The United Kingdom Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation has 

http://blogs.bbsrc.ac.uk/index.php/2014/04/practical-school-science-is-v...

Before a bunch of people go off on some jag about how important STEM is and committees are stupid, yes, yes, we know all of that already. We also have to consider we are part of the problem. Science is becoming more esoteric and remote from the public and it is a scenario we have helped create.

How many academics have you heard say that practical research is important? Not many. And when they do, they say it is important for someone else. Most academics instead talk about basic research and how their science should not be focused on solving problems, it needs to be open-ended discovery and such. Finding an academic who came up through the ranks in the last 25 years and cares about practical science is even harder than finding a Republican who got tenure.

I'm not an academic so why do I say 'we' caused the problem? Well, I am of an age to have been an adult when Ronald Reagan was president and he was the guy who set us on this course of removing the practicality from science. He loved science too much. And I did too. I espoused basic research and now that everything is basic, I see I was wrong. It's like having a whole world full of theoretical physicists - nothing would ever get done.

A Republican? Don't they hate science? Sure, it that helps you, but reality is far more complex. President Reagan believed that basic research was one of only a handful of things that government should spend money on. And though a culture war developed around George W. Bush, it correlated to a lurch of science academia out of the political mainstream, not anything he did.  Science funding went up during the Reagan years and down during the Clinton ones. It went up again under Bush - a Republican President and Congress that hates science does not double funding for the NIH - but Obama had no issue completely shutting down the NSF in an act of political theater.

So at a time when much of the public thought of science as R&D, I was instead on the basic research bandwagon. Every company had a division with weird people working on stuff with a high expectation of failure. 

Compare that with today. Actual basic research is more like a job works program. Companies just wait for the person running a DARPA committee to have graduated from the same school as their head of research and they somehow get handed $20 million to work on something with no expectation anything will come from it. And as Reagan's government machinery became larger, companies learned they didn't have to do as much basic research. The government was now spreading risk among 300 shareholders and a company could just buy it if anything worked.

But after a generation passes where people are removed from the benefits of practical science, policymakers are going to take note. Practical lab work is going the way of cursive writing.

When was the last time you heard a scientist say people need to learn how to do things? It's rare, instead the focus is on the culture trope of "critical thinking" - until American kids take standardized tests and end up in the middle of the pack because learning 'how to think' does not actually show up on standardized tests. Then we get lamentations about how dumb kids are and we blame teachers or lack of government funding.

What is the default reaction of a giant swath of the public when they see a study that has a company name on it? They assume the scientists are unethical and have been paid to produce a result and would be fired if they don't.