Alice Huang showed this graph during her address on assuming the presidency of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She did so in a discussion of the need to build scientific bridges with the rest of the world.
Let me use the same figure to underline the need to be more inclusive in our recruitment of people into science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The size of each circle in the graph reflects the total amount of R&D funding in each country. China and India have large circles (which are getting larger fast) because they have huge populations. Japan shows up as spending more per capita on R&D and having more R&D personnel per capita than does the United States. We have been competing by importing R&D personnel from abroad, and increasingly be recruiting women as well as men, but we need also to recruit minorities. There could be a lot more American inventors and innovators if we were more effective (and more ethical) in recruiting blacks and Hispanics into these fields.
No comments:
Post a Comment