The National Science Foundation (NSF) was established by the U.S. Congress on May 10, 1950, exactly 75 years and one month ago, with the stated mission: “to promote the progress of science, to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare, and to secure the national defense.” The concept was inspired by the vision of Vannevar Bush, then head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development which initiated the Manhattan Project. In his 1945 response report to President Roosevelt, titled “Science — The Endless Frontier,” Bush recognized the importance of science to national security and economic prosperity and addressed post World-War II plans to establish government commitment to innovation in science and technology.
How can we make the next 75 years in scientific innovation even better? Here are a few ways:
1. The dogmatic tone of mainstream scientists and the frustrating experience by citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic eroded trust in science. To gain back the trust from the public and policy makers, it is imperative to focus on evidence-based science rather than ideology-based or prejudice-based research.
The processing of large data sets is now feasible with the aid of machine-learning and artificial intelligence (AI). To take advantage of these unprecedented computational tools, it is important to collect as much empirical data as possible and focus on research areas which are rich in feedback from experiments. Science is a learning experience, and we can learn more on topics where our tutor, Mother Nature, gives us more information.
Philosophy, psychology or sociology departments often focus on what past thinkers taught us. However, there were no AI systems in previous centuries and the emerging technologies require new guidelines for navigating through all facets of the interaction between humans and AI systems. There are major ethical challenges regarding intellectual rights, privacy of information and free speech; there are major societal challenges regarding AI control of strategic assets with implications for national security; and there are major psychological challenges regarding mental health because AI will manifest as social media on steroids. It is critical that we develop humanities of the future rather than focus on humanities of the past.
2. A recent study indicated that the rate of disruptive discoveries in scientific research declined over the past few decades. Apparently, papers and patents that change the course of science are becoming less dominant despite the increased allocation of funds. As noted in a brilliant speech given on May 19, 2025 at the National Academies of Sciences by Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, the yield of scientific discoveries does not simply scale with the amount of money poured into research. The efficiency of the scientific engine in producing innovation depends critically on the intellectual climate surrounding research.
It is imperative to relieve scientists from the parasitic burden of social justice warriors and free them to focus on scientific excellence and merit. Allocation of time is a zero-sum game. The fraction of time that researchers spend on red tape and bureaucracy should also be minimized.
NSF could foster disruptive science and promote risk-taking and innovation. Even if only one in many ideas will end up as a major discovery, that discovery could more than compensate for the cost of other ideas that received funding but did not deliver upon their initial promise.
Grants should reward merit and not echo chambers which reiterate what is already known. Following the historic examples of many Nobel-prize worthy discoveries at Bell Labs, contact with technological challenges could foster unprecedented innovation in curiosity-driven research.
In funding disruptive science, it is important to keep in mind what Galileo Galilei stated: “In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” This, of course, reflects the life experience of Galileo. But it also reflects present day science. For example, the disruptive discovery of a hot-Jupiter companion to a solar-type star by Michel Mayor and his student Didier Queloz in 1995, received a Nobel Prize in 2019. But the discovery paper did not acknowledge that the idea of searching for hot Jupiters was suggested by Otto Struve in 1952 and was ignored by mainstream astronomers for more than four decades based on the argument that Jupiters cannot reside so close to their host star. The resulting delay in following Struve’s suggestion represents the inefficiency inherent in a scientific culture dominated by a herd mentality. Refusing to seek evidence for an “out-of-the-box” idea as a result of prejudice is a recipe for maintaining our ignorance and avoiding disruptive discoveries.
In 2010, I published an essay in Nature magazine, encouraging scientists to adopt a diversified portfolio of risk taking in scientific research, in analogy to financial investments in bonds, stocks and venture capital.
3. The present-day economic landscape is very different from what it was 75 years ago. Currently, there is enormous wealth that can be dedicated to basic research among entrepreneurs, high-tech companies and private foundations. The vast majority of my scientific research over the past decade was funded by these sources.
In particular, there is more money available for blue-sky research within corporations like Google than offered by NSF. 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. Given the national benefits from science, the reins should be in national hands. It would make sense to establish a national fund for fundamental science, in which investments by the private sector 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. Allocation of funds should encourage curiosity-driven research but also reflect priorities for economic prosperity and national security.
4. Science would be exciting to the public if it resonates with public interests. Funding should not be biased by a sense of prestige and elitism but reflect raw curiosity about nature. My experience with hundreds of students and postdocs over the past forty years suggests that the most brilliant among them were not necessarily those who appeared well on paper, attended elite universities, or focused on impressing their peers through virtue signaling.
5. Fledgling scientists are vulnerable to the intellectual climate that surrounds them. They are reluctant to deviate from the beaten path if their mentors are dogmatic and guide them in a tightly packed configuration. Promoting risk-taking and innovation in STEM education will have the compounding effect of encouraging young scientists, who historically fostered innovation, to be creative.
Disruptive scientific breakthroughs, by their nature, cannot be forecasted. The physicist Albert Michelson said in his 1894 speech at the dedication of Ryerson Laboratory of the University of Chicago: “The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote…. Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.” This was a decade before Special Relativity, two decades before General Relativity and three decades before Quantum Mechanics, were discovered and revolutionized our concepts of space, time and particles.
The most impactful discoveries are yet to come. With an inspiring vision, policy makers in Washington DC can make sure that the most consequential scientific discoveries in the future will be made by U.S. scientists and that they will happen faster than ever imagined before.
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.
