Ever since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit on Oct. 4, 1957, America has been struggling to recruit and retain STEM teachers in its public middle and high schools.

In the 2017-2018 school year, approximately 100,000 teacher jobs in STEM – or science, technology, engineering and mathematics – went unfilled at the high school level. At the middle school level, there were about 150,000 unfilled STEM educator jobs.

The situation has been getting progressively worse over the past decade or so. For instance, in the 2011-2012 school year, 19% of public schools were unable to fill a teaching position for biology or life sciences. By the 2020-2021 school year, that number had grown to 31%. The situation was similar for other subjects, going from 19% to 32% for mathematics, and 26% to 47% for physical sciences, such as physics, geology and engineering.

Science shortages were a problem even before Sputnik, but the launch served as a wake-up call. Three months afterward, President Dwight D. Eisenhower stated during his Special Message to the Congress on Education that federal action was necessary to educate more science and mathematics teachers.

As a professor of education policy – and also as a former state secretary of education in Virginia – I have examined the STEM teacher shortage from multiple vantage points. In a September 2023 policy paper, a colleague and I recommend that in order to solve America’s STEM educator shortage, elected officials and education leaders should adopt something that is widely used in higher education – an endowed chair position for STEM teachers.

We think endowed chairs have the potential to retain and attract more STEM educators at the K-12 level, but it requires a willingness to rethink the ways that schools employ STEM educators.

What’s behind the gap?

Two factors contribute to so many unfilled vacancies in STEM education:

1. There are fewer college students graduating with a bachelor’s degree in education that ever before.

Between 1959-1976, bachelor’s degrees in education were the most popular college major in the United States, and they accounted for about 20% of all degrees. Between 1975-2021, the percentage of students majoring in education fell from 17% to 4%.

2. STEM graduates can earn more money outside of education.

When STEM majors go into a STEM career, they will earn, on average, US$101,100. When STEM graduates become a math, computer science or science teacher, they will earn, on average, only a fraction of that amount – roughly $60,000.

This salary gap between STEM professionals and STEM educators is what is known as the STEM teacher “wage penalty.”

According to a national survey of teacher salaries in 2017-18, average teacher salaries never exceeded $100,000,, regardless of years of experience.

But this only tells a portion of the STEM teacher salary story. In 2021, K-12 teachers’ weekly salary was only $1,348 – about $660 less than the $2,009 earned weekly by other college graduates.

Prior efforts to close the gap

Since developing a strong STEM workforce is vital to the nation’s security and economic well-being, several U.S. presidents have used their position to advance a STEM education agenda.

For example, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, Eisenhower and Congress came to realize that the nation needed to focus on what takes place in the classroom space – not just outer space.

The Senate and House passed the National Defense Education Act of 1958, and Eisenhower signed it into law on Sept. 2, 1958.

This set in motion a national STEM education agenda for American colleges and K-12 schools for decades to come.

Fifty-three years later, President Barack Obama utilized his 2011 State of the Union address to advance the national STEM agenda. “This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,” he said. “And over the next 10 years, with so many baby boomers retiring from our classrooms, we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science and technology and engineering and math.”

Through the leadership of 100Kin10, now named Beyond100K, the initiative exceeded the goal in 2021.

But the goal of the 100,000 STEM teacher campaign was to narrow the gap, not end it.

A shortage of STEM teachers remains. According to a survey of 53 states and territories, 39 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands had teacher vacancies in all subjects, STEM disciplines included, as of Feb 9, 2023. One additional reason for the current shortage is that public schools lost approximately 7% of their teachers – 233,000 instructors – between 2019-2021, which included STEM teachers.

Currently, President Joe Biden is promoting STEM education programs for teachers, the Department of Education has dedicated $120 billion to support STEM, and the National Science Foundation is supporting teacher fellowships.

The endowed chair as a potential solution

Federal investments in programs and fellowships to produce more STEM teachers are good. But those alone will not be enough to retain and attract the quality STEM educators we need.

That’s why a colleague and I recommend endowed chairs for K-12 educators.

Traditionally, an endowed chair is a prestigious faculty position funded through annual spending from a university’s endowment fund.

The interest earned on the endowment will partially or fully fund the salary of the position for as long as the university exists. Endowed chairs are awarded to those who are the best in their field.

The benefit of an endowed chair is that it will be paid for decades to come by the interest on investment. In our paper, we suggest that K-12 schools could use endowed chairs to support a K-12 STEM teacher’s salary, benefits and professional development, all the while saving money for the district and state.

If structured right, the interest on the endowment will pay a teacher’s salary and benefits, something the district would subsequently not have to pay. The endowment can be used to purchase STEM supplies. The money saved by the district can be used to invest in another teacher. The money could come from private individuals, corporations or foundations.

