It is perhaps not surprising that the director of the National Institutes of Health would invoke the name of a man revered by scientists as the architect of a policy widely credited with driving the United States’ global supremacy in biomedical research. But Jay Bhattacharya’s claim over the weekend that the Trump administration is pursuing a vision articulated eight decades ago by that scientific leader, Vannevar Bush, has provoked pushback — even outrage — in scientific circles.
Standing before one of the country’s largest annual gatherings of conservative political activists, Bhattacharya attempted to make the case that the administration’s science policies — particularly its efforts to diminish the research dominance of elite universities and spread federal funding more broadly across the country — are rooted in the ideas Bush proposed at the end of World War II.
“I want to tell you a great story about how we can make America healthy again. I’m going to begin with a perspective from 1944 that still challenges us today,” he began his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday in Dallas, Texas. “There was a man named Vannevar Bush. He wrote a book called ‘The Endless Frontier’ that warned that the scientific progress in the United States was becoming unevenly distributed. Too much research capacity, he argued, was concentrated in a small number of institutions.”
