Remarks as prepared for delivery Good morning, and thank you all for being here. It has been so encouraging to see “Science: A New Golden Age” receive such a warm reception, and thrilling to see the enthusiasm with which leaders from across government, industry, philanthropy, and the academy are stepping forward to contribute to remaking the American science enterprise for the 21 st Century.
The American people depend on and deserve a science ecosystem that is bold and ambitious; a science enterprise that seeks to solve grand national challenges; and a science community that is unapologetic in its hope that fundamental discovery will enable new breakthroughs for the improvement of daily life. This summit is an opportunity to share such a vision for the future, and some of the small steps and giant leaps being taken to get there.
“Science: A New Golden Age” was born of a three-fold tasking from President Trump: to maintain and extend American technological leadership; to ensure all Americans enjoy the benefits of rapidly advancing emerging technologies; and to revitalize America’s research enterprise by empowering America’s scientists to do their best work. The world in which science is conducted today has been radically transformed since Vannevar Bush pointed us toward the Endless Frontier in 1945—in large part by his program’s successes. Now more than eight decades on from Bush’s project, the U. S.
research ecosystem stands in need of an update, and the Federal Government can help lead the way. Today, the private sector and philanthropy play a much larger role in American basic science, and technologies have transformed the way research is done. Over the past two decades the share of private funding dedicated to fundamental research has grown by a factor of five. And while Bush’s program assumed an essentially “linear” model of innovation—in…