A Brief History of Federal Funding for Basic Science

Biomedical science in the United States is at a crossroads.

For 75 years, the federal government has partnered with academic institutions, fueling discoveries that have transformed medicine and saved lives. But recent moves by the Department of Health and Human Services and other federal agencies — including funding cuts and proposed changes to how research support is allocated — now threaten this legacy.

Harvard Medical School is among the institutions bracing for the potential of steep reductions, raising concerns about the future of biomedical research.

“The pacemaker of technological progress”

The partnership between academia and government was born during World War II, inspired by the vision of Vannevar Bush, head of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development. 

In his report Science, The Endless Frontier, Bush envisioned science as a source of light that could drive away the dark shadows of the war and stave off the return of the Great Depression. He offered a roadmap for the U.S. scientific enterprise with an emphasis on basic research.

“Basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress,” Bush wrote in the report, which he submitted to President Harry Truman in 1945.

While the National Science Foundation did not launch until 1950, agencies like the National Institutes of Health began making investments in peacetime research and education modeled on the Bush recommendations, transforming the United States into a global science leader. In biomedical science, federal funding allowed U.S. researchers to make breakthroughs, deepening understandings of how health and disease arise from the interaction of individual molecules and cells, and how these interactions culminate at the level of the individual organism as well as across populations.

These basic science insights have unlocked important treatment advances for cardiovascular illness, cancer, infectious diseases, and mental health, among others. The American Cancer Society estimates that 3.5 million lives were saved from cancer between 1991 and 2019 from improvements in detection, prevention, and treatment based on federally funded research.

From observations to insights

For much of its nearly 250-year history, HMS operated without federal research funding. In its early days, faculty generated insights based on observation, while working in the hospitals and teaching medical students, says David Jones, MD ’01, the A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine at HMS.

Things began to shift in the mid-nineteenth century as scientific research flourished in Europe. There, governments funded training for science and engineering, fueling advances in electrification, telegraphy, and in the physical and natural sciences. In contrast, U.S. federal support for research was scarce due to the disruptions of the Civil War and to traditions favoring local and state control of education.

But by the late nineteenth century, the research enterprise at HMS had begun to transform, Jones says, with faculty soon doing research in cells, animals, bacteria, and people. Private philanthropy — from the likes of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller — funded research and built the School’s new Quad. The new campus, opened in 1906, became the heart of a flourishing research and clinical hub known as the Longwood Medical Area.

As efforts to prepare for World War II intensified, the government’s own labs couldn’t keep up. Bush and Harvard President James Conant, chair of the National Defense Research Committee, called for direct government support of university research. The goal was clear: develop urgently needed tools for the war. But scientists were also given latitude to pursue their own ideas.

The result was a number of remarkable advances: new ways to manufacture penicillin at scale; better therapies for malaria; and revolutionary developments in aviation, radar, and communications technology.

“The research was targeted at the war effort, but it produced many results that were useful for civilian purposes,” says Scott Podolsky, MD ’97, professor of global health and social medicine and director of the Center for the History of Medicine at HMS.

This helped shape the postwar model of federally funded science as a pillar of national progress.

After the war, the NIH evolved from a small institution conducting research in its own labs into a major grant-making agency, funding research and training at universities nationwide. Funding also came from other federal grant-makers, such as the Atomic Energy Commission and the Office of Naval Research. The scale of funding increased dramatically, and grants didn’t just pay for research, they also reimbursed universities for physical and administrative infrastructure needed to nourish the science.

One illustrative example of the importance of sustained federal support for science comes from the Framingham Heart Study, launched in 1948 with support from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. It was the first study to identify high blood pressure and high cholesterol as major risk factors for cardiovascular illness and led to the development of the Framingham Risk Score tool, used by clinicians worldwide to gauge a person’s ten-year risk for cardiovascular disease. The study continues to follow the descendants of the original participants and has expanded into other areas, including how genes and social environment affect cardiovascular health, dementia, and cancer.

In 1988, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health launched the Human Genome Project, which eventually became a collaboration with scientists around the world to map the human genome. From an initial investment of $3 billion, the project has generated essential tools for understanding, preventing, and treating a wide range of diseases. While it’s hard to quantify the overall return on this federal investment, a 2021 report noted that genomics-based businesses supported 850,000 jobs and paid more than $5.2 billion in federal taxes in 2019, a year in which the federal government invested $3.3 billion in genomics research.

Bridging basic science and clinical medicine

Since the 1950s, HMS researchers have pursued foundational discoveries within a vibrant biomedical ecosystem that includes its affiliated hospitals and research institutes. This integration has led to lifesaving and life-changing advances and laid the groundwork for future discovery. 

“Between the phenomenal fundamental science and the extraordinary clinical expertise at HMS, its affiliated hospitals, and the rest of Harvard University, this is an unrivaled group of biomedical researchers,” says Mark Namchuk, who leads the HMS Therapeutics Initiative, designed to accelerate the translation of basic science insights made in the lab into medicines used in the clinic.

Why federal support is critical

Federal funding is critical for scientific efforts with broad societal benefit but little commercial incentive for private enterprises to invest in, notes Anupam Jena, the Joseph P. Newhouse Professor of Health Care Policy at HMS. This includes efforts to measure and improve how well health care systems operate, train the scientists, and conduct basic, fundamental science that cannot be tied to short-term production of a new medicine.

“Federal funding allows for the kind of exploration that lets academic researchers make genuine leaps forward, completely changing how a field is understood,” Namchuk says.

These leaps can break open areas of medicine. 

“If that funding is taken away,” Namchuk says, “we’re going to fall behind in having the breakthrough moments of clarity that set a field in a productive new direction for decades.”

Even with philanthropy and industry investments in science, federal support remains the bedrock of long-term innovation. In recent years, close to 75 percent of research funding at HMS has come from the federal government, supporting innovation and infrastructure and training the next generation of physician-scientists.

“We have an enormous amount to show for those investments,” says Jones, the HMS historian. “If you had to choose between medicine in 1935 and today, the answer is obvious. That progress didn’t just happen, it was built on decades of public funding.”

Jake Miller is a science writer in the HMS Office of Communications and External Relations.