Want the next breakthrough? Don’t starve the science that makes it possible

If you’re scrolling through this story on a smartphone, you’re holding a product that harnesses one of the boldest investments the United States ever made into science.

In 1947, researchers at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., started this process by building the first working transistor. At the time, the so-called “semiconductor triode” was just a laboratory curiosity made from germanium that could control electrical current much the same way speed limit signs and double yellow lines control your car. Only later, as silicon proved to be more stable and manufacturable, were these tiny devices dubbed transistors — nodding at their ability to transfer electrical resistance.

These Bell Labs scientists weren’t aiming to build iPhones or supercomputers. They were merely chasing the question of how electrons moved through solids. But that curiosity-driven experiment became the foundation for every computer chip on Earth, and their breakthrough has since reshaped civilization. Today, billions of transistors — each no larger than a bacterium — fit onto a chip smaller than a fingernail, powering everything from laptops and defense systems to heart monitors, satellites, vehicles and the GPS that guides your commute.

No American born in the 21st century can imagine life without these devices. Yet at the time, this or any kind of payoff was unimaginable.

What made the next wave of transistor development possible was the U.S. government’s willingness in the early 1950s to fund research that seemed abstract and impractical at the time. The Department of Defense, especially the Office of Naval Research (ONR), poured millions into solid-state physics through flexible contracts that covered lab equipment, faculty salaries and graduate stipends, helping lay the groundwork for today’s federal model of university research support. This approach followed Vannevar Bush’s landmark 1945 report “Science, the Endless Frontier,” which urged continuous federal funding for research in peace time.

In 1950, the newly created National Science Foundation (NSF) joined the ONR with its modest $3.5-million budget, seeding research programs at universities including MIT, Stanford and Caltech. NSF soon pioneered the competitive peer-reviewed grant system that underpins U.S. science today, supporting advances in all fields, from developing the internet and COVID-19 vaccines to discoveries surrounding gravitational waves and quantum materials.

That’s the essence of basic science: work driven by curiosity rather than a business plan or project road map, often yielding breakthroughs no one could have predicted. The discoveries of lasers, DNA’s double helix and the algorithms now fueling artificial intelligence that are now ubiquitous were all born this same way.

However, the system that over the decades has enabled such incredible discoveries, typically funded by federal grants, is now being squeezed so tightly that it’s starving the very work that produces breakthroughs and is making long-term discovery harder to sustain.

Across federal agencies, new proposals to cap “indirect costs” — the overhead universities depend on to support labs, facilities and research staff — pose a serious threat to the research enterprise. Reducing overhead reimbursements from the traditional 60% or 70% down to just 15% would force universities to shoulder the difference with already strained budgets. The result will not be abstract bookkeeping: Graduate programs will shrink, and in some cases disappear, as institutions struggle to compensate for drastic cuts in federally sponsored research.

Shrinking federal research budgets are forcing institutions like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania to reduce the number of graduate students admitted to basic and applied science and engineering programs. It’s also leading to the shelving or cutting of projects that were already approved and that are already supporting doctoral students’ research and livelihoods.

This rupture in the nation’s creativity and ideas pipeline doesn’t just threaten to slow innovation — it threatens to cut it off. A country that once set the pace in both public and private research is now at risk of surrendering its lead in the race that will define the future.

Financing basic science isn’t just our smartest investment in the future, it’s a moral duty. Proving the point, today’s AI boom may look like an overnight miracle, but it rests on decades of basic research in physics and computer science. In the 1980s, tenacious physicists experimented with “neural networks,” computer models inspired by brain cells. Many dismissed the work as inefficient and impractical, but because government agencies valued asking deep questions, even unpopular ones, work continued. That persistence made today’s AI revolution possible.

Breakthroughs poised to improve our children’s lives — including quantum technologies, sustainable energy and advanced medical diagnostics — are already happening at American universities. But they will only become real technologies if, as a nation, we choose to fund them. From inside the Caltech lab where I design and build new materials with unprecedented and unique properties, from the nanoscale to the macro world, I see what it takes.

In science, as in other fields, progress often comes after tens — or even hundreds — of failed trials, each one teaching us something about what might eventually work. Progress is built on students learning how to push boundaries, and on scientists from different disciplines learning one another’s languages to tackle problems with no ready-made answers — unlike the tidy solutions we’ve come to expect at the back of a textbook.

This work may be invisible to most, even to the elected officials who ultimately decide on funding, but it is the foundation of the highly visible technologies we rely on today and will depend on more and more in the future.

The question for all of us, consumers, taxpayers and parents, is simple: Do we have the courage to keep investing in knowledge for its own sake, as previous generations did for us? If we falter now, the next great breakthrough — a cure for Type 1 diabetes, fusion energy to power our cities without carbon, or next-generation batteries that let a phone run for a year without recharging — may still emerge. But it won’t carry the tag “made in the U.S.A.”

Julia R. Greer is a professor of materials science, mechanics, and medical engineering at Caltech and a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.