BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER
9
APRIL
2014
al Science Foundation by the US
Senate. She was nominated for
the position by President Obama
last summer.
Cora Marrett
has
been acting director at NSF since
March when
Subra Suresh
left
to become president of Carnegie
Mellon University.
Córdova will now lead the federal agency that has
a $7 billion budget to award grants for scientific
research around the country. She stepped down
in 2012 as Purdue’s president, a position she had
held since 2007. An astrophysicist, Córdova
served as NASA’s Chief Scientist in the 1990s. She
also served as Chair of the Smithsonian Institu-
tion’s Board of Regents.
NSF Report Shows Shift in
Global R&D Funding
The 2014 edition of the NSF’s
Science and Engi-
neering Indicators
, which summarizes trends in
science and engineering research, education, work-
force development and market economics, points
to a decrease in the US and European Union (EU)
share of global R&D investment and an increase
in that of Asian countries.
The amount that Asian countries spent on R&D
in 2011 accounted for more than one-third of the
world’s total, and in 2012 China spent slightly
more of its gross domestic product on science than
the EU did as a whole. The report indicates that
the US and Europe no longer monopolize
global
R&D. The portion of the world’s R&D per-
formed in the US and Europe has decreased since
2001 by 37% to 30% in the US and from 26% to
22% in Europe. During the same period, the share
of global R&D performed by Asian countries in-
creased from 25% to 34%, with China leading the
way with its share growing from just 4% to 15%
during the same period.
The report also cites a hefty increase in the num-
ber of published papers from Asian countries,
but points out that the US remains the leading
producer of highly cited articles.
As the US plays “a less dominant role in many ar-
eas” of science and engineering activity, the report
cautioned, further “potentially disruptive develop-
ments” could be on the way.
In a separate report that buttresses the NSF find-
ings, Battelle, a leading global innovation firm,
forecasts a total of $465 billion in US public and
private research and development spending, still
first in the world. However, the Battelle report
also shows rapidly increasing spending by China,
which has already enabled it to leapfrog past Japan
into second place. If current trends continue,
China is projected to overtake the United States
by 2022.
The full NSF report can be found at
.
nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/
Holt Won’t Seek Reelection
Another advocate for science re-
search has announced the he will
not run for office in 2014.
Rep.
Rush Holt
(D-N.J.) announced on
February 18 that he will not seek
reelection.
“There is no hidden motive for
my decision,” Holt said. “As friends who have
worked with me know, I have never thought that
the primary purpose of my work was reelection
and I have never intended to make service in the
House my entire career. For a variety of reasons,
personal and professional, all of them positive and
optimistic, the end of this year seems to me to be
the right time to step aside and ask the voters to
select the next representative.”
Holt is the son of former senator
Rush D. Holt
(D-W.Va.). He worked as a nuclear physicist and
starred on Jeopardy! before joining Congress in
1999. He is the 20th House member and ninth
Democrat to announce he won’t seek reelection
this year.
France Córdova
Rush Holt
