Get The Gavel
A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr.
This looks like bad news for universities, which since the 1950s have conducted open-ended research that is funded by taxpayers on behalf of the national interest.
But it is also bad news for anyone who appreciates the scientific breakthroughs that have occurred thanks to research conducted at universities, including the COVID-19 vaccines and life-changing innovations ranging from the smartphone and the internet to GPS and the laser.
This sort of research, known as basic research, is the pursuit of knowledge without a particular application or product in mind. For decades, the federal government has invested in basic research in university labs because the results can reveal new insights about how the world works, which eventually can lead to new inventions and entirely new industries. Private companies, in contrast, tend to conduct applied research — work that is related to their industry and is meant from the start to have a particular application within a relatively short time period.
American universities are among the few places in the world where this kind of exploratory work has been so richly funded for so long. It has been the foundation for the country’s technological edge. US universities’ consistent record of producing research firepower has made them the envy of the world; countries including China are emulating the American model.
Among his many suggestions, Kratsios says a new government entity could handle basic research in the future. Under this new model, national laboratories and universities could serve “as revitalized hubs of testing and evaluation for private industry.”
Kratsios also proposes investing in individual researchers and artificial intelligence rather than universities, largely because the Trump administration believes universities spend too much on overhead costs.
L. Rafael Reif, who was recently the president of MIT for a decade, points out that research is expensive to conduct regardless of whether it takes place in a university lab or in a new government entity.
“There is no way to give the money to a researcher and not spend money on electricity or equipment,” Reif says. “There is no such thing.”
Colleges and universities are not perfect. Far from it: They have struggled in recent years to foster debate and civil disagreement. But universities are among the few places where basic research can take place without the expectation of profit and with protections from government interference. Decreasing financial support for basic research at universities is similar to cutting your retirement savings as a young professional — you will feel the consequences years down the road.
Kratsios’s report mentions the Apollo mission as an example of an ambitious project the likes of which he wants the country to pursue again. But American universities including MIT were involved in the Apollo mission, designing the “navigational system that was used by the command module and by the lunar module to get to the moon,” Reif says.
Kratsios argues that domestic scientific advancement has slowed over the last 30 years, largely because of federal and university bureaucracies that hamper innovation. Kratsios, who is not a scientist but for years worked for billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, believes that the government needs to increase investment in projects that will produce greater returns in the age of artificial intelligence and other rapidly evolving technologies.
“Our task is to build a scientific enterprise that maximizes the marginal returns to intelligence, which means confronting, clearly, the factors that constrain its work,” he wrote in his 126-page report “Science: A New Golden Age.”
Kratsios, Thiel, and many of their fellow travelers exalt the breakthroughs happening in private companies like SpaceX; Kratsios recommends in the report that industry should have more access to the country’s “laboratory research infrastructure.” But many of the private sector’s advancements are already built on decades of government-sponsored research in university labs.
Kratsios doesn’t clearly explain in the report how universities will fit into the nation’s reimagined scientific enterprise, but he does suggest that universities and community colleges should focus more on technical training, especially to prepare students for manufacturing jobs. The press office for the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy did not respond to my questions about the new research strategy.
Most scientists would probably agree with Kratsios that less paperwork and less bureaucracy would be nice, but Kratsios seems to be operating under the assumption that artificial intelligence will replace the need for many scientists and researchers in the years to come. Universities, which also train future scientists, would presumably be less important in a world where AI is responsible for conducting our most important research.
Indeed, this summer the White House announced more than $5 billion in federal commitments for Genesis Mission, “a national effort to harness AI for science.”
Robert Brown, a former president of Boston University and a chemical engineer, questions how artificial intelligence could ever replace basic research in universities. Scientific breakthroughs often come after exploring completely unrelated questions, dictated by researchers’ curiosity.
“Creativity, imagination are not the same as asking Claude to answer a question,” Brown says.
Brown says the report’s recommendations seem to be “setting the stage to try to drive another wedge into research universities and see if people will come out and form different kinds of organizations outside.”
Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, in the Oval Office on July 24.Eric Lee/Getty
The White House presents Kratsios’s report as a next-generation successor to the postwar vision of Vannevar Bush, the former MIT professor who argued in a 1945 report called “Science, the Endless Frontier” that new basic scientific knowledge would be critical for the nation’s competitive position. Bush wrote that colleges, universities, and research institutes “are the centers of basic research.”
Bush wrote the report at the request of President Franklin D. Roosevelt as World War II was ending, largely because of the fruitful collaboration among scientists on efforts such as the Manhattan Project. Bush successfully argued for the federal government to continue to fund basic scientific research to bolster national security, advance public health, and benefit the economy.
Bush added that universities are “the wellsprings of knowledge and understanding.”
“As long as they are vigorous and healthy and their scientists are free to pursue the truth wherever it may lead, there will be a flow of new scientific knowledge to those who can apply it to practical problems in Government, in industry, or elsewhere,” Bush wrote.
The report laid the foundation of the modern research infrastructure we have today, including the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950.
John Holdren, who was science adviser to President Barack Obama, read Kratsios’s report with dismay, saying that he sees an executive branch with “no respect for facts, no respect for science, no respect for independent opinion.”
“In fact it has done everything it could think up to impair and impede the organizations that produce science, that analyze objectively the challenges facing the country, that educate the next generation of analysts and scientists on whom we depend to support our economy, to support public health, to support national security, climate,” Holdren says. “It’s all at risk.”
Reif worries that most Americans have only known the United States as the top in the world at science, innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology. That is about to change, he says, because for too long the United States has taken being the best for granted, failing to keep pace with Chinese investments in research infrastructure. The Trump administration’s cuts to federal research funding will only hasten the fall.
“All of a sudden, the new innovations, the new kinds of iPhones, the new kinds of telecommunication systems, the new vaccines, and the new therapy drugs will come from China,” Reif says. “We’re going to realize, boy, we blew it big time. That is going to happen. And I think the country is not ready for that.”
Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com.