WASHINGTON—“We are going to put on the largest science and engineering party that the United States has ever seen,” said Larry Bock, executive director of the USA Science and Engineering Festival, at the Koshland Science Museum at the National Academies in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 29.
But this is not just fun and games.
“In this society, we celebrate Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and we generate a lot of them. But we don’t celebrate science and engineering,” said Bock. And as a result, there has been a dramatic decrease in the number of Americans going into science and engineering, according to Bock.
Bock is mobilizing 25 Nobel Laureates, 100 other scientists and engineers, and 550 organizations to get the attention of Americans and build a powerful momentum toward the upcoming nationwide festival starting on Oct. 10 involving 49 locations across the U.S.
The nationwide festival will culminate in a two-day expo on Oct. 23 and 24, centered in and around the National Mall in Washington, DC. The purpose is to educate a wide range of Americans and to inspire a young generation of Americans to take a greater interest in science and engineering.
Alarming Trends for the U.S.
In one of Larry Bock’s e-mails to supporters of the festival he wrote: “According to Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley, by the end of 2010, 90 percent of the world’s scientists and engineers with advanced degrees will live in Asia; 80 percent of the people being trained in the advanced physical sciences in the United States are from abroad.”
“Because the opportunities are now greater abroad, we are no longer retaining them in the USA. If we do not turn this trend around, we will have outsourced innovation,” Bock wrote in an e-mail to The Epoch Times and others on Sept. 15.
“America’s competitive posture in this world is changing, and it’s not going in the right direction,” said Charles Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering and president emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
