America’s New Era of Private Science

For most of the past century, the story of American research was, in large part, a story about government. Federal agencies underwrote the basic science that universities performed, and the resulting discoveries — in physics, medicine, computing and materials — seeded entire industries. That arrangement, forged in the aftermath of the second world war, made the United States the world’s dominant scientific power.

That model is now being reshaped. Philanthropic foundations, billionaire-backed institutes, corporate laboratories and venture-funded startups are assuming a larger share of the work of discovery. Whether this amounts to a healthy diversification or a worrying shift of priorities is one of the more consequential questions facing American research.

Why the balance is shifting

Several forces are pushing in the same direction. Public research budgets have grown more slowly than the cost and ambition of modern science, and have become more exposed to political turbulence. Grant-making processes are often slow and conservative, favouring incremental proposals over risky ones. Meanwhile, the private sector has accumulated both enormous capital and an appetite for scientific problems: artificial intelligence, biotechnology, fusion energy and space have all attracted investment at a scale that would have seemed fanciful a generation ago.

Some of the most ambitious laboratories in the country today are not attached to a university or a federal agency at all. Privately endowed institutes recruit researchers with long-term funding and freedom from grant-writing. Technology companies run research divisions whose computing resources dwarf those available to most academic departments. Non-profit foundations fund disease research, scientific instruments and open databases that governments once might have supplied.

The case for optimism

Private money can move quickly. It can tolerate failure, back unfashionable ideas and fund researchers rather than narrowly defined projects — an approach that has, historically, produced some of science’s biggest surprises. Donors with a personal stake in a particular disease or technology can sustain long, unglamorous programmes that would struggle to survive annual budget negotiations. And competition between funders may itself be useful, giving scientists with unconventional ideas more than one door to knock on.

The risks

But private funding is not a straightforward substitute for public funding. It is concentrated in a handful of fashionable fields and a handful of wealthy regions, leaving less glamorous but essential work — long-term environmental monitoring, routine data collection, basic research with no obvious commercial application — relatively neglected. It is also unaccountable in ways that public spending is not: priorities reflect the enthusiasms of donors rather than any democratic deliberation about what society needs to know.

There are questions of openness, too. Corporate laboratories have commercial reasons to keep methods, data and models proprietary. When the frontier of a field sits inside a company, independent researchers may be unable to scrutinise or replicate the most important results — a problem that has already become acute in artificial intelligence.

Finally, there is the matter of training. Universities do more than produce papers; they produce scientists. If talent and resources migrate towards private laboratories, the pipeline that supplies the whole system may thin.

What comes next

The likely outcome is not the replacement of public science but a more complicated ecosystem, in which federal agencies, philanthropies and firms each do different things. Making that ecosystem work will require thinking hard about what only governments can fund: the slow, broad, unprofitable foundations on which the exciting private ventures ultimately rest. Read More