American Fund for Fundamental Science
On June 4, 2025, I attended an inspiring evening discussion in New York City, coordinated by the brilliant Rolf Dobelli, founder of WORLD.MINDS. The conversation revolved around a vision for a better future given the recently proposed budget cuts in science.
Coincidentally, a few hours earlier, I received an email from the visionary Stanford Professor, Garry Nolan, who wrote: “The question is whether the United States of America wants to treat its investments in science like smart people invest in companies and the market. Taking money out of the system that created […] our position as the leading country in the world in science across many arenas is frankly self-harm, as well as giving China a ribbon tied gift […] What if the government created a public/private investment vehicle where investment in the fund (that goes to the NIH and NSF) gives them some kinds of rights of first refusal for technology, or a simple royalty payment from patents. Billionaires or companies could easily create such an endowment system.”
When Rolf asked me to speak at the event, I started with the current limitations of academic research. First, I gave examples of branches of science that are entirely divorced from relevant outcomes to society. Consider the remarkable tradition of theoretical physics, in which the principles of quantum mechanics enable us to manufacture computer chips at the atomic scale, or the principles of Einstein’s gravity enable GPS navigation. In stark contrast, the new mathematical principles developed by the mainstream of theoretical physics over the past forty years in an attempt to unify quantum mechanics and gravity under the umbrella of String Theory, did not lead to testable predictions, the gold standard of science. Instead, unverified ideas like extra dimensions and the multiverse garnered academic popularity. The contact point of mathematical physics with experiment, Supersymmetry, was actually ruled-out in its natural range of parameters by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider at a cost of billions of dollars. The mainstream in astrophysics embraced recently the search for microbes as a top priority and allocated over ten billion dollars to the construction of the Habitable World Observatory in the coming two decades. However, the search for technological signatures of extraterrestrial civilizations, which is far more popular among taxpayers, was marginalized as “an extraordinary claim” and was not allocated taxpayers money in the Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics. These are two examples for the drift of the scientific mainstream away from the preferences of the society that supports it.
Second, the hubs of traditional innovation in science, universities, became bloated with administration and turned into centers of social warriors with a political agenda. Over the past 32 years of my service as a professor at Harvard University, I noticed a major increase in the ratio of administrators to faculty. When I started as a junior faculty three decades ago, there used to be a direct path between a junior faculty member and the Dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences. Now, there are many mini-deans, program directors and administrators along that path. Needless to say more about the parasitic politics on campus and within Harvard’s Corporation, which was exposed on October 7, 2023.
How can the nation correct this course? My inspiration stems from the example of Bell Telephone Laboratories, where innovation in fundamental physics was funded by corporate money which attracted the best scientific minds to work on problems with relevance to society. The magic sauce was to place creative individuals next to experimentalists and engineers and present that community with the societal challenges of tomorrow. This recipe led to a long list of innovations and discoveries between 1925–1983, listed online here. Some revolutionary findings were awarded the Nobel Prize.
Consider the serendipitous discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background as relic radiation from the Big Bang. Arno Penzias and Bob Wilson worked on a low noise antenna for the societal benefit of communication. In the 1960s, Bell Labs was trying to use microwaves for transmission of long-distance calls by bouncing a signal off a giant mylar balloon in orbit above the Earth. Penzias and Wilson were given control of the antenna as engineers attempted to better understand how microwave signals pass through the Earth’s atmosphere. Bob Wilson said: “I think they probably told management a couple of astronomers would be very helpful.” And so, Penzias and Wilson started to study microwaves from space by turning the telescope toward a quiet part of the Milky-Way galaxy in order to calibrate it. But irrespective of where they pointed the antenna, they detected the same underlying static noise. Penzias and Wilson spent months crossing off pigeon poop or possible sources of interference as the origin of the noise. Then, the MIT Professor Bernie Burke realized that the source might not be on Earth or even the Milky Way. He knew of calculations done in Professor Bob Dicke’s group at Princeton, which led the Princeton team to design an experiment in search for a microwave signal from the Big Bang. When Bob received a follow-up phone call from Bernie, he hung up the phone and told his team members: “We were scooped.”
There are two lessons to be learned from this story. First, technological challenges which are offered by practical applications can lead to unexpected discoveries in fundamental science. And second, such discoveries can be cultivated by an open-minded corporate management.
Currently, there is more money available for blue-sky research within corporations like Google than the federal funding for science offered by the National Institute of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF) or NASA. Indeed, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Demis Hassabis, who serves as the chief executive officer and co-founder of Google’s DeepMind.
The future of fundamental science should not be left to the commercial calculations of corporate managers. Instead, given the national benefits from science, the reins should be in national hands. Building on the success of Bell Labs and Garry’s argument, I proposed establishing a national fund for fundamental science, in which the wealth of corporations and other contributors to a fund will be managed by the government with agreed-upon rules for the rights and royalties of the resulting technological products. The research themes of the fund will be tied to societal challenges and its wealth will benefit from the corporate world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
