What are other countries doing on this issue? A lot of countries have realized that one of the reasons the U.S. became so great was because of things like federally funded research. So there are lot of countries that are trying to really invest in science and technology. I think it's important to continue funding that in the U.S. Otherwise it is just going to lose the edge - it's as simple as that.

The mood in Congress today is to cut, not spend. Are you worried that we're on course where cutback in government-funded research is inevitable? It may be. I understand that things need to be cut. But I would say, and most everybody in the scientific community agrees that cutting as little as possible, or preferably not cutting anything, would be best.

Has federal research played a role in your work? Definitely. In every single case. In every single thing that I have done.

Do a lot of your students work on projects funded by the National Science Foundation? Yes they do. The model for the NSF is a really great one. The money is usually used to support students. That's really great, because not only are you educating them but these people are also doing the technology transfer. These students work at research institutions like Carnegie Mellon or MIT or Stanford and then they go get a job, say at Apple or at Google, and that is where a lot of the technology transfer is happening.

Couldn't the technology companies do some of this research on their own? That was part of our point -- (private firms) can't. At the end of the day, the larger companies usually have to respond to Wall Street. They're not looking at 50 years from now; they are looking one to two years out. If you look at the iPad, all of its components were were developed over a span on the order of 30 to 50 years. What led (for instance) to GPS was a series of discoveries that didn't have anything to do with GPS. A lot of the discoveries in research are not what we set out to find. Companies can do some of the research, but they do the research that is two or three years out.