Michael Kratsios
speaker
623 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2025
last heard 24 Aug
Michael Kratsios’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So if you kind of rewind history, back in in nineteen forty-five, uh World War II was ending.
Vaniver Bush, who was sort of the science advisor, had my role for for FDR, received a letter from the president that asked him, you know, what do we do with the science enterprise post-World War II?
And Van Verbush wrote his response that became Science Endless Frontier, which is kind
Kind of the seminal work and the way that the US government should interface with science community.
And has sort of served as sort of the North Star for how we think about science funding for the last 70 years.
And what Bush proposed was essentially the system that we have today, where the government funds basic research primarily at universities.
And it set up this enterprise where all these researchers sprung, all this research kind of sprung up in kind of the post war.
That was able to do this great basic research.
And in parallel to that, all the national labs that had helped sort of build the nuclear weapons of World War II and so on sort of sprung up to do the intramural work that you're talking about.
So there you had sort of two pieces: you had government and you had academia.
And why that was so important in that era was at that time, the vast majority of science funding was done by the federal government.
Roughly 70% of RD was paid for by the US government, about 30 was in the private.
private sector.
What has happened over the last 70 years was there's been this dramatic shift.
Now roughly 70% of RD is done by the private sector, and 30% is funded by the federal government.
And as you mentioned correctly, new institutions have sprung up: things like philanthropies that fund focused research organizations, things like Howard Hughes, Max Plock Institute, and so on.
And the question now is: is that model that Bush pushed forward and promulgated and actually led to the great discoveries of the last 50 years?
Is that still as relevant today as it was then?
And our answer is it's not.
And we need a refresh.
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