Funding Basic Research

Innovation is a much more complex process than people realize. When a technological advance comes into being, its creators are far from the only ones who deserve credit. Their creation could never have come into being without the herculean efforts of thousands of scientists preforming basic research. These unsung heroes of the modern age are hampered by the long term nature and intrinsic unprofitability of basic research. Historically, this has been mitigated by federal support for basic research. Support manifest, in institutions like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), budget items like military 6.1 funding and grants through the National Science Foundation (NSF). Unfortunately, irresponsible budget cuts, petulant government shutdowns and policies driven by any statement that begins with, “I’m not a scientist, but…” have threatened the national treasure that is government sponsored basic research.

While the instruments, through which the federal government sponsors basic research are myriad, I will focus on the figures given for the largest: the NIH. From 2002 to 2014 NIH funding fell by $3.78B while the percentage of NIH funding devoted to basic research fell from 58.8 percent to 54.2 percent. This double whammy resulted in a decline of $1.23B in NIH funding for basic research, which works out to an annual change of negative .8 percent. Over the same period, real GDP increased at an annual rate of 1.5 percent and federal tax revenue increased at an annual rate of 2.8 percent.

This trend has been to the detriment of all mankind and, because of the tabula rasa these scientists work with, we may never know what we have lost. The latitude these scientists have to embrace their tangent ideas, is a key part of what makes basic research so productive, but a tangent idea is easily lost if someone is stranded at home because they were deemed “non-essential” or because it was a Friday and they faced a 20 percent across the board spending cut. An idea can be drowned in the sea of troubles begotten by indiscriminate cuts that force a scientist to choose which of their promising experiments to abandon. Their research is being decimated and, as a result, we are losing the future. A future that is dominated by technology we cannot comprehend today driven by processes discovered in basic research.

If we do not discover the technology of the future, others eventually will. We may have the last manned fighter, but how will it compare to a kinetic bombardment weapon? We may have the world’s most powerful economy, but how long will that last when we cannot advance without the go ahead from the newest innovators? We owe our preeminence, at least in part, to basic research, and how long can we keep it without basic research?

There are some who think that corporate labs could take up the slack, but the days of Bell Labs and Xerox PARC are gone. Today’s industry sponsored research comes to the conclusions that sugary drinks may not be linked to obesity, that babies born after their mothers smoked during pregnancy are perfectly healthy and that global climate change is caused-not by human activity-but by the sun. There is a reason that after founding GE, Thomas Edison still felt motivated to create the Naval Research Laboratory, a bastion of basic research today.

The point of all of this is that we face major issues. The climate is changing, the population is aging and becoming less healthy and we do not know anywhere near enough about these problems to begin to solve them. Without basic research, we never will.