The Plan #3: And Other Purposes

To explain why he was doing this, it’s worth knowing exactly what the NSF is, and what it does — and why.

“To promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense; and for other purposes.”

From the National Science Foundation Act of 1950, establishing the NSF

The National Science Foundation is a ten billion dollar federal agency. It is not a part of another department, such as Energy or Commerce, but an institution all its own. It takes its money every year and immediately gives away 95% of it to American researchers, mostly with no strings attached of any kind. Although other science-focussed agencies have more money — for example, the Department of Energy has an annual budget almost ten times the size — NSF still funds 27% of all basic research done in US schools, all on its own. 

These are huge amounts of cash, to be sure, and enormous numbers, but they still don’t really describe the unbelievable clout the NSF has in the US, or the world. A number that does this better is 268: the researchers NSF funds have won 268 Nobel Prizes. And even that only scratches the surface of its history.

Historically, the purpose of NSF is to answer deep questions about the universe. How does quantum physics work, How do cells work, How do the oceans work? We call this “basic” research, to mean research that doesn’t have an obvious, or immediately available, application — it just tries to describe the world. “What kind of juice comes out of molds?” would be considered “basic” research. What the NSF historically does not fund is “applied” research, the kind with an immediate and intentional application to a known, current, problem. “How do we cure one particular kind of infection?” is “applied” research.

This rationale for focusing on basic research rests on two core ideas. One, that basic research has enormous consequences. And two, that only the federal government will put up the money for it.

The first idea, that basic research has enormous consequences, is hard to argue with. They may be unpredictable consequences, and they may take years to materialize, but asking deeper questions is how you get deeper results. To everyone’s shock, including their own, the medical world that had spent decades asking “How do we cure one particular kind of infection” got their answer from the people asking “What kind of juice comes out of molds?” because it was mold juice that led directly to the world’s first antibiotic drug, penicillin. This single discovery made such an enormous difference to the Allied troops in World War Two that there were posters of heroic field medics, heroically treating soldiers fallen on foreign shores, under equally heroic block capital letters proclaiming: “Thanks to PENICILLIN … He Will Come Home!”

Most of the government’s research for World War Two was overseen by a man named Vannevar Bush. At a memorial to him — which was held not at a church but at MIT, where he had been the Dean of Engineering — a colleague said "No American has had greater influence in the growth of science and technology than Vannevar Bush". He may well still be right.

I imagine this is something we all do to one degree or another, but I know for certain that it’s an unconscious habit of mine — when I hear about figures of generational influence, people who made legacies that continue to shape my own life, I tend to expect enormous and august people. Someone who would look natural when carved in an enormous block of marble. But when I look at Vannevar, the thing I can’t help but seeing is a young boy, who’s gotten old.

His features were sharp and his face was lean, throughout his life. His hair was cut neatly, but it was arrayed in a tousled mop, as if he had rubbed his hands through it the second he got out of the barber’s chair -- very unlike the careful presidential arrangements of the men around him,. However It is his expression that sets him apart from his colleagues most visibly. There is something wry and smirking and detached about his gaze, a crooked half-smile that suggests whatever is currently happening, he only has time to pay attention to half of it. The other half of his mind is busy.

In 1944, the research Vannevar oversaw had transformed the country, and the world, and was about to help shoot the US for the first time to the position of a global superpower. President Roosevelt was determined to continue this rocketing progress, and writing with the historic gravity of the unparalleled moment, recorded this vision in a letter to his Science Advisor:

“New frontiers of the mind are before us, and if they are pioneered with the same vision, boldness, and drive with which we have waged this war we can create a fuller and more fruitful employment and a fuller and more fruitful life.”

— but he may as well have been asking, “How do we do penicillin again?” Vannevar’s answer was: We should establish the NSF. If the US thought that penicillin was a good thing — along with radar, and synthetic rubber, and nuclear fission, and duct tape, and computers — then we should fund more basic research. And so in 1950, that’s what we did.

The second idea behind NSF’s focus on basic research – that, more or less, nobody but the federal government will fund it – may be a little more surprising, but it is just as well documented. The process is simply too long, too expensive, and too unpredictable for a corporation, whose defining goal is to make money, and make it now. Very often, ten years and millions of dollars later, mold is still just mold, and investors looking for big returns by the next quarter simply don’t have the patience. Industry is great at using research to make money, but the research they use has, shockingly often, originally been funded by the government.

For one particularly famous example, take the iPhone. As the first smartphone, it both opened the door on, and could even be said to define, an entirely new period of history. It also increased Apple’s stock price by literally 100x. However all fourteen of the critical technologies that make the smartphone smart, including GPS, touch screens, voice recognition, and hard drives, were developed with federal funding, each years earlier, and at completely different places. When Apple licenses and combines these technologies they can certainly claim to be contributing something special. But what they did not contribute was the basic research. It simply never would have fit into their business model.

But maybe you’ve heard that one before. Or think that it was just a lucky shot? Okay, how about the internet? It was originally called the ARPANET, and it was a government funded project. Space travel? Obviously government, top to bottom, NASA and JFK and the space race and the moon landing. Silicon Valley? Built with a whole lotta contracts from the US Department of Defense, largely brought together by Fred Terman, student and close friend of NSF’s godfather, Vannevar Bush. Tesla Motors is the stock market’s number one car company, and — as of this writing — has a market value almost five times larger than its next competitor. But in large part, that’s because Tesla Motors was given $465 million dollars by the US Department of Energy, to help get it going. 

And if you don’t think Tesla is all that impressive, then there’s always Google. The company now known as Alphabet has been perhaps the single most defining company of the 21st century, radically changing our relationship with information of almost every kind. As part of its well-known founding myth, Google was founded by two lowly graduate students, while they were at Stanford. What’s often left out is that they working on an internet search project that was funded by -- the NSF. Who was very excited to see Google succeed so fabulously, and then happy to return to its own, traditional, basic research.

Now that the basic idea was proven, and most of the risk had been removed — went the NSF reasoning — business would come in and do the rest. 

Or at least, that’s the way it had been. Until three months ago.

Subscribe to make sure you don't miss the next part!

And donate, to make sure I can stay alive to post it!