“They view this as a once-in-a-lifetime income opportunity/' said Li of the team at Microsoft Research Asia. ”They saw their parents going through the Cultural Revolution. The best they could do was become a professor, do a little project on the side because a professor's pay is horrible, and maybe get one paper published. Now they have this place where all they do is research, with great computers and lots of resources. They have administrators-we hire people to do the dirty work. They just could not believe it. They voluntarily work fifteen to eighteen hours a day and come in on weekends. They work through holidays, because their dream is to get to Microsoft.“ Li, who had worked for other American high-tech firms before coming to Microsoft, said that until starting Microsoft Research Asia, he had never seen a research lab with the enthusiasm of a start-up company.
“If you go in at two a.m. it is full, and at eight a.m. it is full,” he said.
Microsoft is a stronger American company for being able to attract all this talent, said Li. “Now we have two hundred more brilliant people building [intellectual property] and patents. These two hundred people are not replacing people in Redmond. They are doing new research in areas applicable worldwide.”
Microsoft Research Asia has already developed a worldwide reputation for producing cutting-edge papers for the most important scientific journals and conferences. “This is the culture that built the Great Wall,” he added, “because it is a dedicated and direction-following culture.”
Chinese people, explained Li, have both a superiority and an inferiority complex at the same time, which helps explain why they are racing America to the top, not the bottom. There is a deep and widely shared view that China was once great, that it succeeded in the past but now is far behind and must catch up again. “So there is a patriotic desire,” he said. “If our lab can do as well as the Redmond lab, that could be really exciting.”
That sort of inspired leadership in science and engineering education is now totally missing in the United States.
Said Intel chairman Craig Barrett, “U.S. technological leadership, innovation, and jobs of tomorrow require a commitment to basic research funding today.” According to a 2004 study by the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation, an industry-academic coalition, basic research performed at leading U.S. universities-research in chemistry, physics, nanotechnology, genomics, and semiconductor manufacturing-has created four thousand spin-off companies that hired 1.1 million employees and have annual world sales of $232 billion. But to keep moving ahead, the study said, there must be a 10 to 12 percent increase each year for the next five to seven years in the budgets of key research-funding agencies: the National Institute for Science and Technology, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy's Office of Science, and the Department of Defense research accounts.
Unfortunately, federal funding for research in physical and mathematical sciences and engineering, as a share of GDP, actually declined by 37 percent between 1970 and 2004, the task force found. At a time when we need to be doubling our investments in basic research to overcome the ambition and education gaps, we are actually cutting that funding.
In the wake of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress's decision to cut the National Science Foundation funding for 2005, Republican congressman Vern Ehlers of Missouri, a voice in the wilderness, made the following statement: “While I understand the need to make hard choices in the face of fiscal constraint, I do not see the wisdom in putting science funding behind other priorities. We have cut NSF despite the fact that this omnibus bill increases spending for the 2005 fiscal year, so clearly we could find room to grow basic research while maintaining fiscal constraint. But not only are we not keeping pace with inflationary growth, we are actually cutting the portion basic research receives in the overall budget. This decision shows dangerous disregard for our nation's future, and I am both concerned and astonished that we would make this decision at a time when other nations continue to surpass our students in math and science and consistently increase their funding of basic research. We cannot hope to fight jobs lost to international competition without a well-trained and educated workforce.”