A few months ago, during some research for our upcoming [[Idea Factory Movie]], I wondered: **Is there such a thing as "American science"?** We Americans have a funny way of doing things. We're often bold, ignorant of tradition, and we dive right into problems. You see this in the way we conduct global politics, industry, and innovation — could it be true that *there's something unique about the way we do science as well?* To get to the bottom of this question, I talked to 3 people who have spent a lot of time thinking about science: - [Ben Reinhardt](https://www.benjaminreinhardt.com/about) — Spends his time working on [Speculative Technologies](https://spec.tech/), a nonprofit industrial research lab. If you visit Ben's website, it's clear he's thinks a lot about how science organizations work, from DARPA to Bell Labs. It seems to me, Ben's quest in life is to build and help build such organizations. - [Dr. Cailin O'Connor](https://cailinoconnor.com/) — Is a Philosopher of Science at UC Irvine, and spends her time studying (1) misinformation, (2) science communities, and (3) discriminatory conventions and norms. She's written [The Misinformation Age](https://www.amazon.com/Misinformation-Age-False-Beliefs-Spread-ebook/dp/B07L14B7P1/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.bp3Wz3FLr8EVpcADhsIB8-Z1llW7neUqVbg5ncmX6g7c0GPoVn_RM230wEjpn8Rc4ek-cyysWmfk07V8IpFuqJ2h7b3ycfKMqpO9OWXAiguhSxzjrMlDiz-7GyqDGACZ4Ei7gGp82GwJvluaW3I6opIN8oBm9w-O-DVUY3y5QRdDC0BFLWPxpZX-rLfrce4hggu-heptLkff86TFpntjGlbI5GOeyjiKUfrq6i2AfwA.kUXd_iFXwXvkcJKEdjKaXHNE30qOJwo3aSS3OuDhedM&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+misinformation+age&qid=1760742106&sr=8-1) among other works. - [Tom Kalil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kalil) — Worked under the Clinton and Obama administration leading science and technology for the US Government. From leading the National Nanotechnology Initiative to getting DARPA to do "incentive prizes" — which caused projects like the [DARPA Self Driving Challenge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge) and the development of mRNA vaccines. His impact on the way science has been done in America is unprecedented in modern times. He's now the CEO of [Renaissance Philanthropy](https://www.renaissancephilanthropy.org/). *Even if there is no such thing* as "American science," it's at least an interesting proxy to query into the status of science being done in America in 2025 — how we got here, and what's coming next. Without further adieu, let's dive in. ## The 3 Eras of American science ##### Tinkering Era: Founding of country (1776) — 1900s > As soon as any of the thunderclouds come over the kite, the pointed wire will draw the electric fire from them, and the kite, with all the twine, will be electrified, and the loose filaments of the twine will stand out every way and be attracted by an approaching finger. When the rain has wet the kite and twine so that it can conduct the electric fire freely, you will find it stream out plentifully from the key on the approach of your knuckle. > > *Benjamin Franklin* From the founding of the country to pre-boom of the industrial revolution, this was Gilded Age Science. From Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Edison, these were the days of the tinkerer. As Ben Reinhardt explains in our video: > To a large extent, this era is characterized largely by tinkering. Scientifically, in the discovering knowledge sense, America is very much a backwater (at that time). We have a lot of inventors, not a lot of theory, just a lot of hands-on practicality, like: how do we make this steam engine better? > > *Ben Reinhardt* Tinkering is good for experimentation and building new things but it's not as helpful for winning wars, which takes us to our next era. ##### Wartime Science: 1900 - 1980 > One of the biggest things that World War II did for American science was start this expectation that science is going to be very heavily funded by the government, and that the government is going to be putting all this money into science, and then also expecting that there are going to be all of these benefits for technology, especially military technology, technologies that make a country a dominant world power. > > *Dr. Cailin O'Connor* The development of radar, munitions targeting, and the atomic bomb — all hallmark science innovations of the war era. ##### The Academic Era: 1980 - Present Day As the post war boom settled down, science dispersed into many places: More research started being done by research teams at universities, corporate research like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC took off, and the government continued to fund large initiatives. In a small period of time, American science went to new places that science hadn't seen before — immense government funding, rapid wartime application, industry accelerated research. >Our culture has hustle. Americans have hustle. People come to America to do science because of the freedoms we afford to scientists. No regime can dictate what you can or can't study, no mandate that every discovery serves the state or the military. It's one of the few places where science can flourish for its own sake. > >*Ben Reinhardt* At least, that's how it used to be. Is that still true today? ## The State of American Science > When you have a system that's predicated on a really high rate of growth that all of a sudden runs into steady funding levels for science, it becomes hyper-competitive. To a large extent, that system also was predicated on the existence of corporate research labs, which have now been gutted. > > Anything that I would call pre-commercial, we expect universities to do. And then everything early and post-commercial, we expect academics to do. > > There's really sort of nothing in between. Professors don't spend most of their time doing science. They spend most of their time managing grad students and writing grants, serving in committees and teaching, and really don't get to do very much science. **And if professors don't get to do science, then who does?