• Question: Who are more responsible for the invention of new chemicals, vaccines, theories, ideologies, treatments and other things, Americans or the British?

    Asked by anon-240740 to Tom, Rebecca, Emily, Elspeth, Ben, Antoine on 9 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Ben Cropper

      Ben Cropper answered on 9 Mar 2020: last edited 9 Mar 2020 1:07 pm

      This isn’t an easy question to answer for a few reasons!

      Firstly, there isn’t an obvious number to say ‘this is the amount of invention that a country does’. Research spending looks like a sensible one you can use though… until you realise that the numbers put out by the US and UK governments are different. The US Government has a “Research and Development” budget of about $135bn (about £100bn) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_policy_of_the_United_States). The UK has a “science and research funding allocation of about £5bn (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/science-and-research-funding-allocation-2016-to-2020). That obviously looks massively different, but the US has a broader definition of research spending. Half of the USA’s budget goes to military research (of course) which isn’t included in the UK’s number. Even still, it’s worth noting that NASA alone ($20bn) eclipses the UK’s entire science budget. Overall I have no doubt that the USA spends more than the UK on science.

      Another way would be by Nobel Prizes. The UK has the second most in the world with 133. The US is first with 385. USA wins on this as well! If you’re British though, you’re nearly twice as likely to win one as an American (19.4 Nobel prizes per 10 million people compared to 11.7 for the USA). The country with the most Nobel prizes per person though is the Faroe Islands, with 202 per 10 million. That’s because their population is tiny but they had one person that won one!

      The second “problem” is that science is very collaborative. The scientific community is very international and a lot of research by UK researchers is done using European especially (but American, Chinese and others as well) equipment (CERN is the obvious one but the European Space Agency, JET, etc. etc. etc.) and collaborating with international researchers as well. Is my Ph.D. project British even though it was done with German equipment and half of my collaboration is German? American research is more often entirely American – they are really far away from everyone else – but even still it definitely isn’t entirely.

      UK science is excellent and we have a proud history as a nation of invention and scientific endeavour. America is overall just much bigger!

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