The section draws its data from the Society’s Chemical Abstracts Service and publications of the National Science Foundation. Highlights of the section include:
Federal Funding for R&D
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Federal support for R&D in all disciplines grew just 2.8 percent from 1999 to 2000, barely keeping up with inflation.
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In fiscal 1999, federal support for basic chemical research rose 7.2 percent to $555 million. Federal funding for basic research in chemical engineering rose 5.2 percent to $55 million.
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For applied research, federal support for chemistry dropped by 14 percent to $260 million, while chemical engineering funds rose 7.3 percent to $148 million.
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Chemical and pharmaceutical companies undertook more than $20 billion worth of R&D in 1999, accounting for about 11 percent of U.S. industrial R&D expenditures.
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More than half (58 percent) of industrial chemical R&D funds were earmarked for development. Another 26 percent went to applied research and only 16 percent to basic research.
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Of the 82,700 R&D scientists and engineers employed in the chemical sector, half were employed by drug companies.
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During the decade from 1989 to 1999, R&D expenditures for chemistry rose by 17.3 percent in real terms. Overall academic R&D expenditures rose much faster during the same time period, soaring nearly 43 percent in real terms.
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Chemical engineering showed the opposite pattern. Adjusted for inflation, total support for chemical engineering was up 40 percent for the decade, while funding for engineering as a whole rose 38 percent.
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The University of California, Berkeley continued to be the top spender for chemical R&D with $21.1 million, and Johns Hopkins University raked in the most in federal support for chemistry: $18 million.
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The total number of assigned chemical patents dropped in 2000 for the first time since 1994. Last year’s total of 42,323 patents was off 2.3 percent from a year earlier.
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The total number of chemistry-related journal articles abstracted in Chemical Abstracts Index fell 3 percent last year to 573,000. Over the past seven years, the number has fluctuated between 540,000 and 590,000.
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More than 40 percent of the abstracts concerned biochemistry papers, and abstracts of physical, inorganic, and analytical chemistry papers represented another quarter of the papers.
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