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What does science get us? That’s always the question from those who fund it, but not from those who do it. This tension is in full swing in the US right now, as the Trump administration takes a hacksaw to the scientific ecosystem. But it isn’t new.
In 1969, as Robert Wilson was testifying before the US Congress to get funding for a new particle collider at Fermilab, he spoke on the topic. The senators were grilling him on how this scientific endeavour would contribute to national defence or help compete with Russia during the cold war. He answered: “It has nothing to do with the military… it has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets?… It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.”
The utilitarian view always misses that so many of the biggest and most important discoveries come from the unobstructed pursuit of knowledge. And the line from discovery to application to return on investment is rarely a straight one. Without Albert Einstein musing in the early 20th century on the weightlessness felt by a person in freefall inside an elevator, we wouldn’t have his theories of relativity and we wouldn’t have GPS – a technology that has revolutionised life around the world.
Many of the biggest discoveries come from the unobstructed pursuit of knowledge
It is impossible to predict what purely scientific inquiry will lead to, which is why the destruction being done to science in the US is so short-sighted. But it is much easier to foretell what damage slashed funding will cause. Losing programmes to treat and prevent tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS will lead to preventable disease and death. Cuts at NASA, including vital climate studies on extreme heat and air pollution, will be felt for decades if not longer (see “Are Trump’s cuts to science the end of the endless frontier?”).
After physicist J. J. Thomson discovered the electron in 1897, he famously said it was useful for nothing. What followed was the electric age, a century of unimaginable global progress built on this humble particle. What revolutionary age to come is being impeded now?
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