Perhaps the real question is this: why is it that places that used to be technologically advanced no longer produce new, original inventions? Is it fear of China copying them? Did the U.S. decide not to develop a sixth-generation fighter jet because it was afraid China would copy it? Did it stop working on battery technology because it feared China would copy that too?
Working in academia, the rise of China academically is palpable. There's an avalance of Chinese research published, and a reasonable chunk of it very high quality, and getting better.
https://www.statista.com/chart/20553/gross-domestic-expendit...
https://itif.org/publications/2025/06/30/china-outpacing-us-...
And the economics prize, though it's not officially really a Nobel prize.
But the core science prizes, AFAICT, are pretty spot on. Of course there are always many worthy contenders of a prize and one can quibble should this or that person really deserve to get it instead of another person, but I haven't heard of any outright frauds or some trivial advancement getting the prize.
What I would consider as the most impactful inventions of the last decade would be things like mRNA, Generative AI, and reusable rockets - all came from the US and the US is maintaining the lead in them.
This so myopic. The covid mRNA vaccine that Pfizer made billions from was done by BionTech a company in Germany led by immigrant turks.
Sure some American's recently got the Nobel prize for the pseudouridine modification - and whiles that's enabling it's not sufficient - you also need LNPs and a whole bunch of other stuff to make it all work - some of which was invented in America and some of which wasn't.
The nature of international science is collaboration.
The danger the for the US right now is it's cutting itself off from one of the biggest sources of innovation right now - China.
Nobody disputed that mRNA, like all science, has many inventors. And that many people in the west as a whole has worked on the technology. Everything you said about the contributions to mRNA is correct, and doesn’t diminish US’s critical part in it.
The point was, and remains, that saying that the US has stopped becoming innovative, is just nonsense.
So you think that, as an advanced military project that should have been kept under the strictest secrecy, the Chinese somehow obtained it and, based on that, developed their own sixth-generation fighter—and even managed a successful test flight while the U.S. is still at the PowerPoint stage? I don’t know which scenario would be worse for the United States.
- stealth (not really) - aliens (sure....) - 6th gen jets (where are the jets?)
The reality is that everything that you do in peacetime is just to scare the enemy and will have very little effect in war. Since the US doesn't have as much industrial capacity the only winning war is nuke from space first or learn to get along
