Celebrating its 350th anniversary as a scholarly association devoted to scientific pursuits, the Royal Society (UK), in March 2010, published "The Scientific Century: Securing Our Future Prosperity." In its report, the Royal Society argues against both the notion of withdrawing public investment from its world-class universities and the haphazard, uninformed commercialization of knowledge. Instead, it urges governmental leaders to place a policy priority on scientific innovation as a long-term strategy for economic growth. It supports a response to fiscal challenges that incorporates a new, sustained focus on university-industry collaborations and the creation of high-tech clusters of scientific and related organizations. Invariably, the Royal Society connects the future welfare of the United Kingdom to its ongoing public investments in enhancing its academic system, the source that generates scientific and intellectual capital at all levels. This article shares lessons from the Royal Society and how these lessons might be enacted in the U.S. (Contains 6 endnotes.)