America needs more basic research
If there’s one story from the past two years that should make you more optimistic about the United States of America, it’s mRNA vaccines. It’s the kind of tale that seems designed for a screen adaptation. A solitary genius (Katalin Karikó) immigrates to the U.S. and spends decades toiling in relative obscurity, but eventually convinces companies to try her invention. Venture capital corporate capital patiently funds two startups (BioNTech and Moderna) that slowly develop the technology over many long, unprofitable years. Then the big world-shattering crisis hits, and suddenly mRNA vaccines arrive in the nick of time to save millions of lives.
This story underscores how important basic research is to the American industrial model. This is the country that sequenced the human genome, created quantum electrodynamics, and invented the transistor and the laser and Crispr. This was the country that landed humans on the moon. Americans conceived of the chemical potential and covalent bonding, discovered the neutrino and the quark, and invented plastic and the personal computer and the MRI.
As Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson have chronicled, discoveries and inventions have consistently flowed downstream from American research efforts, generating new industries that have maintained American industrial dominance across the decades. Quite a few economics papers have shown how much industry depends on science, as evidenced by how dependent patents are on scientific journal articles. Azoulay et al. (2019) demonstrate how private-sector innovations in the biomedical space are crucially dependent on NIH-funded research. And so on.
