The US is the world’s science superpower — but for how long?
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Over the past five years, the nation has won more scientific Nobel prizes than the rest of the world combined — in line with its domination of the prizes since the middle of the twentieth century. In 2020, two US drug companies spearheaded the development of vaccines that helped to contain a pandemic. Two years later, a California start-up firm released the revolutionary artificial-intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT and a national laboratory broke a fundamental barrier in nuclear fusion.
This year, the United States is on track to spend US$1 trillion on research and development (R&D), much more than any other country. And its labs are a magnet for researchers from around the globe, with workers born in other nations accounting for 43% of doctorate-holders in the US workforce in science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM).
