EDITOR'S PAGE
Hand-Wringing Won't Help
T
his issue of C&EN features our annual special report, 'Tacts & Figures for Chemical R&D," the most comprehensive compilation of statistics published by any magazine on the status of the chemical research and development effort in the U.S. and abroad. This special report and its companion report, "Facts & Figures for the Chemical Industry" (July 24, page 38), provide an extensive overview of the health of the chemical enterprise. Depending on your viewpoint, the R&D cup is either half full or half empty. C&EN has certainly done its share of hand-wringing in the past year about declining support for R&D. We've bemoaned more than once on this page the cutbacks by industry in R&D spending as a percentage of sales and the declining employment of chemists. And C&EN's reporters have covered almost every conference, study, and utterance examining the drop in federal and industry funding for R&D. But, in fact, nothing in life is black or white, and statistics in particular are especially subject to interpretation. On the down side, what are we, as chemists, to make of these facts: • In current dollars, U.S. R&D spending in 1995 rose 1.1% to $171 billion, but in real terms (calculated in constant 1985 dollars), it fell 1.7%, continuing a four-year downward trend. • In 1985, 18 large chemical companies spent $3.0 billion on R&D, outspending six large drug firms by nearly $1.2 billion. In 1995, the same chemical companies spent $3.7 billion on R&D, while the six drug firms spent $7.0 billion. • Fewer patents were issued in 1995 than in 1994 to every one of 16 major chemical companies tracked by C&EN. Collectively, the drop was about 20%—representing 400 patents. • Federal funding for basic chemical research has remained virtually unchanged since 1989, even as federal funding for other sciences has increased by 4.1%. • Total R&D spending as a percent of gross domestic product (GDP) is falling for the U.S. and six other major industrialized nations. In terms of support of R&D, is the U.S. "eating the seed corn"? Or, are we to believe, as the Wall Street Journal optimistically stated last week, that "the R&D seed bin in America is at least half full"? In drawing its conclusion, the Journal points to several areas also highlighted in our report. For example: • Academic spending on research and development in the sciences and engineering climbed 5.7% from 1993 to 1994 to reach $21.1 billion. Funding for chemistry research in academia grew at an annual rate of 7.4% in the decade 1984-94. • The U.S. alone, with a population of 264 million, spends almost as much for total R&D as do Japan, Germany, France, the U.K., Italy, and Canada combined, with their total population of 410 million. Even excluding defense R&D, the U.S. outspends the other nations on a per capita basis. As a fraction of GDP, the U.S. outlay may be smaller than for some of the other nations, but in absolute dollars, it is huge. In 1979, when C&EN launched "Facts & Figures for Chemical R&D," then assistant managing editor David Kiefer wrote: "Statistics on spending for R&D provide a convenient yardstick for measuring the well-being of the R&D process. But they are by no means the perfect one. They provide little insight on the quality of R&D or on the ill-defined ties between R&D efforts and innovation or economic development. It is increasingly evident that scientific and technological problems are not necessarily solved simply by throwing money at them; more research is not necessarily better research. All in all, the relationships among R&D, innovation, and progress are too complex to be assessed simply by use of dollar expenditures." Kiefer's comments of nearly two decades ago are a reminder that even as we are swept up in the numbers game, the most important question is whether money is being spent effectively. No amount of hand-wringing will provide a simple answer to that tough question, but it should be our top priority. Madeleine Jacobs, Editor Rudy Baum, Managing Editor
Views expressed on this page are those of the author only and not necessarily those of ACS
AUGUST 26,1996 C&EN 5
