Science’s institutional history at 250

For America’s 250th anniversary, Brad Wible invited a trio of pieces for Science’s Policy Forum tracing the institutional shifts that built the modern US scientific enterprise.

Ronald Daniels writes about the founding of Johns Hopkins in 1876, made possible by a $7m gift (the largest philanthropic gift in US history at the time), which imported the German research university model and laid the foundation for the postwar funding system. Ashish Arora and Sharon Belenzon cover the rise and fall of the corporate research lab, positioning the pursuit of long-horizon research in commercial contexts as a break from the more distributed systems that dominated before (typically individual inventors licensing patents to firms) and after (typically universities producing novel science, startups translating it, and firms commercializing it). And Daniel Gross and Bhaven Sampat trace the federal funding system back to OSRD, which invented the federal R&D contract (described at the time as one of the “great inventions” of the war) and grappled with many questions that remain top-of-mind today, like indirect costs, patent rights, and geographic distribution.