The State of Science

Seed Magazine’s inau­gural ‘State of Sci­ence’. Fea­tures include:

• Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Sci­en­tific Minds (men­tioned pre­vi­ously).
• The Sci­en­tist in 2008.
• What’s Hold­ing Sci­ence Back.
• Emer­gent Sci­ence Cities: Natal, Brazil; Jena, Ger­many; Jed­dah, Saudi Ara­bia; Mianyang, China; Abuja, Nige­ria.
• The Fun­da­men­tals: Intel­lec­tual Prop­erty, Infor­mat­ics, Pub­lic Per­cep­tion, Pub­lish­ing, and the fol­low­ing excerpt from Money:

Con­sid­er­ing that sci­ence is fun­da­men­tal to the world’s pro­duc­tiv­ity, we col­lec­tively spend very lit­tle on it. On aver­age, nations spend about 2.3 per­cent of their GDP on sci­en­tific research and devel­op­ment, or roughly one tril­lion dol­lars a year world­wide. This num­ber quickly dwin­dles when divided between every researcher on Earth—especially con­sid­er­ing not all research yields imme­di­ate returns in terms of money or knowl­edge. Ulti­mately, the pres­sure for prac­ti­cal results placed on sci­ence invest­ment can cre­ate con­flicts of inter­est. In light of 2008’s mas­sive eco­nom­i­cal tur­moil, find­ing new ways to make sound invest­ments and man­age risk in sci­en­tific research has become crucial.