Hosts
Derek Thompson
Derek ThompsonAbout the episode
Today, we are witnessing an unprecedented assault on American science. Thousands of workers have been dismissed from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Billions of dollars are being cut from the NIH and NSF. Talented scientists are leaving the field (or leaving the country). Clinical trials and longitudinal studies are ending without explanation. Major research universities are under direct attack, with billions more dollars being withheld for political purposes.
Today, I want to do three things: First, I want to review what’s happening to American science and why it’s so serious. Second, I want to explore how we got here—how the American science system works and where it came from. And third, I want to discuss what a real reformist agenda for American science would look like.
So, for the first time, this is a triple-barreled podcast. First we speak to Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of Science and the prestigious Science journals. Second, we talk to Bhaven Sampat, a researcher and historian at Arizona State University, about the history of the NIH. And finally, we talk to Pierre Azoulay, a researcher at MIT, who has spent considerable time and energy studying how American science works and how it could work better.
If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.
Summary
In the following excerpt, Derek talks to Holden Thorp about the importance of scientific research in the United States.
Holden Thorp: Well, I think a big part of it is how it was set up. It was set up by someone named Vannevar Bush, who was involved with the Manhattan Project around when World War II ended. And there was a lot of urgency around how the United States was going to continue to compete in the new world that was formed by the war, especially in science, since a lot of things had happened between the U.S. and Germany and Japan over science during the war.
And Vannevar Bush had what might be kind of a radical idea, but it turned out to be correct. And it’s part and parcel of how we think about everything now, which is that the right people to do science in a completely unfettered way were professors at universities, because they wouldn’t be subject to the federal government setting the agenda in a way that might prohibit them from finding something that wouldn’t have been found otherwise and that they should have a lot of independence when they do that for the same reasons.
And so Bush convinced the United States to have a federally funded research enterprise and to do it in universities with relatively independent university professors carrying out the research. And this was a complicated idea. It would’ve been easier to just set up a bunch of central facilities that the government funded because most of the universities at that time didn’t have big labs that people are used to seeing when they drive around a university campus now. And all of that stuff had to be built, and programs had to be put together to train students in the system.
But what we ended up with, which is something that I have benefited from and administered my whole career from one perspective or another, is an apprentice system where professors, having done what their students would then do, learned how to be very independent scientists, how to follow curiosity where it led and to bring up students and other trainees that we sometimes call postdoctoral fellows. Those are people who have finished graduate school but don’t have a faculty position or a permanent job yet. To train them to do research, and they train the next generation and on and on. And throughout the system, it’s all about finding things that other people haven’t thought about before.
And it’s based partly on the idea that it’s impossible to know what science you have now is going to turn into the applications of the future. But especially now, with all the cuts and everything, you’re seeing a lot of people talking about how almost every approved drug has its birth somewhere in an NIH-funded study at a university. And this is what’s made the system great, and this is why people have traditionally come from all over the world to participate in it, which is another thing that we’re now struggling with. But the fact that those folks are trained in the American system, even if they go back to their original country, it still gives the United States a lot of influence over the way the scientific enterprise plays out around the world. And a lot of us are very worried that that’s going to go away.
Derek Thompson: There are some studies suggesting that every dollar spent on research, every dollar that flows from the NIH or the NSF to a university researcher, returns at least $5 to the economy. And if you take this statistic seriously, it really is like a kind of magic. There’s almost nothing else I can think of that every time you put $1 into a machine, the machine spits out $5.
You’ve had a really interesting career that allows you to see the origin of basic research, how that can be translated into technology, how technology can become the kernel of a new company. Can you explain a little bit about how this statistic can possibly be true, $1 of research returns $5 of economic growth?
Thorp: Right. Well, some of it is the services and environment that goes to support the research. So there’s a building there, and there’s people who work at the building, and there’s graduate students who come and bring their own money for things. And so some of that is just the additional economic activity that has to happen to support that $1.
But then many of those studies are then perhaps followed up at other places which then spend more money on that. Or if industry takes interest in the research and they do something with it, that creates economic activity. And then because of something that we’ve had for a long time, since 1980, called the Bayh-Dole Act, the universities are allowed to, and in large part obligated to, find a home for any technologies that come out of the research that they end up patenting with a licensee that is going to maximize the value of that patent.
And so many, many university patents are licensed to drug companies and to companies in the IT space or aerospace companies or whatever it is that has a use for that patent, and then that creates more economic activity. But I think it’s also important to remember that many of those dollars don’t necessarily get multiplied. And that’s because we don’t always know where these things are going to lead.
Thompson: Right. I like the way that you edited my original metaphor, because it’s not as if there’s a machine that turns every dollar into $5. It’s more like the machine has this lottery function where some dollars create absolutely nothing, and then other dollars are spent on something like Gila monster venom research in the 1990s that ends up becoming the basis for GLP-1 drugs that becomes, like, a trillion-dollar global industry.
So the value of the original research might not be just a five-times payoff. It’s something like a 10,000-, 100,000-times payoff, and you have this portfolio of bets that scientists are making as they’re trying to discover truths about our bodies and the universe and the world. And some of them return something incredible, and some of them return nothing, but we don’t know which bets are going to return what beforehand. And that’s why you want to essentially have the federal government taking a lot of bets.
It raises a question. To a certain extent, the NIH and NSF can defend their spending with this sort of portfolio approach that I’m describing. But there’s other people, maybe, say, MAGA conservatives, MAGA tech folks, who are saying, “Hey, you know who’s really good at making bets? Venture capitalists, the private sector.” Why doesn’t the private sector just take on all of the science spending in America and just sort of put the NIH into the dustbin of history? It was a fine idea of the 1950s. It’s not the best idea for the 2020s. Defend the idea that the federal government should be doing basic research funding.
This excerpt has been edited and condensed.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guests: Holden Thorp, Bhaven Sampat and Pierre Azoulay
Producer: Devon Baroldi