^{Wealth & Poverty Review} The Future Is Local for Research Funding

Given the Trump administration’s funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, the U.S. must rethink how it endows innovation at American universities.

However woke and wasteful in recent years, U.S. university research backed by public funds has fostered such innovations as the Global Positioning System, cancer therapies, recombinant DNA, and magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI. U.S. technological leadership depends on creativity from our campuses, as Vannevar Bush, FDR’s science adviser, wrote in his 1945 report, “Science: The Endless Frontier.” With Chinese universities announcing breakthroughs, the U.S. must maintain its leadership in scientific research and development.

The turbulent story of Crispr — the source of gene editing technology behind many recent advances in biotech — offers a useful lesson. While conducting research on water quality on the beaches of southeastern Spain in 1989, microbiologist Francisco Mojica noticed an unusual DNA repeating pattern in archaea, single-celled microorganisms that exist in high-salt environments. About 15 years later, Mr. Mojica and his colleagues published their findings that the genetic pattern can defend against viruses.