallen from 61 percent to 29 percent since 1983. And now we are

starting to see a surge in patents awarded to Asian countries. From 1980 to 2003,

Japan's share of world industrial patents rose from 12 percent to 21 percent, and

Taiwan's from 0 percent to 3 percent. By contrast, the U.S. share of patents has fallen

from 60 percent to 52 percent since 1980.

Any honest analysis of this problem should note that there are some skeptics who

believe that the sky is not falling and that scientists and the technology industry

might be hyping some of this data, just to get more funding. A May 10, 2004, article

in the San Francisco Chronicle quoted Daniel S. Greenberg, former news editor of the

journal Science and author of the book Science, Money and Politics, who argues that

"inside-the-Beltway science (lobbying) has always been insatiable. If you double the

NIH (National Institutes of Health) budget in five years (as recently happened),

they're (still) screaming their heads off: 'We need more money.'" Greenberg also

questioned the science lobbyists' interpretation of a number of statistics.

Quoting Greenberg, the Chronicle said, "To put scientific publishing trends in

context. . . it's important to look not only at overall percentiles but also at the

actual numbers of published papers. At first, it may sound startling to hear that

China quadrupled its scientific publication rate between 1986 and 1999. But it sounds

somewhat less startling if one real

izes that the actual number of Chinese papers published rose from 2,911 to 11,675.

By comparison, close to a third of all the world's scientific papers were published

by Americans-163,526 out of 528,643. In other words, China, a nation with almost four

times the population of the United States, published (as of 1999) only one-fourteenth

as many scientific papers as the United States."

While I think a dose of skepticism is always in order, I also think the skeptics would

be wise to pay more heed to the flattening of the world and how quickly some of these

trends could change. It is why I favor Shirley Ann Jackson's approach: The sky is

not falling today, but it might be in fifteen or twenty years if we don't change our

ways, and all signs are that we are not changing, especially in our public schools.

Help is not on the way. The American education system from kindergarten through

twelfth grade just is not stimulating enough young people to want to go into science,

math, and engineering. My wife teaches first-grade reading in a local public school,

so she gets Education Week, which is read by educators all over America. One day she

pointed out an article (July 28, 2004) headlined, "Immigrants' Children Inhabit the

Top Ranks of Math, Science Meets."

It went on to say, "Research conducted by the National Foundation for American Policy

shows that 60 percent of the nation's top science students and 65 percent of the top

mathematics students are children of recent immigrants, according to an analysis of

award winners in three scholastic competitions. . . the Intel Science Talent Search,

the U.S. team for the International Mathematical Olympiad, and theU.S. Physics Team."

The study's author attributed the immigrant students' success "partly to their

parents' insistence that they manage study time wisely," Education Week said. "Many

immigrant parents also encouraged their children to pursue mathematics and science

interests, believing those skills would lead to strong career opportunities and

insulate them from bias and lack of connections in the workplace ... A strong

percentage of the students surveyed had parents who arrived in the United States on

H-1B visas, reserved for professional workers. U.S. policymakers who back overly

restrictive immigration policies do so at the risk of cutting off a steady infusion

of technological and scientific skill," said the study's au271

thor, Stuart Anderson, the executive director of the foundation. The article quoted

Andrei Munteanu, eighteen, a finalist for the 2004 Intel competition, whose parents

had moved from Romania to the United States five years earlier. Munteanu started

American school in the seventh grade, which he found a breeze compared to his Romanian

school. "The math and science classes [covered the same subject matter] I was taking

in Romania . . . when I was in fourth grade," he said.

For now, the United States still excels at teaching science and engineering at the

graduate level, and also in university-based research. But as the Chinese get more

feeder stock coming up through their improving high schools and universities, "they

will get to the same level as us after a decade," said Intel chairman Barrett. "We

are not graduating the volume, we do not have a lock on the infrastructure, we do

not have a lock on the new ideas, and we are either flatlining, or in real dollars

cutting back, our investments in physical science."

Every four years the United States takes part in the Trends in International

Mathematics and Science Study, which assesses students after fourth grade and eighth

grade. Altogether, the most recent study involved roughly a half million students

from forty-one countries and the use of thirty languages, making it the largest and

most comprehensive international study of education that has ever been undertaken.

The 2004 results (for tests taken in 2003) showed American students making only

marginal improvements over the 2000 results, which showed the American labor force

to be weaker in science than those of its peer countries. The Associated Press reported

(December 4,2004) that American eighth-graders had improved their scores in science

and math since 1995, when the test first was given, but their math improvement came

mainly between 1995 and 1999, and not in recent years. The rising scores of American

eighth-graders in science was an improvement over 1999, and it lifted the United

States to a higher ranking relative to other countries. The worrying news, though,

was that the scores of American fourth-graders were stagnant, neither improving nor

declining in science or math since 1995. As a result, they slipped in the international

rankings as other countries made gains. "Asian countries are setting the pace in

advanced science and math," Ina Mullis, codirector of the International

272

Study Center at Boston College, which manages the study, told the AP. "As one example,

44 percent of eighth-graders in Singapore scored at the most advanced level in math,

as did 38 percent in Taiwan. Only 7 percent in the United States did." Results from

another international education test also came out in December 2004, from the Program

for International Student Assessment. It showed that American fifteen-year-olds are

below the international average when it comes to applying math skills to real-life

tasks.

No wonder Johns Hopkins University president Bill Brody remarked to me, "Over 60

percent of our graduate students in the sciences are foreign students, and mostly

from Asia. At one point four years ago all of our graduate students in mathematics

were from the PRC [Communist China]. I only found out about it because we use them

as [teaching assistants] and some of them don't speak English all that well." A Johns

Hopkins parent wrote Brody to complain that his son could not understand his calculus

professor because of his heavy Chinese accent and poor English.

No wonder there is not a major company that I interviewed for this book that is not

investing significantly in research and development abroad. It is not "follow the

money." It is "follow the brains."

"Science and math are the universal language of technology," said Tracy Koon, Intel's

director of corporate affairs, who oversees the company's efforts to improve science

education. "They drive technology and our standards of living. Unless our kids grow

up knowing that universal language, they will not be able to compete. We are not in

the business of manufacturing somewhere else. This is a company that was founded here,

but we have two raw materials-sand, which we have a ready supply of, and talent, which

we don't." (Silicon comes from sand.)

"We looked at two things," she continued. "We looked at the fact that in disciplines

that were relevant to our industry, the number of U.S. students graduating at the

master's and Ph.D. levels was declining in absolute numbers and relative to other

countries. In our K to twelve we were doing okay at the fourth-grade level, we were

doing middle-of-the-road in the eighth grade, and by the twelfth grade we were

hovering near the bot-

torn in international tests related to math. So the longer kids were in school, the

dumber they were getting . . . You have teachers turning off kids because they were

not trained. You know the old saw about the football coach teaching science-people

who do not have the ability to make this accessible and gripping for kids."

One of the problems in remedying the situation, said Koon, is the fact that education

in America is relatively decentralized and fragmented. If Intel goes to India or China

or Jordan and introduces a teacher education program for making science more

interesting, it can get into schools all over the country at once. In America, the

public schools are overseen by fifty different state governments. While Intel does

sponsor research atthe university level that will benefitits own product development,

it is growing increasingly concerned about the feeder system into those universities