An interesting piece in today's NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/technology/20ping.html

Quick summary: it's getting easier for US companies to farm out research tasks to low wage countries. America is becoming a "postscientific society": our future value-add will be in "product design, marketing and finance" not in scientific innovation.

In the short-term at least, higher spending on scientists by India and China could create a glut of them in these countries, driving wages down further and making the costs of acquiring science even lower.

Not to worry, though:

For the foreseeable future, United States companies will need their own highly paid scientists “to evaluate the purchase of foreign science and to make sense of it in their own labs,” says Daniel Sarewitz, director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University.

The implication is that a very different skill set will be needed by US scientists in the future. Prospects will continue to worsen in basic research as the cost of doing domestic research becomes prohibitively expensive relative to doing so elsewhere. The real opportunities will be in figuring out how to bring discoveries to market. We'll need some basic research to keep up some core skills and for teaching purposes, but increasing emphasis may be placed on people doing applied work, translational work, and so on.