US’ scientific self-harm will only help China

After the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803, which almost doubled the size of the United States’ territory, US president Thomas Jefferson commissioned the legendary Lewis and Clark expedition, which surveyed new routes from the Missouri river to the Pacific coast. It also carried out work in agriculture, ethnography (with indigenous peoples) and geography.

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, that was the kind of science the US government was willing to pay for – practical, applicable (especially to the military) and, where possible, profitable.

It would be absurd to think it should fund basic science with no immediate discernible applications or payoffs. That was certainly the case in the United States up to the 1930s.

“Practically since the start of the United States, the federal government has invested in science,” University of California, Santa Barbara history professor Patrick McCray told his university system’s news publication in September. “But for most of our history, those were investments of a very practical nature. So you have things like coastal surveys, research devoted to fisheries, programmes to map terrain or geology, and promote agriculture.

UC Berkeley historian Cathryn Carson elaborated further in the same interview: “Up through the 1930s, the idea that the federal government would put any money into either universities or industry science was actually anathema in some quarters”. It was seen as “inappropriate” for the federal government to do so.

World War II changed all that, as it showed the power of basic science, especially theoretical physics, leading to the atomic bomb. The idea that the government should be the main source of science funding is relatively recent in the US, and rather new in China.