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The focus should be on harnessing AI and out-competing China, writes Michael Kratsios, the White House science chief.
- Vannevar Bush’s “Science: The Endless Frontier” built post-war American science and the National Science Foundation, but its 20th-century model no longer fits.
- Industry now self-funds more basic research than government funds at universities, and AI is creating new conditions for research.
- Kratsios proposes portfolio funding, X-Labs, support for early careers and the Genesis Mission, set out in “Science: A New Golden Age”.
As the second world war drew to a close, President Franklin D. Roosevelt tasked his science adviser, Vannevar Bush, with reorganising America’s scientific enterprise for a post-war order. Bush’s answer, a report entitled “Science: The Endless Frontier”, became the blueprint for American government support of basic science.
That blueprint in turn led to the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF), a federal agency that supports fundamental research, and shaped the triumphal attitude to science and technology that defined so much of the “American Century”.
The belief that government should support basic research, that this research can be a foundation of national prosperity and that America can organise its scientific institutions to facilitate that process, remains as true today as when Bush laid out that schema. But Bush would be the first to recognise that the world in which science is conducted has changed dramatically since 1945, leaving the American research system in need of an update.
The 1945 blueprint that built American science
Bush wrote his report to Roosevelt at an exceptional moment. America stood on the cusp of final victory in the largest conflict in human history. The countries of Europe, the previous century’s scientific powers, lay mostly devastated.
This structural reality produced the heights of American manufacturing power. Similarly, it explains part of Bush’s success in continuing wartime organised science in peacetime.
In 1961 President Dwight Eisenhower described the cold-war culmination of Bush’s initiative. Eisenhower observed that “research has become central” and “more formalized, complex, and costly”, as “task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields” displaced the “solitary inventor”. Mass industrial science soon mobilised government, corporations and academia to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon.
Why the Endless Frontier is showing its age
That post-war industrial America no longer exists. And the dreams of an open world that followed the cold war have given way to a competitive global environment, in which Chinese technical capacity, not Soviet science, seeks to overtake America in a race for scientific and technological leadership.
There are reasons besides the procession of history to think the “Endless Frontier” is out of date. In recent decades American scientific enterprise has shown its age, with diminishing returns. Despite biomedical research budgets soaring since the 1990s, the rate of significant breakthroughs has slowed and drug approvals have plateaued.
Many scientists spend nearly half their time on paperwork. The system serves itself better than its scientists.
Industry now leads in basic research
Linear model — Bush’s managerialism promoted the idea that government funds basic research in universities, and industry turns newly published insights into novel applications.
That model made sense when government was the primary administrator of fundamental science. But these days an increasing number of scientists do their research in industry, and industry funds an increasing amount of basic science.
Over the past two decades the share of private funding dedicated to fundamental research has grown five-fold.
a year in basic research self-funded by industry — more than the government funds at universities.
The 2024 Nobel chemistry prize, for a breakthrough in protein-folding, was largely achieved through industry resources and talent.
AI demands a new research ecosystem
Moreover, artificial intelligence is creating new conditions to which research institutions must adapt. AI has the potential to be the greatest accelerant of scientific progress in human history, if we match its capacities with a suitable research ecosystem.
The longer we delay adjustments, the more likely it is that legacy organisational structures built to Bush’s blueprint will be overwhelmed. As the world changes, and the challenges of American leadership change with it, the effort to organise the national research system must move on from 20th-century managerialism.
A portfolio approach to funding science
To respond to these new realities, government is refocusing its efforts to meet America’s best scientists where and when they do their best work. We should adopt a portfolio approach to funding that includes both fast, exploratory grants and longer-term support, matching the timeline to the researcher’s work.
We should use the full toolkit of funding mechanisms, including prize challenges and binding commitments to create markets for innovative products. We should experiment with review processes that promote disruptive proposals, and fund new institutional models such as X-Labs, the NSF’s initiative to launch and scale new organisations to address technical challenges that university and industry labs cannot easily solve through traditional methods.
Beyond all this, we should back early-career independence by expanding portable graduate fellowships and four-year PhD programmes. We should subject our work to the scrutiny of metascience, the scientific study of how we do science, including building metascience units in funding agencies.
And we should co-ordinate national efforts, in the spirit of the Apollo programme, and prepare the scientific ecosystem for the AI era. To this end, last November President Donald Trump launched the Genesis Mission via executive order.
Homage to Vannevar
Making the case for this transformation, last month I published my own report to the president on the shape of the American science enterprise, “Science: A New Golden Age”. It is a sequel and an homage to Bush’s Endless Frontier, but also aims to be a successor.
The moment calls for renewal of his original intentions, recapturing his ambition and optimism, while recognising the new context in which we find ourselves.
Michael Kratsios is director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
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