Spending on R&D continued to rise in 1999

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

Federal support for R&D in all disciplines grew just 2.8 percent from 1999 to 2000, barely keeping up with inflation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Of the 82,700 R&D scientists and engineers employed in the chemical sector, half were employed by drug companies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.