This is an account of how best to harness a nation’s scientific and engineering resources to produce competitive technologies across a wide range of its needs, from health to defence of its people. The story begins in America during the second world war.
Roosevelt’s legacy
In 1940, Vannevar Bush, an engineer and dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, noticed how German scientific advances in rocket development gave the Nazis military advantages and realised that if America were to be drawn into the war, it would need to mobilise its scientific talent quickly. He persuaded President Theodore Roosevelt that national research and development should not be run by a few government laboratories (the British method); instead, the work of thousands of the nation’s top scientists and engineers at universities like MIT, Harvard, Columbia, UC Berkeley and Stanford, as well as industrial laboratories, should be coordinated by a single agency.
Stunning breakthroughs
This resulted in the formation of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) with Vannevar Bush as its leader. It was given unprecedented authority to coordinate research across government agencies, universities and industry. It produced a stunning array of technologies that proved decisive in winning the war. This included collaborating with the UK on the development of radar and the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. Medical research also produced breakthroughs in mass-producing penicillin, developing new vaccines and treating battlefield injuries.
After the war
In a November 1944 letter, Roosevelt asked Vannevar Bush for recommendations on how this model could be adapted for peacetime to advance national welfare, create jobs and maintain military superiority. Bush’s response, a report delivered to President Harry S. Truman in July 1945, was titled Science the Endless Frontier. This document became the foundational text for American science policy and established the philosophical framework that guided federal research until recently.
The report’s most crucial argument emphasised the value of basic research undertaken primarily to acquire new knowledge, without any specific application, as “scientific capital”, the fundamental fund of knowledge from which all practical applications must be drawn. While private industry was skilled at applied R&D and product development, it could not be relied upon to support long-term, high-risk basic research. The time horizons were too long, the risks too high, and the benefits too uncertain and widely distributed for private companies to invest adequately.
After some debate, Congress finally passed the National Science Foundation Act of 1950. The NSF would be led by a director appointed by the president, subject to Senate confirmation, and overseen by a National Science Board composed of distinguished scientists and engineers. This would prove to be one of the strengths of the American research system, providing multiple sources of funding and reducing the risk of political interference.
The cold war effect
The cold war, and especially the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik1, the world’s first artificial satellite, was a major catalyst in boosting American research funding to regain America’s scientific leadership. During the 1960s, universities built more state-of-the-art research laboratories, matched by an explosion of student enrolments. But defence, space, computer science, engineering and health accounted for the bulk of R&D funding compared with social sciences.
The next stage was the development of key federal funding research agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Defence Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
NIH became the world’s largest supporter of biomedical research, funding work at hundreds of universities and medical schools. Its investments laid the foundation for major breakthroughs in understanding human biology and developing new treatments for disease. The National Science Foundation (NSF) was unique among federal agencies in its broad mandate to support basic research across all non-medical fields of science and engineering. A full history of American research funding and the complex grant system for awards can be found at GovFacts.
Control over federal grants
It is reasonable to assume that the objectives and methods of spending a large proportion of a nation’s GDP will be reviewed when circumstances or priorities change. For example, more emphasis is now needed on information sciences, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and global environmental changes. These topics need the involvement of multiple sectors. But as they are fundamental to a nation’s strategic direction for the security, health and prosperity of its people, they should be debated and agreed by both houses of government and be supported by a plan for execution and an impact analysis.
This is not Trump’s style. He prefers the crash-and-burn signature of an executive order, regardless of the consequences for people it affects. Take a few minutes to watch what the impacts of dismantling science funding for the research community were considered to be in May 2025. Even worse is that he is using this method to remove all limits on presidential authority (SciAm).
The lessons of the last 75 years are that public–private partnerships are best suited to meet major national and international challenges. This leverages the strengths of both sectors: government’s ability to fund long-term, high-risk research and address national priorities, combined with industry’s expertise in development, manufacturing and commercialisation. This maintains global competitiveness, particularly in strategic competition with nations like China.
Further to this,Trump’s selection of Robert F Kennedy Jr as his health secretary in February has been criticised as putting Americans in danger. Trump is also starting to wage war on the research universities, starting with Harvard.
Europe’s opportunity
Trump has applied pressure on Europe and the UK to take greater responsibility for the security and defence of Europe and increase their funding to NATO. He has also implied that any future US involvement in European conflicts will be limited to, as yet unspecified, airborne support. European governments are now looking to cooperate with European defence industries and consortia to develop and produce future military assets that will reduce Europe’s reliance on American hardware and software. Other allies, including Canada, Australia and Japan, will be partners and customers for some of these products. Close partnership with industry, academia and business investment is essential for success.
The EU already has a small Horizon research programme with a budget of €7.2bn allocated for 2025 and a European Defence Fund budget of €7.2bn for 2021–2027. If Europe and its allies are serious about increasing their competitiveness in trade on the world stage, they need a long-term research strategy that looks beyond each nation’s next general election. They also need an organisation drawn from a wide spectrum of ‘stakeholders’ to advise on funding priorities and maybe, a greater share of the world’s scientific talent: a demand that could be satisfied by offering job opportunities in each allied country to those becoming surplus in American universities and laboratories.
The UK position post Brexit
Brexit and protracted negotiations on the withdrawal agreement after 2016 froze the UK out of participation in the EU Horizon programmes. There were fears that some of our best scientists would leave the UK to continue their work. It was not until September 2023 that an agreement was made for the UK to rejoin Horizon.
The UK is well placed to adapt to closer relationships between government, academia and industry. In January 1996, I started my last RN job as senior naval aviation adviser at the government-run Defence & Research Aviation Agency in Farnborough, Hampshire. Three years later, I put my uniform aside and joined them, initially as a civil servant. I later transitioned with them when they were privatised to become QinetiQ. This allowed them to ‘spin off’ the results of military research into the civil marketplace. They have since expanded by buying companies that enable them to transfer their research output to products and services. They have international subsidiaries in Australia and North America.
Towards an integrated EU and UK research strategy
In May 2025, Ursula von der Leyen gave a speech at the Sorbonne University in Paris entitled “Vision for a United Future”. It gave an overview of the EU’s future “open and free” science research strategy. In the last few minutes of her speech, she gives the main priorities of this as, initially, a €500m fund for 2025–27 to attract scientists worldwide and a seven-year super grant for long-term research. There will also be relocation grants for 2026/27 to help scientists move to Europe and a fast-track innovation with regulatory barriers removed to enable business opportunities and new start-ups.
In August, Jean Tirole, a Nobel Prize winning economist, advocated that EU research funding should be managed by an EU body, not member states, as they tend to favour their own researchers. “People in power always want to distribute the chocolates.” This is especially true in applied research and in subsequent development and production projects. It will take greater management of European projects by consortia of European states or truly European companies to overcome this understandable competitiveness.
In its next steps of re-building bridges with a changing EU, the UK must demonstrate its willingness for, and capability of leading where appropriate, the evolution of a long-term science strategy that is not overly controlled by government.
