Science seldom works in straight lines. Sometimes it’s “applied” to solve specific problems: Let’s put people on the moon; we need a Covid vaccine. Much of the time it’s “basic,” aimed at understanding, say, cell division or the physics of cloud formation, with the hope that — somehow, someday — the knowledge will prove useful. Basic science is applied science that hasn’t been applied yet.
That’s the premise on which the United States, since World War II, has invested heavily in science. The government spends $200 billion annually on research and development, knowing that payoffs might be decades away; that figure would drop sharply under President Trump’s proposed 2026 budget. “Basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress,” Vannevar Bush, who laid out the postwar schema for government research support, wrote in a 1945 report to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Look no further than Google, which got its start in 1994 with a $4 million federal grant to help build digital libraries; the company is now a $2 trillion verb.
Here are nine more life-altering advances that government investment made possible.
GPS
The first commercial GPS unit, a $3,000 brick for hikers and boaters, was made in 1988. The technology is now so ubiquitous — in cars, planes, phones, smartwatch running apps — that its existence can seem almost preordained.
In fact its path was long, indirect and paved with federal money. Start in 1957: Two researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory realized that they could pinpoint the whereabouts of Sputnik, Russia’s new orbiting satellite, from the changing frequency of its radio signal as it moved. Now reverse that logic: If a fixed receiver on Earth can locate a moving satellite, then a satellite with known coordinates should be able to find a “lost” receiver on Earth, its location unknown.
That idea, in 1958, became Transit, a navigational system for tracking nuclear subs, developed by Johns Hopkins and the Defense Department. Then came the Navstar Global Positioning System, starting in 1978, for wider military use; in 1983, commercial airlines were authorized to use it, too. All of this required newer satellites; atomic clocks for better accuracy; rockets to launch everything into orbit; research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Naval Research Laboratory; and government contracts to companies like Rockwell International, General Dynamics and Boeing. Now it’s just called GPS.
Diabetes and Obesity Drugs
Today, millions of Americans take Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro or one of the other new blockbuster diabetes and weight-loss drugs. Thank Uncle Sam — and a slow, venomous lizard that can survive on just a few meals a year.
In 1980, Dr. Jean-Pierre Raufman, a researcher studying insect and reptile venoms at the National Institutes of Health, discovered that venom from the Gila monster had a pronounced effect on the pancreas, prompting it to release a digestive enzyme. This piqued the interest of Dr. John Eng, an endocrinologist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in the Bronx, who worked with Dr. Raufman to isolate and identify a novel compound, exendin-4, in the lizard’s venom. A synthetic version of the compound, which stimulates insulin production and slows stomach emptying, was approved for the treatment of diabetes in 2005.
It was the first drug in the now booming class of medications known as GLP-1 receptor agonists, which are being studied for their potential to treat a wide range of conditions, including kidney disease, Alzheimer’s and alcohol use disorder.
Quantum Dots
If you’re reading this on a screen, you’re looking at quantum dots, billions of them.
Quantum dots are tiny crystals of semiconductor stuff, 10 nanometers (billionths of a meter) or smaller in size, and they have become a mainstay of consumer electronics. Being nano, they are subject to the weird laws of quantum mechanics and absorb and emit light more efficiently than other materials.
Their colors are vibrant, great for TVs, smartphones and computer monitors. They fluoresce to identify cancer cells. They’re in clear windows that double as solar panels. In military sensors, they detect microwave radiation. First baked in 1980, quantum dots have been refined and made mass-producible with funding from NIST, the U.S. Army Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies and other agencies. In 2023, three scientists, including an M.I.T. physicist supported by Army grants, won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery and development of quantum dots.
Sign Language Dictionary
When William Stokoe, an English literature professor, arrived at Gallaudet College in 1955, many schools required deaf students to lip-read and speak aloud instead of using sign language, which was dismissed as a crude or lesser form of communication. But to Dr. Stokoe, who was not deaf himself, his students’ signing appeared to be dynamic and complex.
In the years that followed, he used grants from the National Science Foundation to conduct in-depth studies of the linguistic structure of sign language and create the first dictionary of American Sign Language, in collaboration with two colleagues at what is now Gallaudet University. Dr. Stokoe’s research laid the groundwork for A.S.L. to be recognized as a full-fledged language.
CAPTCHA
Are you a robot? Probably not. We know this — “we” being any website you visit that asks you that question — thanks to a security technology called CAPTCHA, a digital puzzle that weeds out nonhuman bots that might be trying to disrupt a billing system or other valuable database.
