If you are moving through this story on a smartphone, you are holding a product that takes advantage of one of the boldest investments that the United States has made in science.
In 1947, Bell Labs researchers in Murray Hill, NJ, began this process by building the first work transistor. At that time, the so -called “semiconductor triode” was just a laboratory curiosity made of Germanio that could control the electric current in the same way as the speed limit signs and double yellow lines control their car. Only later, as silicon proved to be more stable and manufacturing, these small transistor bent devices, nodding their ability to transfer electrical resistance.
These Bell Labs scientists did not seek to build iPhones or supercomputers. They were simply chasing the question of how electrons moved through solids. But that curiosity -based experiment became the base of each computer chip on Earth, and its advance has remodeled civilization. Today, billions of transistors, each not larger than a bacterium, fit a smaller chip than a nail, which feeds everything, from laptops and defense systems to heart monitors, satellites, vehicles and GPS that guides its trip.
No American born in the 21st century can imagine life without these devices. However, at that time, this or any type of reward was unimaginable.
What made possible the next wave of transistor development was the disposition of the United States government in the early 1950s to finance research that seemed abstract and little practical at that time. The Department of Defense, especially the Naval Research Office (ONR), poured millions into a solid state physics through flexible contracts that covered laboratory equipment, salary of the faculty and postgraduate stipend, helping to lay the foundations for the federal model of support of the university research of today. This approach followed Vannevar Bush's historic report in 1945 “Science, The Endless Frontier”, which urged continuous federal funds for peace -time research.
In 1950, the newly created National Science Foundation (NSF) joined the ONR with its modest budget of $ 3.5 million, sowing research programs in universities such as MIT, Stanford and Caltech. NSF was soon a pioneer in the peer reviewed competitive subsidies system that supports the science of the United States today, supporting advances in all fields, from the development of Internet and COVID-19 vaccines to the discoveries surrounding gravitational waves and quantum materials.
That is the essence of basic science: the work promoted by curiosity instead of a business plan or a project map of the project, often producing advances that no one could have predicted. The discoveries of lasers, the double DNA propeller and the algorithms that now feed artificial intelligence that are now omnipresent were born in the same way.
However, the system that over the decades has allowed such incredible discoveries, typically funded by federal subsidies, is now being squeezed with such force that the work that produces progress is hungry and is making the long -term discovery more difficult to maintain.
In all federal agencies, the new proposals to limit “indirect costs”, general universities depend on supporting laboratories, facilities and research personnel, represent a serious threat to the research company. The reduction of reimbursements general expenses of 60% or 70% traditional to only 15% would force universities to assume the difference with the budgets already tense. The result will not be abstract accounting: postgraduate programs will be reduced and, in some cases, disappear, since institutions struggle to compensate for drastic cuts in research sponsored by the federal government.
The reduction of federal research budgets is forcing institutions such as Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania to reduce the number of graduated students admitted to basic and applied science and engineering programs. It is also leading to the shelf or cutting of projects that were already approved and that are already supporting the research and livelihood of doctoral students.
This rupture in the creativity and ideas pipe not only threatens to slow down innovation, but threatens to cut it. A country that once established the rhythm in public and private research is now at risk of delivering its leadership in the race that will define the future.
Financing basic science is not just our smarter investment in the future, it is a moral duty. Testing the point, the AI today may seem like a miracle during the night, but is based 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 ruled out the work as inefficient and not very practical, but because government agencies valued to ask deep, even unpopular questions, the work continued. That persistence made possible the AI revolution today.
Advances ready to improve the lives of our children, including quantum technologies, sustainable energy and advanced medical diagnosis, are already occurring in American universities. But they will only become real technologies if, as a nation, we choose to finance them. From inside the Caltech laboratory, where I design and build new materials with unprecedented and unique properties, from the Nanoscale to the macro world, I see what is needed.
In science, as in other fields, progress often comes after tens, or even hundreds, of failed judgments, each of which teaches us something about which it could eventually work. Progress is based on students who learn to overcome the limits and scientists of different disciplines that learn the languages of others to address problems without prepared responses, unlike the ordered solutions that we expect at the end of a textbook.
This work can be invisible to most, even for elected officials who finally decide funds, but it is the basis of highly visible technologies in which we trust 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 continue investing in their own, as did the previous generations for us? If we now hesitate, the next great advance: a cure for type 1 diabetes, the merger energy to feed our carbon without carbon or next -generation batteries that allow a phone to work for a year without recharging, it can still arise. But it will not carry the label “made in the United States”
Julia R. Greer is a professor of Materials, Mechanics and Medical Engineering in Caltech and member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.
