How the US became a science superpower

America is awesome at science. For as long as most of us have been alive, United States scientists have published more research, been cited more often by other scientists, earned more patents, and even won more Nobel Prizes than any other nation.

All that scientific expertise has helped make the U.S. the most prosperous nation on Earth and led to longer and easier lives here and around the world. But until World War II, the U.S. often sat on the sidelines of scientific progress. With national security on the line, the federal government, through policy and strategic investments, set about turning America into the world leader in science.

Now, amid federal attacks on university research and the government agencies that fund it, America is on the verge of relinquishing its scientific dominance for the first time in eight decades.

To learn more about how we got here, and what could happen next, we called up two experts who’ve dedicated their careers to understanding how America built itself into the most innovative nation on Earth.

Cathryn Carson, chair of the History Department at UC Berkeley, studies how 20th century physicists in the U.S. and Europe advanced disciplines including quantum theory and nuclear energy. UC Santa Barbara history professor W. Patrick McCray studies science, technology and the environment in the postwar U.S.

University of California: It’s hard to imagine a time when the US wasn’t the global leader in science. But it wasn’t that long ago, was it?

McCray: Practically since the start of the United States, the federal government has invested in science. But for most of our history, those were investments of a very practical nature. So you have things like coastal surveys, research devoted to fisheries, programs to map terrain or geology, and promote agriculture.

Through the early part of the 20th century, what we think of as basic science—areas like physics, astronomy, those disciplines that ask these fundamental questions about how things work—the U.S. wasn’t really strong in those areas. Some of it was being done at U.S. universities, mainly funded by philanthropic foundations like the Rockefellers or the Carnegies. But if you’re, say, Robert Oppenheimer studying physics in the 1920s, you’d go off to Europe, like he did, to get your Ph.D.

Carson: Up through the 1930s, the idea that the federal government would put any money into either universities or industry science was actually anathema in some quarters. It was seen as inappropriate for the federal government to be tinkering with those parts of civil society by putting money in that served the government’s purposes.

That obviously changed at some point, because in recent years the federal government has funded about 40% of basic research in America. What happened?

Carson: World War II completely changed the bargain. As the nature of the threat coming out of Nazi Germany became clear in the late 1930s, the government started scaling up its investments into aeronautics, aerodynamics and chemical engineering, and then into nuclear physics as it burst on the scene, including here at Berkeley.

The progress these academic scientists were able to make with a little bit of federal funding got the heads turned around of some leading university-based scientists, who raised the alarm and persuaded President Roosevelt to build up an entire infrastructure of guiding and funding university-based science, purely for the purpose of winning World War II.

So it’s the national emergency of World War II that breaks with all past traditions of keeping the government separate from university or industry science, and forges this new compact, this new relationship. The system we have now of federal contracts to universities to do basic research, and the continuing tight relationships and overlaps between university scientists and federal policymakers, was all set up during World War II.

How did the government transition from funding science for the war effort to this long-term commitment to university research?

McCray: The year before President Roosevelt died in 1945, he tasked his science advisor, a man named Vannevar Bush, to look to the future. Bush, who had been at MIT before taking over the management of America’s vast wartime science infrastructure, eventually oversaw the production of this famous report called “Science: the Endless Frontier.” It laid out a blueprint for what would become U.S. science policy in the years and decades following the Second World War.

Did Bush and his successors articulate any specific goals for these policies?

Carson: You might think that the federal government is most interested in applicable research that immediately leads to new weapons or new products. But federal leaders realized that they were actually not just investing in the products of research. They were investing in the people.

McCray: They recognized we needed to have a cadre of trained scientists and engineers and needed to keep them fed and paid until the next conflict eventually breaks out. Scientists were seen as a resource to be stockpiled, like steel or oil, and that we can turn to in time of a national emergency.

Federal leaders realized that they were actually not just investing in the products of research. They were investing in the people.

By the 1960s, the federal government was spending about two percent of U.S. GDP on research and development. How have elected officials made the case for these investments to U.S. taxpayers?

McCray: Bush would say, “We need to water the tree of basic research.” The idea was that the tree will grow nice little fruits we can come along and pluck, and those would benefit our health, economy and security.

Those three things, health, economy, and national security, were part of the social contract that emerged between scientists and the federal government after the Second World War. The idea was that in some way, the research that the government is funding would contribute to the larger benefit of the nation.

