Of course, tax revenues have ended up being substantially higher than they were at the time these dire projections were made, and we are very close now to having a balanced budget. All that has been very helpful.

Agency by agency, we frequently have lost a bit of ground, at least to inflation-but had it not been for the efforts we've made to educate people about the importance of science, technology and advanced education, those predictions very well might have come true.

Over-reliance on strictly economic justifications has already begun to hurt the quality and range of education at every level of American life.

For much of this decade, both Congressional and administration budget projections showed a decline in science and technology accounts of between 20 and 30 percent in real dollars. The real impact to date has been far less severe.

Nonetheless, the research budgets of the Department of Defense are under enormous stress-and they are extremely important because they support more than 40 percent of all federal funding for engineering schools across the country. So the threat was and is real.

The Science Coalition, which grew out of an initial concept at Harvard and at MIT, has now grown to an informal group of about 60 research universities.

America faces many challenges...but the enemy I fear most is complacency. We are about to be hit by the full force of global competition. If we continue to ignore the obvious task at hand while others beat us at our own game, our children and grandchildren will pay the price. We must now establish a sense of urgency.