Is the war against science?
From ‘7 basic science discoveries that changed the world’, Nature, October 29, 2025:
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.”
The piece mounts a spirited defence of fundamental research, invoking the by-now familiar parables of serendipity, including from thermophilic bacteria to the PCR reaction, nuclear spins to MRI machines, microbial repeats to CRISPR, and reptilian peptides to GLP-1, to argue that only the state will underwrite discoveries whose dividends are unpredictable and arrive late. But in treating the present moment as a general assault on science, it mistakes the idea of knowledge for the object of policy.
To quote social theorist Nima Bassiri writing in The Baffler, June 26, 2025:
Let us keep in mind, of course, that it is not every aspect of science that is under assault. According to the version of the budget that passed the House, military spending would be augmented significantly, and indeed the House bill has allocated an additional $150 billion to cover the costs of, among other things, the so-called “Golden Dome” next-generation missile defense systems as well as next-generation F-47 fighter aircrafts (“The most advanced, capable, and lethal aircraft ever built”). Like it or not, high-tech weapons and defense systems are science too. Military science remains, as always, a profoundly American commitment. As the Frankfurt School philosopher Max Horkheimer once remarked, “There is no clear-cut distinction between liberalism and authoritarianism in modern science.” Science, in other words, has no inherent moral value, for it possesses only the values of its practitioners.
That is, what’s withering now is not the class of activities we call science in toto but the publicly provisioned civilian infrastructure that spreads benefits broadly and immediately, from grant ecosystems that serve regional universities to disease surveillance and preparedness. The research yoked to defence or to rapid private capture remains protected, even buoyant. Instead the article restricts its accounting of harm to the abstract entity of future breakthroughs that are now foregone, thus overlooking the distribution of losses in the present. When clinical trials are cancelled and research labs are hollowed out, the poorer regions are hit hardest. Rural patients are shut out of medical research pipelines. Communities risk missing a flood warning.
Ultimately, by picking its success stories based on those that later flowered into markets, the article obscures a recurring pattern in which public risk is socialised and private reward is privatised, with intellectual property and pricing regimes fencing off the very returns deployed as proof of social value. The reader in the end may leave persuaded that basic research is good, a truism, without an account of which science is starved, which is indulged, and whose lives are made more precarious when the state dismantles the machinery of public knowledge.
