In Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report Science, the Endless Frontier [PDF], he wrote:
“A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade, regardless of its mechanical skill.”
This principle also applies to U.S. states and the academic institutions in them. When resources are limited, organizational leaders are often tempted to focus their research efforts on applied studies that could have short-term payoffs. It’s easy to understand this reasoning because there are often pressing health, social, and economic problems close at hand that are crying out for prompt action. However, economic studies, including a recent paper by Hans Gersbach and colleagues and a 2012 study by Andrew Toole, have indicated that basic research is essential to overall advancement, even on a local level.
It might be tempting to think that in this era of open science, states and their institutions can use other scientists’ basic research to propel their own applied research efforts. Such an approach, however, will lead to those states never being at the leading edge of scientific and technological developments and always having to play catch-up. As Eugene Wong put it in a 1996 commentary in Nature [PDF]:
“One major barrier to entry into new markets is the requirement to see the future with clarity. It has been said that to foretell the future, one has to invent it. To be able to invent the future is the dividend that basic research pays.”
For some time, I’ve been concerned that many Institutional Development Award (IDeA)-eligible institutions aren’t focusing enough on basic research. In fiscal year 2024, only 24% of the IDeA Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBREs) had a basic science theme. The basic science-oriented COBREs that currently exist aren’t distributed evenly, with some states having as many as four and others having none. In addition, some IDeA states appear not to have a single structural biologist among their academic institutions, which doesn’t seem conducive to rapid translation of scientific knowledge into medical applications. It’s hard to imagine how the biotechnology sector of a state’s economy could grow efficiently without local expertise in structural biology or other essential areas of basic research given the role local academic research institutions play in spurring small business development.
Effectively supporting basic research requires a supply of well-trained scientific personnel and access to modern technologies and infrastructure. The IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) and COBRE programs are designed to allow IDeA states to develop these needed research and career development capacities. In addition, NIGMS, other NIH institutes and centers, as well as other federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation, support national and regional technology resources to increase access to critical but costly instrumentation. For example, the NIGMS-funded national cryo-electron microscopy centers provide no-cost access to cryo-EM data collection and training services for users across the country. NIGMS supports a wide variety of other national-scale, open-access resources that reduce the burden on individual institutions and states to purchase and maintain high-end instrumentation and other infrastructure. As a result, it becomes easier to support basic biomedical research throughout the country. These national-scale facilities can be complemented by COBRE- and INBRE-supported core facilities that are chosen to be of maximal value to the institutions, states, and regions in which they reside.
IDeA-eligible institutions should select scientific areas for COBRE applications based on their strategic priorities for growth, including developing strong basic research capacity. The areas selected should be broad enough to warrant significant institutional investments, including the hiring of new early career faculty working in COBRE-supported fields. Basic science topics that would be sufficiently broad to merit a COBRE application might include (but are not limited to) structural and mechanistic biology, biomedical data science, cell and developmental biology, immunology, neuroscience, or chemical biology. For comparison, sufficiently broad translational and clinical topics might include oncology, women’s health, health disparities, infectious diseases, metabolic disorders, critical illness and care, biomedical engineering, or pharmacology and drug discovery.
The INBREs should also be leveraged to support basic research in IDeA states. INBRE leaders should ensure that they’re providing students with opportunities to work in basic science labs and that they’re supporting basic research projects at the primarily undergraduate institutions in their states. The INBREs should engage their own core facilities as well as those of COBREs in their regions to facilitate basic research and should build connections to national technology resources to leverage their economies of scale. INBREs should also provide activities designed to promote student interest in basic science.
In addition to the great talent that exists in each IDeA state, the range of geographic environments across the regions represented in the program—from different aquatic ecosystems to forests, mountains, and deserts—presents a compelling opportunity for IDeA state-specific basic science. Each of these ecosystems has unique organisms that assuredly contain amazing biological pathways that, if studied, would significantly advance our knowledge of biology and chemistry and might also lead to the development of important new technologies. One historical example of this opportunity is the discovery of the thermophilic bacterium Thermus aquaticus by Thomas Brock and Hudson Freeze in a hot spring in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. This discovery led to the invention of the polymerase chain reaction, revolutionizing molecular biology research. What else is out there?
Without basic science there’s nothing to translate into breakthrough applications such as cures for diseases. I hope that every institution and region working to build its biomedical research capacity will include basic research as a central pillar of its strategy.
For more discussion of the importance of basic research, read the commentary I recently published in eLife with NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli and Principal Deputy Director Larry Tabak.
I thank Andrew Miklos and Pam Muthuuri for providing data for this post.