Many countries around the world see the acquisition of patents stemming from research as a matter of national security and economic strength. Government leaders and some scientists view information technology and biomedical research as key competitive fields, and they push, with reformist zeal, towards application. But the hype surrounding the relationship between national strength and science has taken on an ominous tone that threatens to harm both basic research and scientific internationalism.

Many countries today see themselves trailing the United States in an intellectual-property race, and are looking for ways to catch up. Moreover, there are moves directed against isolated scholars, who are cast as crusty conservatives pursuing projects to satisfy their own interest. Such researchers are criticized for failing to realize the potential applications, and for their lack of profit-oriented motivation.

For smaller or developing countries with less generous research budgets, the application imperative can be stultifying. Some Chinese researchers, for example, complain about their inability to get funding unless they have a good 'gimmick' to sell. They rightly worry that funding will increasingly depend on demonstrable application, while more technologically modest but scientifically notable projects are shelved.

Will good basic research end up being overlooked? One of the enthusiastic leaders of Japan's movement towards application warns: “We could very well look back in 50 years and say we've made a huge mistake. But now it is the right thing to do — if done with care.”

Certainly, Japan is trying to create a moral imperative out of money-making. The push into technology licensing and the restructuring of government research organizations (see Nature 410, 7; 2001) are geared towards making science more accountable to society and more profitable to researchers. They are also seen as preserving Japan's industrial strength — to some researchers in the vanguard, a lack of practical results means a waste of public money.

Still, much of this reform is just talk. Young revolutionary bureaucrats and technology-licensing promoters speak of radical change. Researchers write grant proposals in which they answer questions such as, “what benefit will your research have to society?”. To a large extent, though, Japan continues to do a lot of good, basic research.

But even if bigger countries' basic research is protected from this latest phase of application-oriented reform, hype about intensifying industrial competition could restrict openness and thereby threaten another ambition that Japan, like many other Asian countries, pursues: respect for its researchers and their full participation within the international scientific community.

Former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori's claim that Japan will overtake the United States in information technology within five years sounds like a harmless jest, but such hype creates a potentially explosive atmosphere. The recent 'bio-spy' incident, in which the United States charged Japanese researchers accused of stealing material for studying Alzheimer's disease with espionage, shows that the United States is increasingly ready to escalate tensions in such matters. Instead of being an incident involving the actions of a couple of researchers, accusation fell on Japan, sending shock waves through the Japanese research community. The Japanese press obligingly presented the episode as an almost inevitable outcome of an international intellectual-property race. Japanese researchers are understandably starting to wonder if they will ever be welcome in US laboratories. And as one US researcher in Japan put it, “all of the sudden I was frighteningly aware that I was a foreign scientist”.

Countries who recognize that applied science can underpin their strength and prestige must also be prepared to support basic research, and to sustain the internationalism that is so essential to it. That requires a judiciously light touch in responding to foreign technological competition.