America is awesome at science. For as long as most of us have been alive, United States scientists have published more research, been cited more often by other scientists, earned more patents, and even won more Nobel Prizes than any other nation.
All that scientific expertise has helped make the U.S. the most prosperous nation on Earth and led to longer and easier lives here and around the world. But until World War II, the U.S. often sat on the sidelines of scientific progress. With national security on the line, the federal government, through policy and strategic investments, set about turning America into the world leader in science.
Now, amid federal attacks on university research and the government agencies that fund it, America is on the verge of relinquishing its scientific dominance for the first time in eight decades.
To learn more about how we got here, and what could happen next, we called up two experts who’ve dedicated their careers to understanding how America built itself into the most innovative nation on Earth.
Cathryn Carson, chair of the History Department at UC Berkeley, studies how 20th century physicists in the U.S. and Europe advanced disciplines including quantum theory and nuclear energy. UC Santa Barbara history professor W. Patrick McCray studies science, technology and the environment in the postwar U.S.
University of California: It’s hard to imagine a time when the U.S. wasn’t the global leader in science. But it wasn’t that long ago, was it?
Patrick McCray:
Practically since the start of the United States, the federal government has invested in science. 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, programs to map terrain or geology, and promote agriculture.
Through the early part of the 20th century, what we think of as basic science — areas like physics, astronomy, those disciplines that ask these fundamental questions about how things work — the U.S. wasn’t really strong in those areas. Some of it was being done at U.S. universities, mainly funded by philanthropic foundations like the Rockefellers or the Carnegies. But if you’re, say, Robert Oppenheimer studying physics in the 1920s, you’d go off to Europe, like he did, to get your Ph.D.