Funding basic science

I wanted to follow up on my editorial from last week, which was about a trip to Seoul, South Korea, at the beginning of October to attend a forum on nanomaterials that ACS Publications held in partnership with South Korea’s Institute for Basic Science (IBS) at Yonsei University. The little bit of research I did about South Korean scientific endeavors before the trip suggested that the country probably does not get as much attention as it deserves. Did you know that, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, South Korea is the highest-spending country in the world in terms of R&D as a percentage of gross domestic product? It currently invests 4.3% of GDP in R&D, which is well above nations such as the US and China, which score 2.7% and 2.0%, respectively. South Korea has only about 51 million inhabitants in 2019 versus the US’s 329