What are some examples of those fruits of basic research?

McCray: I tell my students about Tom Brock, a microbial ecologist in the 1960s who was really interested in the microbes in the hot springs at Yellowstone National Park. The bacteria that he discovered became the key part in a biological technique developed in the 1980s called the polymerase chain reaction, which allows you to amplify sequences of DNA. PCR was a huge step in the creation of the whole biotech industry, and it was ultimately a critical tool used in 2020 to develop a vaccine for COVID.

You can’t predict that path, and the time frame for these government investments paying off is often measured in decades. But Vannevar Bush would have argued that that’s exactly why the federal government should be the one investing in basic science, because industry was never going to think or work that way.

Carson: Silicon Valley was built on microelectronics and aerospace, both funded by the Defense Department. Electronics weren’t initially for consumers. They were for ballistic missiles, jet aircraft, the next generation of radar. All this effort went into building electronics that would serve the military then got turned over to the consumer market in the 1970s and 80s.

Presumably the U.S. wasn’t the only nation that recognized the value of investing in science after World War II?

Carson: No, and in fact, other global powers, including the nations defeated in World War II, started to catch up. Power brokers in Washington in 1948 could never have imagined that the Soviets would get an atomic bomb by 1949. Germany and Japan both made strides in advanced manufacturing in the 1950s. In the 1960s, we had thought we had a semi-permanent lead in semiconductors, but by the 1970s Japan emerged as a leader in microelectronics.

So that’s how the main concern of government-funded science expanded by the 1970s and 1980s, from maintaining the national defense to maintaining U.S. global economic leadership. It became clear that any lead the U.S. might hold—in defense, in electronics, in biotech—has to be constantly defended.

For everyday Americans, why does it matter which nation’s scientists invent the technology or cure the disease, as long as someone, somewhere is solving these problems?

Carson: There are two ways to think about that, and they both have to do with maintaining U.S. economic preeminence. One is the “first mover” advantage: Sure, a company from another country could go and commercialize a technology they didn’t originally develop, but they’d be doing that sometime after the originator, so the originator has the chance to build up a lead.

Also, so much of scientific research isn’t about just discoveries, but it’s about making an initial discovery better, more marketable or more effective. And so having a system of innovation that can play at all stages, from invention through commercialization of the final product, helps keep domestic companies in the lead over global competitors.

How has the government decided what research is worth funding? Do you see that changing now?

Carson: Up until now, the consensus of the scientific community has governed what got funded, whether it was from high-energy particle physics accelerators to social science or environmental research. We’ve had a self-governing body of scientists, through peer review and through funding panels, who essentially direct government science funding to the places where the scientists thought it would do the most benefit.

I think the consensus that science was a route to national well-being and prosperity was widely shared by people across the political spectrum until very recently. It’s only been the past few years that we’ve seen a rising lack of trust in scientists being self-interested rather than finding truth through coordinating with each other. The surge of distrust for the people who have been steering the enterprise through peer review is pretty frightening, because it then leaves the space for all kinds of ideological interests to come in.

Since January, the federal government has paused or canceled billions in research grants to universities across the country. Now Congress is considering a federal budget for next year that could include cutting some agencies that fund research by as much as half. How could these cuts affect American families and communities?

McCray: This whole history isn’t just about the money, but the ambition behind it. The United States built big particle accelerators, big research vessels, big telescopes. Those were all attractive things for people in other countries to come here to get their degrees, and then maybe stay and start a company that builds U.S. prosperity. One way these cuts could hurt the United States economically is if it makes it so this is no longer a place where people from other countries can come to take advantage of our scientific resources.

But I think the more pernicious effect is to degrade the value of experts and expertise. Science is the production of reliable knowledge about the natural world. What makes it reliable is the fact that experts make this knowledge. This is not to say they are perfect or free from conflicts of interest. But modern science is an infrastructure designed to produce consensus—not certainty—about knowledge. This is what makes it powerful and, at the same time, fragile. The average citizen and politician wants certainty but that is not what science is designed to give us.

It’s easy to forget that U.S. leadership isn’t some fixed, unchanging feature of the scientific landscape. It has a history, it’s developed and changed over time, and like any other system, it can be degraded. And sadly, that’s what’s happening now. And it’s going to be hard to build that system back, especially since, at least in this country, it took decades to create.