We are watching a scientific superpower destroy itself

As China threatens to overtake US leadership in science and technology, America has responded by sabotaging its own engines of progress.

- Stephen Greenblatt

The Trump administration's assault on America's universities by cutting billions of dollars of federal support for scientific and medical research has called up from somewhere deep in my memory the phrase "duck and cover".

These were words drilled into American schoolchildren in the 1950s. These actions were meant to protect us from the nuclear attack that could come, we were told, at any time. Though even in elementary school most of us intuited that there was something futile in these attempts to shield ourselves from destruction, we dutifully went through the motions. How else could we deal with the anxiety caused by the menace?

The anxiety greatly increased in October 1957, when Americans learnt of the Soviet Union's successful launch of the world's first satellite, Sputnik 1. The vivid evidence of the technological superiority in rocketry of our Cold War enemy provoked a remarkably rapid response.

In 1958, by a bipartisan vote, Congress passed and then President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Defence Education Act (NDEA), one of the most consequential federal interventions in education in the nation's history. Together with the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, it made America into the world's undisputed leader in science and technology.

Nearly 70 years later, that leadership is in peril. According to the latest annual Nature Index, which tracks research institutions by their contributions to leading science journals, the single remaining US institution among the top 10 is Harvard, in second place, far behind the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The others are: