In his article "An unexplained pause" [C&EN, Sep. 10, 2007], Michael Heylin evinces the current world score of scientific and engineering articles as a crisis from the US point of view. His assessment is based on the following numbers (see his table on the right): from 1988 to 2003, the US share of the world total fell from 38.1% to 30.2% because US accounted for just 14.4% of the total increase in articles over these years. National Science Foundation, Michael says, apparently is concerned about the unprecedented and almost total lack of growth in publica-tions of US articles that began in the early ‘90s: there were 194,000 US-based articles published in 1991 and 195,800 in 2002. Is there a problem?

Well, yes, for a colonial state of mind. To keep Michael-type Americans happy, US should suppress and inhibit R&D outside US borders, wage a war or two if necessary, because US should remain the world’s dominant single science power by a large margin. The graph below shows more trouble on the horizon if you carelessly allow those billions of people around the globe to do R&D. And, by the way, some of them are of higher IQ than American whites (non-Hispanic). Also, R&D in less developed countries grows exponentially (like any natural process in an early stage) which makes US (apparently on the upper part of an S curve, characteristic of a mature natural process) to look really bad.