#ResearchPolicy

A seismic shift is reverberating through the global scientific community as China firmly overtakes the United States to become the world’s leading science nation, marking a pivotal moment with profound ramifications for research, innovation, and international collaboration. This trend, explored in a recent commentary and substantiated by the latest data from the prestigious Nature Index, signals not just a changing of the guard but an acceleration of the gap in scientific output and influence between the two global superpowers.

A powerful new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has shone a harsh spotlight on the declining state of women’s health in the United States, raising urgent questions about medical research funding and health inequities that hold major implications for women and girls globally, including in Thailand. Despite the nation’s wealth and medical advancements, American women are living shorter lives than their peers in other high-income countries, facing disproportionate disability in their later years, and enduring alarming rates of maternal deaths and violence—all while research on their health remains chronically underfunded (PRB.org).