Does the U.S. create knowledge?

I recently read chapter 7 "Skills" of Lester Thurow's book Building Wealth. (See the Prologue to the book) Thurow talks about knowledge deployment (making good use of knowledge economically by workers in the form of skills) and knowledge creation (inventing new products, proceedures, and ideas) and observes that relative to the size of the country, the US is much better at knowledge deployment than it is at knowledge creation. He observes that German in the first half the the 20th century was the leader in knowledge creation. I point you to the Nobel site. Note how many of the prizes go to Germany. Also note the large number England got. Two of the great discoveries of the 20th century, nuclear and space science, America owes a huge debt to Germany. On the one hand, Jewish scientists fled the Nazi's and brought their nuclear physics to the US, and in the second case, we made off with Germany's rocket scientists after the war. When you figure how many discoveries are derivative of the nuclear and space programs, all of which ultimatly are founded on German educative capital, not American. That we could have the Sputnik crisis in American education when we did, points to the reliance on German, not American know how. Looking at the recent decade of nobel laureates, we have gained a recent boon from the Russian brain drain. Our science relies on the desirability of immigrating to the U.S. The search in Asia for computer science types is well known. Our university system attracts students who didn't come up through the American public school system.