THREATS TO U.S. S&T LEADERSHIPA Brief History of Federal Funding for Basic Science
Biomedical science in the United States is at a crossroads. For 75 years, the federal government has partnered with academic institutions, fueling discoveries that have transformed medicine and saved lives. Recent moves by the Trump administration — including funding cuts and proposed changes to how research support is allocated — now threaten this legacy.
Biomedical science in the United States is at a crossroads.
For 75 years, the federal government has partnered with academic institutions, fueling discoveries that have transformed medicine and saved lives. But recent moves by the Department of Health and Human Services and other federal agencies — including funding cuts and proposed changes to how research support is allocated — now threaten this legacy.
Harvard Medical School is among the institutions bracing for the potential of steep reductions, raising concerns about the future of biomedical research.
“The Pacemaker of Technological Progress”
The partnership between academia and government was born during World War II, inspired by the vision of Vannevar Bush, head of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development.
In his report Science, The Endless Frontier, Bush envisioned science as a source of light that could drive away the dark shadows of the war and stave off the return of the Great Depression. He offered a roadmap for the U.S. scientific enterprise with an emphasis on basic research.
“Basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress,” Bush wrote in the report, which he submitted to President Harry Truman in 1945.
While the National Science Foundation did not launch until 1950, agencies like the National Institutes of Health began making investments in peacetime research and education modeled on the Bush recommendations, transforming the United States into a global science leader. In biomedical science, federal funding allowed U.S. researchers to make breakthroughs, deepening understandings of how health and disease arise from the interaction of individual molecules and cells, and how these interactions culminate at the level of the individual organism as well as across populations.
These basic science insights have unlocked important treatment advances for cardiovascular illness, cancer, infectious diseases, and mental health, among others. The American Cancer Society estimates that 3.5 million lives were saved from cancer between 1991 and 2019 from improvements in detection, prevention, and treatment based on federally funded research.
From Observations to Insights
For much of its nearly 250-year history, HMS operated without federal research funding. In its early days, faculty generated insights based on observation, while working in the hospitals and teaching medical students, says David Jones, MD ’01, the A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine at HMS.
