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Farewell to the U.S. as the World’s Top Science Nation

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When I asked John Savage, the retired co-founder of the Department of Computer Science at Brown University, what the essential ingredient in research is, he responded with one word: “Passion.”

It is passion that keeps scientists going, dead end after dead end, until there is a breakthrough.

It is passion that keeps them at the bench or staring into a microscope or redesigning an experiment with slight modifications until that “eureka moment.”

I have been writing about science for half a century. I can tell you that passion is the bridge between daunting difficulty and triumphant discovery.

Next comes money: steady, reliable funding, not start-and-stop dribbles.

It is painful to watch the defunding of the nation’s research arm by roughly a third to a half; the wanton destruction of what, since the end of  World War II, has kept the United States the premier inventor-nation, the unequaled leader in discovery.

It is dangerous to believe the status quo ante will return when another administration is voted in, maybe in 2028.

You don’t pick up the pieces of projects that are, as they were, ripped from the womb and put them back together again, even if the researchers are still available — if they haven’t gone to the willing arms of research hubs overseas or other careers. 

The work isn’t made whole again just because the money is back. The passion is gone.

There are crude, massive reductions in funding for research and development across the government — with the most axing in the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE). But the philistines with their metaphorical chainsaws have slashed wildly and deeply into every corner of science, every place where talented men and women probe, analyze and seek to know.

This brutal, mindless slashing isn’t just upending careers, causing projects to be abandoned in midstream, destroying the precious passion that is the driver of discovery, but it is also a blow against the future. It is a turn from light to dark.

The whiz kids of DOGE aren’t cost-cutting. They are amputating the nation’s future.

The cutting of funds to NIH — until now the world’s premier medical research center, a citadel of hope for the sick and the guarantor that the future will have less suffering than the past — may be the most egregious act of many.

It is a terrible blow to those suffering from cancer to Parkinson’s and the myriad diseases in between who hope that NIH will come up with a cure or a therapy before they die prematurely. It is a heartless betrayal.

The full horror of the dismantling of what they call the nation’s “scientific pillar” has been laid out by two of America’s most eminent scientists in an essay in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

They are John Holdren, who served as President Barack Obama’s science adviser and as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Neal Lane, who was President Bill Clinton’s science adviser and is a former NSF director. In their alarming and telling essay, they appeal to Congress to step in and save America’s global leadership in science. 

They write, “What is happening now exceeds our worst fears. Consider, first, the National Science Foundation, one of the brightest jewels in the crown of U.S. science and the public interest. …. It’s the nation’s largest single funder of university basic research in fields other than medicine. Basic research, of course, is the seed corn from which future advances in applied science and technology flow.”

The NSF co-stars in the federal research ecosystem with NIH and DOE, the authors write. The NSF has funded research underpinning the internet, the Google search engine, magnetic resonance imaging, laser eye surgery, 3-D printing, CRISPR gene editing technology and much more.

The NIH is the world’s leading biomedical research facility. The writers say it spends 83 percent of its $48 billion annual budget on competitive grants, supporting over 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 institutions in all 50 states. Another 11 percent of the agency’s budget supports the 6,000 researchers in its own laboratories.

Holdren and Lane write, “Of the energy department’s $50 billion budget in fiscal 2024, about $15 billion went to non- defense research and development.”

Some $8 billion of this went to the DOE Office of Science Research, the largest funder in basic research in the physical sciences, supporting 300 institutions around the country including the department’s own 17 laboratories.                                                

In all of the seminal moves made by the Trump administration, what The Economist calls the president’s “War on Science” may be the most damaging.

The Battle for America Is the Battle for Science

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The man who popularized Greek-style yogurt, Hamdi Ulukaya, is probably one of the only, if not the only, billionaire of recent years who does not owe his fortune to the government. Jeff Bezos does, Bill Gates does, Mark Zuckerberg does, along with dozens of others who have amassed fortunes in the digital age.

They are smart men all who have exploited opportunities, which would not have existed but for the government’s presence in science. I applaud individuals who build on government discoveries to make their fortunes.

But government-backed science, which has brought us everything from GPS to the internet, is in for a radical reversal, as laid out in the Trump administration’s budget proposal.

It was greeted with derision when it was released, with many hoping Congress will reverse it. However in the science community, in the halls of the National Science Foundation, in the facilities of the National Institutes of Health, and in the sprawling world of the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, there is fear and alarm.

There should be. There should be from the world of learning a great bellow of rage, too.

The Trump administration has declared essentially that the United States cannot afford to be wise, cannot afford to invent, cannot afford to cure or to minister, and cannot afford to continue the rate of scientific evolution, which has made science of the post-World War II period so thrilling, benefiting countless people.

The administration has identified 62 programs for elimination or severe cutbacks. It has done this in a mixture of ignorance, indifference and delusion. The ignorance is that it does not seem to know how we got where we are; the indifference is part of a broad, anti-intellectual tilt on the political right; and the delusion is the hapless belief that science and engineering’s forward leap of 75 years will be carried on in the private sector.

The broad antipathy to science, to learning in all but the most general sense, is the mark of the Trump budget proposal.

But science, whether it is coming from ARPA-E, (Advanced Projects Research Research Agency-Energy) or the National Science Foundation’s watering of the tender shoots of invention, the Department of Energy’s world-leading contribution to the Human Genome Project, or the National Institutes of Health’s endless war against disease (especially the small and awful diseases like Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and the rarest cancers) is the future. Without it, the nation is gobbling its seed corn.

In the Trump administration, there is money to build a giant wall but no money to surge forward into the future.

To the administration, as indicated in its budget proposal, the sciences and the engineering that flows from them is a luxury. It is not. It is the raw materials of peace and strength in this century and beyond.

To take just one of the follies implicit in the philistine budget, cutting funding for medical research will come just when there is need for more — research that if not funded by the government will not be done. New epidemics like bird flu, Zika and Ebola cry out for research.

Increasingly, the old paradigm that new drugs would come from the drug companies is broken. It now costs a drug company close to $2 billion to bring a new compound to market. That cost is reflected in new drug prices, as the companies struggle to recoup their investments before their drugs go off patent. Shareholder value does not encourage the taking of chances, but rather the buying up of the competition. And that is happening in the industry.

The world desperately needs a new generation of antibiotics. The drug companies are not developing them, and the bugs are mutating happily, developing resistance to the drugs that have held bacterial disease at bay since penicillin led the way 89 years ago.

Fighting the political folly that threatens science is the battle for America. In 50 years, without amply government-funded research and development, will we still be the incubator for invention, the shock troops against disease, the progenitors of a time of global abundance?

Our place in the world is not determined by our ideology, but by our invention. Sadly, the pace of invention is at stake, attacked by a particularly virulent and aberrant strain of governmental thinking.­­