An endowed chair could also provide funding for teachers and students to have access to state-of-the-art learning technology. As part of the endowed chair contract, a teacher can participate in a fully paid externship at a STEM-focused public or private sector company during the summer months. The goal would be to bring to the classroom the experiences and insights the teacher learned from the externship.

An endowed STEM chair salary may never outpace what educators could earn if they entered the private market. But it can potentially help elevate their position and, perhaps, enable educators to make a salary that would be higher than what it would otherwise be.

Gerard Robinson, Professor of Practice in Public Policy and Law, University of Virginia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Billions of people around the world have received the Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. The rapid development of these vaccines changed the course of the pandemic, providing protection against the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

But these vaccines would not have been possible it if weren’t for the pioneering work of this year’s winners of the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine decades earlier.

Dr Katalin Karikó and Dr Drew Weissman, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, have been given the prestigious award for their discoveries into mRNA biology. The pair were the first to discover a way of modifying mRNA that allowed it to successfully be delivered to cells and replicated by them.

Their discovery was not only integral to COVID-19 vaccine development, but may also lead to the development of many other therapies – such as vaccines for cancer.

Life’s work

Karikó is a Hungarian biochemist and Weissman an American physician scientist. The two began working together in 1985 when Karikó was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, where Weissman was already working as an immunologist. They had a shared interest in how mRNA could be used to make new therapies.

Messenger RNA (better known as mRNA) is an essential molecule to life. It’s made in the body from our very own DNA in a process called translation. DNA is our special encoded handbook of instructions for manufacturing proteins, which are the building blocks for material in the body.

Our mRNA copies and carries these genetic instructions from our DNA to our cells. The cells then make whatever protein they’ve been instructed to, such as haemoglobin which helps red blood cells carry oxygen around the body.

Karikó and Weissman thought that if it was possible to commandeer this process, mRNA could be used to instruct cells to essentially make their own cures. But at the time they started working together, attempts by other researchers to do this had been unsuccessful.

The researchers faced two major challenges as they began their work. The first was being able to prevent the host from mounting an immune response against the modified mRNA. The second was being able to deliver the mRNA into the host safely without it degrading.

To understand how they overcame the first barrier, it’s important to understand mRNA’s structure. Normally, mRNA molecules contain four types of smaller molecules known as bases (nucleosides): A (adenine), U (uridine), G (guanine), and C (cytosine). Different sequences of these bases can be strung together to produce the basis of an mRNA molecule.

In early experiments, Karikó and Weismann found that injecting normal mRNA molecules into mice led to an immune response. This meant the mouse’s immune system saw the new mRNA as an invading pathogen and the immune cells would destroy it, instead of replicating it.

So the researchers modified the U nucleoside to create a pseudouridine, a chemical compound which stabilises RNA’s structure. When they repeated their experiment with the modified mRNA, the mice exhibited no immune response.

But Karikó and Weismann still faced the second challenge of being able to deliver the bespoke mRNA without it degrading.

They decided to use lipids (a nanoparticle) to deliver it. These fatty chemical compounds are an essential part of the cell membrane, controlling what enters and leaves the cell. Specially created lipids allowed the mRNA molecules to be delivered without being degraded or broken down by the immune system.

Karikó and Weissman’s research had successfully eliminated the obstacles that had previously stood in the way of using mRNA clinically. Being able to instruct the body to replicate virtually any harmless protein could have potential for treating a range of diseases and even protect against viral infections.

COVID vaccines

When their research was first published, it didn’t garner much attention. But in 2011, two biotech companies – Moderna and BioNTech – took notice and began research into mRNA medicines.

It’s no wonder why. Traditional vaccine production methods are time consuming, expensive and don’t work for every vaccine. But Karikó and Weissman’s work showed that synthetic mRNA could be made at a large scale.

Researchers had already been working on developing mRNA vaccines before the pandemic, such as a vaccine for Ebola that didn’t receive much commercial interest. But in 2020, when COVID-19 began spreading around the globe, vaccines were needed quickly to offer protection.

Using the foundational work of Karikó and Weissman, scientists developed a bespoke mRNA sequence which mimicked the spike protein (which allows the virus to enter our cells). This produced a harmless COVID particle which our cells then replicated, allowing our bodies to protect us from severe COVID infections when it encountered the real virus.

Karikó and Weissman’s discoveries years earlier were critical in making the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines possible. But these aren’t the only ways their work could be applied.

Researchers are now hoping to develop mRNA vaccines for diseases such as HIV and Zika virus. Studies have also shown mRNA vaccines might be useful in treating certain types of cancer.

Alice Godden, Senior research associate, School of Biological Sciences, University of East Anglia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Electric vehicle sales are growing faster than expected around the world, and sales of gas- and diesel-powered vehicles have been falling. Yet, the U.S. government still forecasts an increasing demand for oil, and the oil industry is doubling down on production plans.

