This article appeared in the op-ed section of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Decmber 28, 1995.

I used to be an evangelist for the view that the world was an oyster for anyone achieving a science or engineering degree. The Department of Labor had been forecasting an impending dramatic shortage of scientists and engineers, and immigration policies were designed to recruit as many as possible from foreign countries.

It was all wrong. The country doesn't want many scientists anymore. I recently attended a meeting in Grand Rapids of the Analytical Laboratory Managers Association and I participated in a round-table discussion called "The Talent Pool." One member from the Philadelphia area said there were 1,500 applicants for each entry-level chemist position. Another from a smaller city said there were "only" 150 applicants per position.

My friends there from a major petrochemical company were depressed from watching the decline of the Research and Development effort they spent 25 years building. "It used to be you couldn't get a spot in a 150-space parking lot if you got to work after 8 AM," one said, "Now there are never more than 25 or 30 cars in the lot." Pharmaceutical firms are scaling back R&D, too, closing American laboratories while continuing at European labs. For computer scientists, the assurance that they would always have work ended when Word Perfect/Novell shifted its computer programming to India.

I subscribed to the Young Scientists Network on the Internet back in the early 90's when there were only a few hundred members. I saw that number swell to over 3,000 practically overnight. This is a group dedicated to fighting "The Myth" of a scientist shortage and was started by unemployed and underemployed physics Ph.D.s. There is almost no hope at all of a Ph.D. physicist working in his chosen field these days and this is growing increasingly true for other science and engineering Ph.D.s as well. This has not been helped by the government's egregious immigration policy to import foreign scientists and mathematicians.

Is this all because our education system is producing inferior scientists? I don't think so. I think it is simply the economics of corporate greed. If scientists elsewhere work cheaper, then elsewhere will the science be done. I will admit that I have noticed a steady decline in the science and math training of incoming college students and, subsequently, beginning graduate students but the science departments of our good universities are among the best in the world....for now.

I worry how long that will be so. As a university instrumentation laboratory director, I participate in the education of science students on their way to baccalaureate, masters, and doctoral degrees and I wonder: if industry won't hire the graduates I help to produce, how long will I be needed?

This nagging fear for my future and my institution's is exacerbated by the budget cutting plans of our new Republican Congress which would cripple the research missions of our institutions of higher learning. Fortunately, this issue is starting to get some attention outside the halls of academe. A leading consumer magazine, for instance, declared its alarm in its January issue: "Congress would eventually delete a third of the $40 billion or so spent each year on civilian research and development, programs whose main goal is new knowledge for the public good."

While I'm glad to see this expression of respect for the kinds of research I facilitate and participate in personally, it is also clear to me that we scientists need to do more telling the public that what we do is important - but not always easy to justify in concrete terms. My own field began as an idle physicists' curiosity a little over fifty years ago. It was never imagined that nuclear magnetic resonance would spawn powerful techniques for determining molecular structure in the laboratory or diagnosing illness and injury in the hospital MRI unit.

I was born a couple of years before Sputnik and I've always known an American society that gives at least perfunctory approval to the advancement of science. Now that the Cold War is over, it seems that we no longer have a sense of urgency that scientific excellence is necessary to the nation's safety, its economic security, and the public good. That is the big question I wish to raise: Can we, as a nation, afford to be less and less involved in the practice of science? Can we afford to have other countries do our scientific thinking for us?

William C. Stevens is the director of the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Facility, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.