The United States, for much of its history, was less an engine of scientific progress than a beneficiary of it. Pasteur, Koch, Lister, Mendel, Curie, Fleming—the giants who midwifed modern medicine were not Americans but Europeans.
During the Second World War, the balance
shifted. President Franklin
Roosevelt created the Office of
Scientific Research and Development and tapped Vannevar Bush, a former dean of
M.I.T., to lead it. In the span of a few years, the agency spurred development
of an antimalarial drug, a flu vaccine, techniques to produce penicillin at
scale, and, less salubriously, the atomic bomb. Bush became a champion of
state-sponsored research, helping to establish the National
Science Foundation and to modernize the
National Institutes of Health.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org
Bush’s vision may be as
responsible as any other for nearly a century of American scientific dominance.
Research funded by the federal government has found useful expression in many
of the defining technologies: the internet, A.I., crispr, Ozempic,
and the mRNA
vaccines that saved untold lives during the covid pandemic.
Between 2010 and 2019, more than three hundred and fifty drugs were approved in
the U.S., and virtually all of them could trace their roots to the N.I.H. The
agency has grown into the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, with a
forty-eight-billion-dollar budget. By some estimates, each dollar that the U.S.
invests generates five dollars in social gains like economic growth and higher
standards of living.
Donald
Trump, since his return to the White House, has upended
the long-standing bipartisan consensus that the government should fund
scientific research and then mostly stay out of the way. His Administration has
paused communications from health agencies, wiped data from their websites,
fired hundreds of government scientists, and proposed slashing the budget of
the National Science Foundation by two-thirds. It has announced that the N.I.H.
will no longer honour negotiated rates for “indirect costs” on the grants that
it administers—money that institutions use for such things as laboratory space,
research equipment, removal of hazardous waste, and personnel to help patients enrol
in clinical trials.
The disruptions are already
cascading through academia. Medical schools have paused hiring; labs are
considering when they’ll have to let employees go; universities are curtailing
Ph.D. programs, in some cases rescinding offers to accept students. Meanwhile,
biotech investors are warning of a contraction in medical innovation. There is
nothing wrong with reform. The N.I.H. could stand to restructure its institutes
to minimize duplicative work, to fund projects with greater transformative
potential, to demand more transparency in how institutions calculate their
administrative overhead. But what Trump is doing is not reform, it is
subversion. And it could not come at a worse time.
America has long been the global
leader in scientific output, but by various measures China is
now surging ahead. In recent years, it surpassed the U.S. as the top producer
of highly cited papers and international patent applications. It now awards
more science and engineering Ph.D.’s than the U.S., and, even before the
current funding turmoil, it was projected to match spending on research and
development by the end of the decade. Trump may speak of America First, but his
Administration’s playbook will ensure that the U.S. comes in, at best, second.
It is in this context, that
progressive Asian nations have a tremendous opportunity to lure disgruntled
academics and graduate students to their countries and leapfrog the West. This
is the Asian century, and it must be anchored on research and development.
Reference:
Trump’s Agenda Is Undermining
American Science, Dhruv
Khullar, The New
Yorker,
9 March 2025
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