NAP | The academic research community in the United States is heading toward an era of unparalleled discovery, productivity, and excitement. In fields as diverse as computing and materials science, high-energy physics and psychology, cosmology and the neurosciences, university-based research will open new worlds of knowledge and make possible innovations not yet imagined. The research enterprise holds great promise for advancing social, health, and economic goals into the next century.
The academic research community in the United States is heading toward an era of unparalleled discovery, productivity, and excitement. In fields as diverse as computing and materials science, high-energy physics and psychology, cosmology and the neurosciences, university-based research will open new worlds of knowledge and make possible innovations not yet imagined.
This hopeful vision for the U.S. academic
research enterprise motivated the working group's deliberations and
analyses. To achieve this vision, the enterprise must be guided wisely
by current and future generations of investigators, university
administrators, the sponsors of research, and the broader public. The
working group's strong and positive presentation of this vision assumes
that such guidance will prevail.
Dynamic change is a central component of this
vision. The research enterprise of the future will be unlike the one of
today. Significant opportunities and challenges can be expected in the
decades ahead.
A GLOBAL RESEARCH SYSTEM
International research cooperation will become a
pervasive feature of the U.S. academic research enterprise in the next
century. Multinational research arrangements will be essential for
studying such phenomena as large-scale environmental effects and the
most demanding experimental problems in the physical and biological
sciences. The research communities of both industrialized and developing
countries will rely more and more on cooperative ventures to address
these and other research problems. Just as foreign-based companies now
support research in U.S. universities, in the future more governments
and industries are likely to support the research activities of other
nations.
Over the next few decades, the number of nations
with highly effective research systems will grow. Their university,
government, and industry laboratories will collaborate in novel,
imaginative, and effective ways. Global competition in science and
technology will require that the United States pay close attention to
the research activities of other countries, especially those targeting
economic growth as their primary research goal. This will be
particularly true for the Western European and Pacific Rim countries,
which have become fierce competitors in the knowledge-intensive global
marketplace. Several of the newly democratized nations of Eastern
International research cooperation will become a pervasive feature of the U.S. academic research enterprise in the next century.
