The United States has started to lose its worldwide dominance in critical areas of science and innovation.

Foreign advances in basic science now often rival or even exceed America's, apparently with little public awareness of the trend or its implications for jobs, industry, national security or the vigor of the nation's intellectual and cultural life.

"We stand at a pivotal moment," said Tom Daschle.

"We are in a new world, and it's increasingly going to be dominated by countries other than the United States."

"It's unbelievable," Diana Hicks, chairwoman of the school of public policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said of Asia's growth in science and technical innovation. Dr. Hicks said that American scientists, when top journals reject their papers, usually have no idea that rising foreign competition may be to blame.