Passage on the rope bridge between science and technology: Tales of valor with virtue and vanity with vertigo

The decline of U.S. productivity and competitiveness has been represented as a death by a thousand cuts. Remedies, however, must center on something more than a thousand band-aids. They are best directed to the critical determinants of decline. Next to the need to undertake a radical restructuring of education, we must secure a much more effective exploitation of scientific advance already in hand. This essay does not propose a redistribution of funds away from science to make technology transfer affordable. It urges much expanded attention within the academy to competitiveness issues centering on process and product innovation. There is little attention here to the well-desired accolades enjoyed by science; this essay focuses instead on the sources of vertigo we collectively suffer in effecting the science-to-technology passage, represented metaphorically as a rope bridge. The catalog of causes for the fragile nature of that construct is followed with suggestions for giving it tensile strength.