Interview with Sherwood Boehlert

It's nice to see that he loves is constituency. It's even better to see that he is a realist and seams aware of the issues confronting American Engineers. Here was a great quote from him.

"We like our pre-eminent position in the global marketplace, but that is under attack more than ever before, with some degree of success. It bothers me to learn that the percentage of all patents awarded in the U.S. Patent Office to U.S. applicants is down, as a percentage of the whole, and to foreign [applicants] it's up quite dramatically. It bothers me to see that students who are the best and the brightest from other parts of the world, who used to beat a path to our university campuses, are now declining rather dramatically in numbers, because we have a visa problem."

I do worry that without the government funding more R&D and increasing the interest in the sciences in 30 years we'll be a nation of consumers, not builders.