7 Basic Science Discoveries That Changed the World

upstart writes:

7 basic science discoveries that changed the world:

The National Institutes of Health has cut almost US$2 billion of grants that were already approved, and the National Science Foundation has terminated more than 1,400 grants. And the president has even bigger plans to eviscerate science. His proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 would cut non-defence-related research and development by 36%.

"They have cancelled wholesale a wide variety of research efforts in midstream," says John Holdren at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was the science adviser to former president Barack Obama during both his terms. "They intend to now solidify it with cuts in the budgets."

The cancelled and threatened research is a mixture of 'applied' work that has stated applications, which can be commercial in nature, and 'basic' or 'blue skies' research, intended to develop new knowledge.

[...] Basic research is easily mocked because it can seem impractical, but, in fact, it is a major driver of economic growth. "The return on investment in basic research - the return to society - is very high, typically multiple dollars back per dollar invested," says Holdren.

The US funding cuts will hit basic research particularly hard because the government has historically been the prime supporter of fundamental research. The private sector will never invest enough in such research, says Holdren. "The timescale for returns is too long and the ability of the funder to capture those returns too uncertain," he says. "That's the reason that the funding of fundamental research is, at its base, a responsibility of government."

Although it's impossible to estimate how the reductions in federal support might limit future discoveries, scientists point to a long list of findings that emerged out of fundamental research and went on to change the world. Here are a few examples.

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