Chris Miller assesses the potential impact of the Trump administration’s approach toward science.
The Trump administration has a contentious relationship with America’s scientists, strong-arming universities and appointing vaccine skeptics to senior roles. A recently released White House report aims to reset the country’s science strategy—and many scientists will naturally be skeptical. Yet its two core ideas are worth taking seriously: harnessing AI to accelerate science and redesigning research organizations for this purpose.
First, the backdrop: science and R&D are more important than ever to economic growth and technological leadership. Yet America’s competitive position has deteriorated. China now spends slightly more on R&D as the US when adjusted for purchasing power. By any metric, China is making enormous strides in catching up to the US in science.
What is to be done? Michael Kratsios, who directs science and technology policy in the White House, has two big ideas. The first is that the government should retool to better apply AI to science. Amid all the claptrap about artificial intelligence, this deserves focus. The greatest scientific advances of the last half century have all depended on huge volumes of computing. Computers were as important as DNA sequencing machines in decoding the human genome. The Higgs boson and gravitational waves both required supercomputers to detect. The world’s greatest physicists cluster around the world’s biggest supercomputers for a reason.
The effort to mobilize AI is particularly important because the US can’t compete on the number of researchers, where China now has a staggering quantitative advantage. Competing on researcher quality is also tough when China’s best universities are world class. The only realistic strategy for staying at the cutting edge is to harness the best possible tools.
Artificial intelligence is already transforming the scientific toolset, as the Nobel committee recognized when it gave Demis Hassabis and John Jumper their 2024 prize in chemistry for inventing AlphaFold. Companies and researchers alike are harnessing new AI tools for materials science and biology.
