Fixing the economy the scientific way

By Meryl Comer and Chris Mooney

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Here are two facts that might seem unrelated: 1) Most Americans cannot name a living scientist. 2) Over the last two years, by far the most pressing problems in the country have been the economy and the cost of health care.

What if we told you solving the first will help us fix the second?

Without ramping up our investments in science and research - a matter barely on the public's radar in a country where 65 percent of the citizens can't name a living scientist - we'll be hobbled in trying to fix our long-term economic problems. That's because science creates jobs, and it can also reduce health care costs related to the aging of the population.

Take jobs: This has been a theme hammered home by the National Academy of Sciences. In its two “Gathering Storm” reports released in recent years, the academy has argued strongly that our future prosperity depends on investments made now in research and innovation.

The basic premise rests on the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow, who documented that advances in technology and knowledge drove U.S. economic growth in the first half of the 20th century. If it was true then, it's even more so in today's information economy.

Consider the economic reverberations of dramatically increasing the capacity of the microchip. As the academy unforgettably put it: “It enabled entrepreneurs to replace tape recorders with iPods, maps with GPS, pay phones with cellphones, two-dimensional X-rays with three-dimensional CT scans, paperbacks with electronic books, slide rules with computers, and much ... more.”

It's dramatic testimony to the economic power of scientific advances. And yet over the four decades from 1964 to 2004, our government's support of science declined 60 percent as a part of gross domestic product. Meanwhile, other countries aren't holding back: China is now the world leader in investing in clean energy, which will surely be one of the industries of the future.

At the same time, science also can save society a fortune in shared costs that weigh down the federal budget that is running huge deficits.

Health economists and demographers are predicting a dramatic rise in the cost of dealing with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, which already accounts for $172 billion in total spending annually. That number is projected to climb to more than $1 trillion by 2050 as legions of baby boomers reach the age of onset and the population generally ages. Meanwhile, our annual federal Medicare expenditure on Alzheimer's is projected to increase from $88 billion today to $627 billion, far exceeding the current total Medicare budget (about $468 billion this year).

There's just one hope here: scientific advances that will slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease and ultimately uncover a cure. But, ironically, the prospects for scientists who seek federal dollars to study the disease are among the worst in the entire government science infrastructure. The National Institute on Aging is turning down more than 90 percent of scientifically meritorious research grant proposals due to an inability to finance them.

We need to change our culture to honor our scientists - to rescue them from the funding upheavals that cut short their efforts to bring us lifesaving therapies, treatments and devices that transform our lives and the way we work.

And we need to recognize that the cost of basic science, and the time it takes, require a sustained government commitment because industry can't be relied on to fund incremental and high-risk science for its own sake without any guarantee of a payoff.

Meryl Comer, president of the Geoffrey Beene Foundation Alzheimer's Initiative, is executive producer of the Rock Stars of Science campaign (www.rockstarsofscience.org). Chris Mooney is the co-author of “Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.”