CAPTCHA, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart, was invented in 2000 by humans, notably Luis von Ahn, a computer scientist whose research at Carnegie Mellon University (he’s now at M.I.T.) was supported by N.S.F. grants. Humans are better than computers at deciphering letters and words; early CAPTCHAs displayed an image of distorted text, which the viewer had to type correctly to proceed. (In 2007, Dr. Ahn worked with The New York Times to digitize a century of archives.)
Since then it’s been an algorithm race, with ever more sophisticated CAPTCHAs facing ever more sophisticated CAPTCHA-solving bots. Dr. Ahn founded a company called reCAPTCHA and sold it to Google in 2009. In 2011, with colleagues from Carnegie Mellon, he started the language-translation company Duolingo, which is now worth upward of $30 billion.
Life Without Screwworm
Heard of the screwworm? Also probably not, at least if you’re American; the United States was declared officially screwworm-free in 1966, after a concerted federal effort to study and eradicate the agricultural scourge.
The New World screwworm is the larval form, or maggot, of the New World blowfly, Cochliomyia hominivorax, which resembles a housefly in size and charmlessness. A parasite, it burrows into and feeds on live flesh. For decades it plagued cattle and other livestock, costing the agricultural industry hundreds of millions of dollars a year. (It also cost the occasional human life, gruesomely — hominivorax means “man-eater.”)
Fortunately, the female blowfly mates just once in her 30 days of life. In 1950, scientists with the U.S. Department of Agriculture realized that if they could create, breed and release sterile males, they could fool the females into mating the population out of existence. Two decades and $750 million later, Sterile Insect Technique worked. The technique has since been adapted and used abroad against other agricultural and disease-carrying insects.
Bladeless LASIK Surgery
An almost terrible laboratory mistake spurred advancements in LASIK surgery, an operation that hundreds of thousands of Americans undergo each year to reshape their corneas and correct their vision.
In 1993, Detao Du, a graduate student at the University of Michigan Center for Ultrafast Optical Science, briefly removed his safety glasses while working with the lab’s femtosecond laser, and a stray pulse of laser light hit his eye. A femtosecond laser emits powerful pulses of light that last a mere one-quadrillionth of a second; it hits more like an ultraprecise jackhammer than, say, a knife blade. The accident didn’t cause major vision problems, but Dr. Ron Kurtz, who examined the grad student’s eye, was impressed by the laser’s clean work.
In the years that followed, Dr. Kurtz collaborated with Gérard Mourou and his colleagues at the optical science center, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, to turn the laser into an ophthalmological tool. Their work led to bladeless LASIK surgery, which uses a femtosecond laser, instead of a blade, to carve into a patient’s eye.
Infant Massage
The neonatal intensive care unit can be a cold and isolating place, where premature babies are kept in incubators and lifesaving care can sometimes entail endless poking and prodding. In recent decades, however, many NICUs have begun providing and promoting more comforting forms of touch, including infant massage — an innovation that grew out of a chance observation in a university rat lab.
In the 1970s, Dr. Saul Schanberg and his colleagues at Duke University found that when rat pups were deprived of their mothers’ touch, it dampened the activity of an enzyme that was crucial to the rodents’ growth and development. When the researchers, who were funded by the N.I.H., used a wet paintbrush to stroke the rat pups — simulating the way a mother rat licks her offspring — these growth markers returned to normal.
Dr. Schanberg began collaborating with Tiffany Field, a psychologist at the University of Miami who had been studying tactile stimulation and infant development. Together, and with additional N.I.H. funding, they demonstrated that premature infants who received regular stroking and massage gained weight faster and were released from the hospital sooner than those who did not.
The Dustbuster
During the Apollo years, NASA wanted man to not only walk on the moon but also return with samples. The quest for the perfect moon drill would ultimately yield a product that became a fixture in American homes — and helped residents keep those homes neat and tidy.
To collect soil samples from underneath the Moon’s surface, NASA needed to arm its astronauts with a compact, lightweight, cordless drill. So the agency enlisted Black & Decker to help develop the Apollo Lunar Surface Drill.
“In the course of the development, Black & Decker used a specially developed computer program to optimize the design of the drill’s motor and insure minimal power consumption,” the space agency wrote in its 1981 issue of Spinoff, a publication devoted to products and innovations that benefited from NASA research and funding. The company’s work on the moon drill paved the way for the development of a suite of cordless consumer products, including the Dustbuster, a hand-held vacuum cleaner that came to define a whole new category of cleaning products.
Alan Burdick is an editor and occasional reporter of science and health news for The Times.
Emily Anthes is a science reporter, writing primarily about animal health and science. She also covered the coronavirus pandemic.
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