Saying that the “future strength of the US [science and engineering] workforce is imperiled,” the National Science Board (NSB) is urging increased federal funds to support US science students and improved science teaching.

Between 1990 and 2000, the 91-page report found, the number of science and engineering jobs filled by foreign-born PhD holders in the United States grew from 24 to 38%. The NSB warned that because of “intensifying” global competition for researchers, the “US may not be able to rely on the international [science and engineering] labor market to fill unmet needs.”

The situation in biology in general is not as dire as in the other natural sciences, George Langford, professor of biological sciences at Dartmouth and chair of the NSB Committee on Education and Human Resources, told The Scientist, but “it still is an area of concern, and that is particularly true in some of the fields of the life sciences.” Langford said the problem is particularly acute in areas that require quantitative skills such as bioinformatics, protein structure, and crystallography.

“It would be short-sighted of us to sit back and reap our opportunities to recruit internationally, because they may not stay that way,” said Howard Garrison, director of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) Office of Public Affairs. The report offered little in the way of specifics or data, however. “The report was not designed to talk about specific shortfalls. What we really wanted to do was take a long-term view,” Garrison told The Scientist.

The report comes at a time when groups have voiced concerns about the numbers of life scientists being trained. In October, the FASEB Journal reported that the number of graduate students in the biological sciences in the United States has remained constant at about 54,000, between 1995 and 2001. At the same time, there has been a slow growth in academic jobs since 1997, according to the NSB report, and the US Department of Labor forecasts a 21% increase in doctoral-level biology posts in industry between 2000 and 2010. Garrison said the NSB report's call for more support for graduate students matches FASEB's views.

The report also calls for efforts to encourage more undergraduates to study science, in the hopes of increasing the eventual number of graduate students and PhDs. There is already an effort to do so underway. Last summer, a pilot workshop sponsored in part by the National Academy of Sciences was held at the University of Wisconsin–Madison to discuss better methods of teaching biology to college students.

“I think it's critical that we change the way we teach our introductory science courses because I think that's where a lot of the discouragement happens with our students leaving science,” Jo Handelsman, professor of plant pathology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and one of the workshop's organizers, told The Scientist. She is one of Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) recipients of $1 million grants to improve classroom instruction.

The program emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach. “Many aspects of the quantitative problem solving that have traditionally been associated with engineering are directly relevant to modern biology, yet we have few examples of curricula in which students can move across the traditional boundaries,” said Peter Bruns, HHMI vice president for grants and special programs.