Another View: Farewell to the US as the world’s top science nation

When I asked John Savage, the retired co-founder of the Department of Computer Science at Brown University, what the essential ingredient in research is, he responded with one word: “Passion.”

It is passion that keeps scientists going, dead end after dead end, until there is a breakthrough. It is passion that keeps them at the bench or staring into a microscope or redesigning an experiment with slight modifications until that “eureka moment.”

I have been writing about science for half a century.