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Remarks by Director Kratsios at the National Academy of Sciences
REINVIGORATING AMERICA’S SCIENTIFIC ENTERPRISE
AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY
Washington, D.C.
May 19, 2025
THE DIRECTOR: Thank you, Dr. McNutt, for that kind introduction, and for hosting me here today, in what can only be called a temple of science.
I speak to you this morning as the President’s Science and Technology Advisor, who has been given three interconnected tasks in pursuit of a Golden Age of Innovation: to maintain American technological leadership; to ensure all Americans enjoy the fruit of transformative advances in science and technology; and, a mission I believe we all share, to revitalize America’s scientific enterprise.
In a speech last month, I explained how America’s dominant position in technology can only be maintained through a strategy of both promotion and protection. Today, I’d like to speak a little bit about our shared mission of furthering scientific advancement.
To empower America’s researchers to achieve groundbreaking discoveries and to reinvigorate our national science enterprise, we must scrutinize our existing approach and recommit ourselves to best practices. That is my commitment to you, but also what I ask of you, to ensure America sets the Gold Standard for science in this century and the next.
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The American story has been one of exploration and discovery, inseparable from the pioneering work of America’s scientists. From the tinkering inventor at his workbench to the great teams of men and women in white lab coats working across the country in common pursuit, they have labored to uncover the mysteries of creation and enabled us to build a free and prosperous republic.
The sweep of relentless U.S.-led scientific progress in the twentieth century flowed from Vannevar Bush’s 1945 “Science, The Endless Frontier” report, the blueprint for America’s joint Federal, corporate, and academic research effort. Bush not only provided a peacetime plan for furthering the technological developments of WWII, but planted a banner in the national imagination that in less than 25 years would become an American flag on the surface of the moon.
But as Dr. McNutt said in her inaugural State of the Science Speech last year, there is cause for declining confidence in continued American scientific leadership. While certain fields have seen tremendous advances in recent years, from the invention of transformers and CRISPR to the observation of graphene and gravitational waves, recent studies have found that papers and patents across the sciences have become less disruptive since 1980.
We are seeing diminishing returns. For example, despite biomedical research budgets soaring since the 1990s, scientific progress has stalled—new drug approvals have flatlined or even declined, more researchers are needed to achieve the same outputs, and workforce training has stagnated. More money has not meant more scientific discovery, and total dollars spent has not been a proxy for scientific impact.
As in scientific inquiry, when we uncover evidence that conflicts with our existing theories, we revise our theories and conduct further experiments to better understand the truth. This evidence of a scientific slowdown should spur us to experiment with new systems, new models, new ways of funding, conducting, and using science. As Dr. McNutt pointed out last year, since Dr. Bush’s report in 1945, the scientific enterprise has changed.
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In particular, there has been a profound shift in the balance of scientific funding. Today, industry spends more than three times on R&D than does the federal government, even self-funding more basic research than the Federal government funds at universities.
Even as it alters the model that defined the last century, private money’s growing place in America’s scientific enterprise presents opportunities. In particular, in a period of fiscal constraints and geopolitical challenges, an increase in private funding can make it easier for federal grantmaking agencies to refocus public funds on basic research and the national interest.
What we target is what we measure, and what we measure is what we get more of. To get more bang for America’s research bucks, we need to enhance the creativity and precision of our funding. Spending more money on the wrong things is far worse than spending less money on the right things.
Prizes, challenges, public-private partnerships, and other novel funding mechanisms, can multiply the impact of targeted federal dollars. We must tie grants to clear strategic targets, while still allowing for the openness of scientific exploration, and so shape a general funding environment that makes clear what our national priorities are.
The money that goes to basic and blue-sky science must be used for that purpose, not to feed the red tape that so often goes along with funded research. We cannot resign our research community and the laboratory and university staff who support them to die the death of a thousand ten-minute tasks. To assist the nation’s scientists in their vocation, we will reduce administrative burdens on federally funded researchers, not bog them down in bureaucratic box checking.
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But in addition to taking a hard look at how we fund and supervise science, we should also consider how we, the people who make up the national discovery enterprise, can recapture that spirit of relentless focus and passionate pursuit of truth that underlies all our scientific progress.
Two brief cases will illustrate a need to recommit to what may be named Gold Standard Science. By this I mean research conforming to the principles to which we know great scientists aspire, but that are too often distorted by professional incentives and social pressures.
A painful episode involving Alzheimer’s research illustrates our vulnerability to scientific misconduct, especially when we fail to prioritize reproducibility, communication of error, and skepticism.
In 2009, a celebrated biotech executive published a paper in Nature that promised to revolutionize the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. In December of 2023, the journal retracted the research, acknowledging a number of anomalies and errors, but denying conscious fraud. The retraction came after almost 15 years of questions about the original paper being ignored and suppressed, during which the paper racked up over 800 citations, misdirected huge quantities of money, and helped the researcher become president of a premier university. The paper’s irreproducibility had been demonstrated by 2012, but it took a decade to be fully addressed.
