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Why
Science is Good For the Economy
May/June 2010
Interview by Kathrin Day Lassila ’81
The Yale Alumni Magazine regularly holds a conversation with Yale president Richard Levin ’74PhD to provide a forum in which alumni can learn his views. (Interviews are conducted both in person and by e-mail and condensed for print.) In
this issue, Levin discusses federal policies that affect national R&D.
Y: Yale received over $100 million of stimulus funding for science and medical
research. What makes you concerned now about federal science funding?
L: We have a very large federal budget deficit. And one of the ways the president
has proposed to close it is to freeze the so-called discretionary part of the
budget, which means the agency budgets. So the prospects for the next few years
for the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and
Department of Energy, which provides funding for the defense research budget,
would be dim. The worry is that after this big spurt we would go back to
baseline and not grow for a few years.
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“Cycles of robust growth and then decline are not good for innovation.”
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This
is a worry not just for Yale, but for the whole research community, and indeed
the future of the country. If we’re going to have long-term robust economic
growth again, keeping research funding flowing is quite important. You need a
steady stream of research dollars to generate new ideas that are going to
create new industries and new businesses. We know from experience that cycles
of robust growth and then decline are not good for innovation. It’s much better
to have a predictable rate of increase.
One
of the things I have advocated in Washington is regularizing research funding.
Instead of year-to-year decision-making, we should keep the ratio of R&D
expenditures to GDP constant. This would imply, over the long term, steady
growth at a rate of inflation plus 2 or 3 percent.
Y: We’ve previously discussed your economics research on how basic science affects
a country’s economy. You predicted, during Japan’s economic boom, that the boom
would not last because Japan wasn’t investing enough in basic science.
L: Yes, it was a combination of not enough funds devoted to basic science and a
noncompetitive process of awarding those funds. Here in the United States, some
80 percent of science funds are allocated on a highly competitive, peer-review
basis. Our system has kept us at the forefront of electronics, communications
technology, and biotech. The president’s Council of Advisers on Science and
Technology, on which I serve, issued in March a report on the nation’s progress
in nanotechnology. The assessment by scientists and businesspeople was that
with strong government funding over the last decade, we are way ahead in nanotechnology.
Others are spending more now and starting to close the gap—China especially,
but also the European Union—but we’re still substantially ahead in total
funding, total patents, total products commercialized, and every other
measurable category. This is the only way America can continue to be the
leading economy in the world, in my opinion. Our labor costs are too high to
lead in manufacturing products with mature technologies. We have to maintain
our lead through innovation.
Y: On a related issue, you have long been promoting changes to the law governing
patents. What’s the status of that bill?
L: A bill has passed the House a couple of times in various versions but not the
Senate. But it’s now actively in play and seems much more likely to pass this year.
This effort goes back to a National Academy of Sciences panel that I chaired
from 2001 to 2004, which recommended changes in U.S. patent law, both to reduce
expensive litigation and bring it into harmony with international standards.
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“The U.S. patent process is completely subjective.”
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For
example, in the U.S., if there are competing claims, priority goes to the first
person to invent the device. In the rest of the world, the patent goes to the
first inventor to file a patent claim. The U.S. process is completely
subjective. You may have to go through weeks and weeks of testimony to figure
out who actually had the idea first. That’s expensive and creates a lot of
uncertainty. So we recommended that we do what the rest of the world does and
give priority to the person who gets to the patent office first. It saves
millions of dollars and gives the process clarity. And there are other
subjective elements in U.S. patent law that convert virtually all infringement
litigation into a costly fishing expedition about whether the inventor
defrauded the patent office and whether the defendant “willfully” infringed the
patent.
Y: What’s the status on international student visas to the United States? This has
been a big issue for you.
L: There’s been considerable improvement in the time and burden facing students
seeking visas to come and study. But we’ve made no progress on another serious
problem: what happens to talented students who want to work in this country
after they graduate. We have a very limited number of visas for well-trained
graduates to get jobs and get on track to become permanent residents. For years
Silicon Valley businesses and financial service businesses have been claiming
that this is a very costly restriction on the pool of talent that could be
available to us. Years ago I coined the phrase “Let’s staple the green card to
the graduate diploma”—subject to appropriate security screening. But increasing
the number of visas for highly educated graduates of U.S. universities has been
hung up in the failed effort to achieve comprehensive immigration reform. I
think it’s urgent to separate these issues. Despite the current levels of
unemployment, there have been persistent shortages of people at high skill
levels, particularly in IT industries. We are depriving ourselves of a lot of
talent. Engineers who are trained here are going home—while they could be
working here, strengthening our economy.
To
read the report on patent law by Levin’s 2004 panel, go to
nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10976 |