** > > *Ben Reinhardt* Funding and access to global talent are vital for American science. When those two elements become unavailable, the entire ecosystem of doing science in America has to adapt in some way. It's also no secret that funding for science is being cut left and right under the Trump administration: > There are proposed deep cuts to our core science agencies. So the U.S. is making it more difficult for smart people from around the world who want to come to our universities and then stay here to be able to do that. That is our superpower. > > *Tom Kalil* What Tom is doing *now* to address that gap is incredibly exciting *and* an idea from the annals of history. > Wealthy Italian families supported the Italian Renaissance by backing Michelangelo and da Vinci. Today's philanthropists could be supporting the 21st century Renaissance. We work with over 30 different philanthropists on science moonshots that are organized as Focused Research Organizations (FROs) that have goals like lowering the cost of single-cell proteomics by a factor of 100, lowering the cost of mapping the brain by a factor of 100, developing the tools that we need for ocean-based carbon dioxide removal. Philanthropists have a lot of flexibility in terms of how they support science and technology so they can invest, but with a longer time horizon. They could build coalitions for problems that can't be solved by a single individual organization, and they can advocate for policy change. > > *Tom Kalil* Philanthropy has the potential to be an enormous help to address problems that don't yet have an established agency dedicated to the cause like NASA, the NIH, or the DOE. However, it's just one of many possible solutions to address the gap. > You have to say, what is the goal that I am trying to achieve? The private sector is going to underinvest in fundamental science. Imagine that you are an entrepreneur and you went to a VC and said, would you give me a $5 billion seed round? I'd like to understand why jellyfish glow in the dark. > > That would be a very short meeting. If you held up the iPhone and you said, where did the advanced transistor design come from? Where did GPS come from? Where did TCPIP come from? All those came from government-funded research, and then entrepreneurs and designers then took all the building blocks and turned it into a world-class product. > > *Tom Kalil* > My big hypothesis is that there is no one silver bullet. I really think that we need to enable what I call institutional pluralism and then relax cultural expectations and a lot of the things that help universities maintain institutional monopolies on these different roles and give them competition — make it easy for people to peel off different pieces. And that's how I think universities will naturally feel pressure to retrench to the core things that they're good at. > > *Ben Reinhardt* Scientists were allowed to be visionaries, even madmen. You could dream big about what a transistor or a new field might become. Today, that kind of ambition gets you branded as an extremist and pushed out of academia entirely. We've told scientists to stop dreaming and just churn out the data, leaving the bold visions to Silicon Valley. And when someone does reach too far, like Eric Drexler with nanotechnology, or even Feynman in his time, they're dismissed instead of celebrated as pioneers with a bold vision for the future. But we can change that. > I tend to be kind of a science optimist. I think for the most part, American science has been going quite well. People are coming from all around the world to be educated in the U.S., to work in scientific labs. Science has been self-correcting. It looks at itself. It finds out what things are going wrong. It tries to fix those things. The meta-science movement is part of the self-correction of science. > *Dr. Cailin O'Connor* Long before formal institutions existed, American science was driven by curious experimenters, freaks in the best sense of the word, who tested, tinkered, and dreamed. Of course, America isn't the only country that's had a burst of world-changing science. History is full of these hotspots and innovation: - The Egyptians developing math. - The Chinese experimenting with early chemistry and alchemy. - The Italians of the Renaissance pushing physics and astronomy. - Even Ptolemy, Copernicus, Newton. Each of them tied to a cultural moment where science took a leap forward. So when we talk about American science, we're putting it in the same lineage. Not as the only golden age, but as one of several times in history when a country's curiosity reshaped the bounds of humanity. American science didn't start in a lab: it started with curiosity that scaled thanks to the systems bold enough to let it grow. Today, we've hit the limits of an old framework of scientific innovation. But that's not the end of the story. We don't have one neat answer for how to fix American science. But it's a problem worth solving. Because curiosity built this country's science once and if we dare to reimagine how we teach and how we build, then the next great era of science will be ours to build.