The world needs more scientists

Trump and Musk's attacks on scientific research hurt everyone, including their own followers.

Pierre and Maria Skłodowska-Curie in the laboratory, demonstrating the experimental apparatus used to detect the ionsation of air, and hence the radioactivity, of samples of purified ore which enabled their discovery of radium.

Most people alive today don’t realize how much science has improved their lives. Indeed, most people alive today wouldn’t even be here if not for the scientific and medical advances of the past 150 years.

And for the billions of people alive today, most have much better lives than our recent ancestors did.

You don’t have to look back very far to learn how difficult life was for humans in the past. I recently visited several museums in Europe that documented the history and life of Europeans dating back to Roman times. As the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously observed in 1651, life for most people was “nasty, brutish, and short.”

To cite just a few examples: for centuries, most children died of infections, and if you were lucky enough to survive to adulthood, you still likely died of an infection before the age of 50. Few people reached what we now regard as retirement age. Epidemics were common, with the infamous Black Death killing an estimated 50% of the entire population of Europe in the 14th century.

We now know that the Black Death, called simply “the plague,” was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which is spread by fleas. Today, Y. pestis infections are quickly cured by antibiotics, and no one in modern societies ever dies of the plague.

The first antibiotic, penicillin, was discovered in 1928, and beginning in the 1940s multiple antibiotics were developed and manufactured on a large scale. These have saved hundreds of millions of lives.

Antibiotics don’t treat viruses, though, and some of the other great scourges of mankind, including smallpox and polio, are caused by viruses. For these and many other viral infections, we now have vaccines that are remarkably effective. Vaccines have been so effective, in fact, that humans entirely eliminated smallpox from the planet by the 1970s.

Historically, no one was spared death by infection. Louis XV, king of France from 1715 to 1774, died of smallpox. So did Mary II, queen of England from 1689 until her death in 1694. Many famous historical figures died from tuberculosis, including the English poet John Keats, the Polish composer Frederic Chopin, the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, and the former U.S. first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

And that’s just infections. Virtually any type of cancer was a death sentence until recent decades, but thanks to biomedical science, we now have treatments that can extend life dramatically for many cancer patients, and even provide complete cures for some cancers.

Beyond simply letting us stay alive, science also makes our lives better in countless other ways, starting with fundamental advances such as the ability to generate and use electricity. Our cars, our houses, our computers, our phones, and our workplaces are filled with technology that started out as scientific research just a few decades ago.

This didn’t come out of nowhere. After World War II, the U.S. recognized that science had the promise to make our lives better in many ways that couldn’t easily be anticipated, and that sometimes take years to come to fruition. Private companies couldn’t and still can’t afford to make very long-term investments with an uncertain payoff; only the government could do that. So we did: both the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were created around that time, and they grew rapidly in the decades since.

The U.S. investment in science has paid off many times over, not only with advances in health, medicine, and technology, but in making the U.S. research system the envy of the world. Every year, tens of thousands of foreign students apply to U.S. graduate programs in science, technology, and medicine, and many of them (and their children) have gone on to create enormously successful companies in the U.S.

Why do they come? In part they come because the U.S. leads the world in biomedical and scientific research. But they also come because – and this is obviously connected to our world-leading status – the U.S. is a place where a scientist can pursue studies on a nearly infinite range of scientific questions, without intrusive political interference that has stifled innovation in other countries, including the former Soviet Union and Communist China.

But now, in the space of just a few months, Trump and his followers have launched an unprecedented attack on universities in the United States, with their most devastating actions hitting scientific and medical research. Within days of taking office, Trump issued executive orders that immediately froze virtually all scientific grants in the country. Billions of dollars that would have been awarded by now are still locked up, even though Congress authorized the funding, and even though multiple federal courts blocked the executive orders, ruling that the President doesn’t have the authority to cancel funding that Congress authorized.

Not only did Trump freeze almost all science funding, but (with the enthusiastic help of Elon Musk) he also launched a vicious attack on the entire federal workforce, firing tens of thousands of civil servants and announcing his intent to fire many more. These actions mean that even though some research funds have started to flow, the federal workforce is so decimated that some offices at NIH, NSF, and elsewhere are unable to issue awards. There are simply too few people to do the work, and those that haven’t been fired are afraid that they will be, if they do anything that goes against Trump’s wishes.

Trump has requested budget cuts of 40-50% for NSF and NIH next year. The budget comes from Congress, so they can ignore this request, but most members of the current Congress have been eager to cede their authority to Trump. More recently, Trump ordered the State Department to stop issuing visas for foreign students to come to the U.S. to study. Although another judge issued a ruling blocking this action, it is already having a terribly negative impact on U.S. research, with many of the best students in the world re-thinking or abandoning their plans to study here.

This aggressive attack on scientific and medical research is, in a word, stupid. It will slow or halt progress on thousands of projects that will save lives and make the world a better place.

For those who have suggested (as many have) that scientists can or should look to private sources for funding, I would say: we tried that, it’s called the nineteenth century. And I would add that scientists already look for private funding, and although we’re very grateful for the foundations that support science (Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Howard Hughs Medical Institute, the Gates Foundation, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, the Simons Institute, and many others), all of those sources combined cannot begin to replace what the federal government provides.

We need more scientists, not fewer. The number of vitally important but unsolved problems out there is endless, and we need the brightest minds that humanity produces to help solve them. For the past 80 years, the U.S. has led the world in trying to answer these questions, and I hope we won’t abandon that role.

Finally, to paraphrase a scientist at a U.S. university whose funds have recently been canceled: We want to cure brain cancer. What is political about that?