Why is that, and what happens if the U.S. projections for growing oil demand are wrong?

I study sustainability and global energy system transformations. Let’s take a closer look at the changes underway.

EVs’ giant leap forward

On Sept. 12, 2023, Fatih Birol, director of the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organization that advises the world’s major economies, drew global attention when he wrote in the Financial Times that the IEA is now projecting a global peak in demand for oil, gas and coal by 2030.

The new date was a significant leap forward in time compared with previous estimates that the peak would not be until the 2030s for oil and even later for gas. It also stood out because the IEA has typically been quite conservative in modeling changes to the global energy system.

Birol pointed to changes in energy policies and a faster-than-expected rise in clean technologies – including electric vehicles – along with Europe’s shift away from fossil fuels amid Russia’s war in Ukraine as the primary reasons. He wrote that the IEA’s upcoming World Energy Outlook “shows the world is on the cusp of a historic turning point.”

The United Nations also released its “global stocktake” report in early September, assessing the world’s progress toward meeting the Paris climate agreement goals of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial temperatures. The report found serious gaps in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by soon after mid-century. However, it noted two bright spots: The world is more or less on track in the growth in solar photovoltaics for renewable energy – and in the growth of electric vehicles.

The dynamics of EV expansion are important because each vehicle that uses electricity instead of gasoline or diesel fuel will depress demand for oil. Even though demand for petroleum products in other sectors, like aviation and petrochemicals, is still increasing, the IEA expects a decline in road transportation’s 50% share of oil consumption to drive an overall peak in demand within a few years.

EVs are now on pace to dominate global car sales by 2030, with fast growth in China in particular, according to analysts at the Rocky Mountain Institute. If countries continue to upgrade their electricity and charging infrastructure, “the endgame for one quarter of global oil demand will be in sight,” they wrote in a new report. As electric trucks become more common, oil demand will likely drop even faster, the analysts wrote.

Global sales of light-duty vehicles already show a decrease in internal combustion – gasoline and diesel – vehicle sales, mainly due to increasing EV sales, but also due to an overall decline in vehicle sales that started even before the pandemic.

So, why is the US projecting oil demand growth?

Based on the data, it appears that global oil demand will peak relatively soon. Yet, major oil companies say they plan to increase their production, and the U.S. Energy Information Administration still projects that global demand for oil and fossil fuels will continue to grow.

Vehicles do last longer today than they did a couple of decades ago, and they are also larger, slowing down efficiency gains. But the Energy Information Administration appears to be lowballing projections for EV growth.

The Biden administration, which pushed through large U.S. tax incentives for EV purchases, has taken steps to clear the way for increasing some oil and natural gas exploration. And large government subsidies continue flowing to fossil fuel industries in many countries. These contradictions undermine the goals of the Paris Agreement and could lead to costly stranded assets.

What do these trends mean for the oil industry?

It’s fair to assume that large industries should have a good handle on future developments expected to affect their fields. But they often have a competing priority to ensure that short-term gains are preserved.

Electric utilities are an example. Most didn’t feel threatened by renewable electricity until penetration expanded quickly in their territories. In response, some have lobbied to hold off further progress and invented spurious reasons to favor fossil fuels over renewables.

Of course, some companies have changed their business models to embrace the renewable energy transition, but these seem to still be in a minority.

Large corporations such as BP and TotalEnergies invest in renewables, but these investments are often offset by equally large investments in new fossil fuel exploration.

Both Shell and BP recently backpedaled on their previous climate commitments in spite of tacit admissions that increasing oil production is inconsistent with climate change mitigation. Exxon’s CEO said in June 2023 that his company aimed to double its U.S. shale oil production over the next five years.

What is happening in the fossil fuel industry seems to be an example of the so-called “green paradox,” in which it is rational, from a profit-maximization point of view, to extract these resources as quickly as possible when faced with the threat of future decreased market value.

That is, if a company can see that in the future its product will make less money or be threatened by environmental policies, it would be likely to sell as much as possible now. As part of that process, it may be very willing to encourage the building of fossil fuel infrastructure that clearly won’t be viable a decade or two in the future, creating what are known as stranded assets.

In the long run, countries encouraged to borrow to make these investments may be stuck with the bill, in addition to the global climate change impacts that will result.

Extractive industries have known about climate change for decades. But rather than transform themselves into broad-based energy companies, most have doubled down on oil, coal and natural gas. More than two dozen U.S. cities, counties and states are now suing fossil fuel companies over the harms caused by climate change and accusing them of misleading the public, with California filing the latest lawsuit on Sept. 15, 2023.

The question is whether these companies will be able to successfully adapt to a renewable energy world, or whether they will follow the path of U.S. coal companies and not recognize their own decline until it is too late.

Robert Brecha, Professor of Sustainability, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.