Our scientific enterprise should celebrate and incentivize checking each other’s work, rather than discourage questioning claims of progress.
Meanwhile, the decision to shut down schools during the COVID-19 pandemic showed a failure to confront uncertainties or to integrate the knowledge of colleagues across multiple specializations. The best available scientific evidence indicated children were neither at high disease risk nor significant infection vectors. There was every reason to anticipate remote classes and masked communication would hurt children’s development. But a closed-ranks attitude led to policies that harmed America’s students.
Biased interpretation of science leads to bad decision making and undermines the public’s trust.
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The first step to restoring trust in America’s scientific establishment, and rebuilding a strong foundation for breakthrough discoveries, is a return to Gold Standard Science.
Scientific progress advances in community and in the open, as findings are rigorously tested by others. Gold Standard Science is, therefore, first of all, reproducible and transparent. We cannot allow mistakes to persist unaddressed, poisoning the well of apparent knowledge for everyone else seeking to build on a given finding, as in the Alzheimer’s research case. To further enable this, researchers must proactively communicate errors and uncertainties. Only through this openness can each generation stand firmly on the shoulders of the giants that came before it.
The best environment for truly groundbreaking basic research, moreover, is collaborative and interdisciplinary. As the accumulated body of general science grows decade over decade, basic epistemic humility requires relying on the expertise of colleagues outside one’s particular specializations. But even with confidence in the skill and knowledge of collaborators, the best scientist remains skeptical of a team’s findings and is conscious of the ever present need to interrogate one’s assumptions. Better practice of these principles might have saved America’s children the catastrophic disruption of pandemic school closures.
To reinforce all of these individual virtues, Gold Standard Science is structured for falsifiability, subject to unbiased peer review, accepting of negative results as positive outcomes, and closed to conflicts of interest. Funders of research, whether in government, the academy, or industry, need to come alongside our best researchers to ensure that projects conform to these highest standards.
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At the heart of the practices that make up Gold Standard Science is a suspicion of blind consensus and a celebration of informed dissent. For the crisis of confidence in scientists stems from fear that political biases are displacing the vital search for truth.
DEI initiatives, in particular, degrade our scientific enterprise. DEI represents an existential threat to the real diversity of thought that forms the foundation of the scientific community. Diversity of thought is essential to scientific inquiry, empowering us to challenge entrenched assumptions and offer novel approaches to solving complex problems.
As we seek new paradigms in fundamental science, we cannot afford for America’s scientists to be in the business of scoring points for an ideological agenda. A closed-minded political fashion preoccupied with symbolic victories divides colleagues and distorts grant application and research design.
For example, until recently at NASA—an institution whose mission is to explore the unknown in air and space, innovate for the benefit of humanity, and inspire the world through discovery—research proposals were required to include plans for furthering “inclusion goals.” Evaluation panels for these proposals were to be 50 percent “DEI professionals.” Such requirements undermine merit-based assessment of scientists, add to administrative burdens, and distract from essential, productive work.
Science cannot be subject to ideology, nor should scientists march blindly in lockstep.
Blindly trusting in The Science, with a capital T and capital S, is inimical to free inquiry and open debate and is thus the enemy of scientific progress. The beginning of knowledge is the knowledge of ignorance. We seek to know, despite human limitations, and to move upward from mere opinion to the truth. It is convention, dogma, and intellectual fad that resist revision and correction.
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I believe all of us in this room share the same mission. We want America’s scientists to be the best in the world. We want to empower them to make the awe-inspiring breakthroughs that will solve tough challenges and inspire our young people to follow in their footsteps, and we want to help repair the relationship between the scientific establishment and our fellow citizens.
I believe that this is not something that government, or industry, can do alone; the pioneering scientific enterprise Vannevar Bush built still depends on a partnership, and America’s national laboratories and universities are its crown jewels.
We will have to work together to restore this partnership, and revitalize America’s scientific enterprise.
With a renewed focus on Gold Standard Science, we can take the first steps to revolutionizing the way America conducts the business of discovery. And though this is a call to excellence for all of America’s scientists—in labs, in the field, and in offices across the country—it begins with me and my colleagues in government. Implementing Gold Standard Science starts in the policies and programs of Federal agencies.
If we in government enable scientists to spend less time in the office completing administrative tasks and more time in the lab exploring scientific frontiers; if we adjust to new realities and creatively partner with industry and philanthropy; if we reject political fads and recommit ourselves to the truth: I believe we will reignite the American spirit that lit the world with Edison’s bulb, lifted the Wright brothers into the sky, and landed Armstrong on the moon.
Thank you.
