This American brain trust has led to more than 400 Nobel Prize winners than any other country in the world. As of 2023, an estimated 1.2 million people worldwide have earned PhDs in Science, Engineering, or Health, acquired from American institutions. The US accounts for 27% of the total world research and development activities. This is the majority of China at 22%, but 22% have been closed. This is far superior to Japan (7%), Germany (6%) and South Korea (4%).
This investment is essential to our economy. Over 408,000 jobs are supported by NIH grants. It is estimated that all of the NIH funding will generate $2.56 in economic activity.
Much of its success was because the US government was willing to support the kind of basic science work that took years, and even generations, before it brought about a monumental breakthrough. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, hundreds of millions of federal dollars established the basis for major breakthroughs in mRNA technology. Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs were inspired in part by Gila Monster Venom's NIH-supported research in the 1980s. Without that work, the current weight loss revolution might not be in decades. Fifty years ago, less than 60% of children diagnosed with pediatric cancer survived five years later. Now, thanks to NIH-funded and leading treatments, its survival rate is 85%.
America has also been an attractive destination for science, with the explicit support of researchers studying what is most important without a straight path to success and profit. That commitment appears to be falling apart. Daniel Bauman, a 25-year-old graduate student at Stanford University, said: “We're a 25-year-old graduate student at Stanford. “If efficiency is mandatory, current and future careers will be lost or abandoned. If scientific funding is conditioned on immediate beneficial outcomes, who is left to tell the story of nature? Has anyone heard?”
The careers of young scientists are closely tied to the grant application cycle. Carol Lavonne, a molecular biologist at Northwestern University, recently told podcast Odd Lott to see the lab as a small business operating at a very tight operating margin. For example, grants funded over four years must be renewed in the third year. And if you can't do it, people have to let go immediately – it almost always means junior members of the lab. Peter Jacobs, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is not sure if the DOE and NSF grants will be renewed to help fund his program.
