US supremacy in science may slip, Baltimore says

The United States still holds a preeminent position in the world of science, but if public funding and popular support erode further, its grasp may become less secure, the head of the nation's leading science organization said today.

David Baltimore, Nobel laureate, former president of Cal Tech, and current president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told the Globe that even a change in the White House is unlikely to significantly turn around federal funding for health research, which has fallen 13 percent since 2004, when inflation is taken into account. In town for the AAAS annual meeting, Baltimore also decried cuts in funding for earth-sensing satellites and NASA science programs, which he said have been "decimated."

“To expect a major increase in science funding with a new administration ... is not reading all of the tea leaves,” he said in an hour-long interview at the Globe's offices, noting that the federal budget is tight and that Congress last year ended up approving a budget for the National Institutes of Health that was less than President Bush proposed. “We have a problem finding the money.”

With science funded largely by government grants, and when nearly half the US population does not believe in evolution, that makes for a sometimes uneasy alliance, said Baltimore, founder of MIT's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and currently a Cal Tech biology professor.

“Science does its best to limit the realm of religion and people find that threatening, going back to Galileo and Copernicus,” he said. “Science is so much more powerful than it was 20 years ago, that it is even more threatening.”

Despite funding concerns and chronic worries about educating young people, the US scientific enterprise reigns supreme, he said.

“We do elite education better than anybody else in the world,” he said. “Our best are better. And the best matters.”

Industrial support makes a difference, too, he said, powered by a system of venture capital second to none.

Other countries, such as India and China, are gaining ground, although it will be decades before they represent a real threat to US leadership in science, he said. But as countries like China and India become more reasonable places to do science, their best and brightest may no longer leave home for US labs.

“We are way ahead of everybody else in the world. What we need to do is stay there,” he said. “That’s what we are doing badly.”