“`In 1945, Vannevar Bush published a report entitled Science: The Endless Frontier. His thesis was that prosperity follows from basic research. The report was highly influential in the United States and elsewhere. It led to the creation of an entirely new government bureaucracy.

With this report, Bush popularized the linear model of innovation: innovation (such as medical cures) flows sequentially from basic research to applied research to development to production and diffusion. Grow basic research, and the rest will follow.

When Bush wrote his report, basic research was not usually supported directly by the state. We did not have a large basic research infrastructure. And yet, the West had just lived through an unprecedented period of rapid scientific progress: the theory of evolution, electromagnetism, radio communication, special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, nuclear technology, rockets, the combustion engine, and more. We would get the invention of the transistor only two years after Bush’s report. We also did not have today’s peer-review mechanism.

Even though Bush’s report has been viewed as a piece of genius that unlocked a golden era of scientific prosperity, I believe that the linear model of innovation is hopelessly naïve. I believe the thesis that a large bureaucracy delivering funding to other bureaucracies (such as universities) is how we get innovation is absurd. Except perhaps in the domain of computing (“bits”), we have been largely stagnant technologically since about the 1970s. So Bush’s model failed over time. To be clear, it might have worked for a while by encouraging more young people to study engineering and science. It may also have shone a favorable light on a few enterprising professors who got to promote useful ideas.

If you visit a research lab today in a leading university, what you are most likely to see is a boring bureaucracy that caters to whatever is politically favorable at the moment—a bureaucracy that plays it safe and avoids controversy. You see young people seeking well-paid jobs, going through the motions with often little genuine interest in, say, curing cancer. We have never published so many research papers—the volume has been growing exponentially ever since Bush wrote his report—but it is doubtful that this is how technological breakthroughs are achieved.

The evidence is overwhelming that shoddy science is widespread. We have a severe reproducibility crisis: if you redo an experiment (even a highly cited one), you are likely to fail to reproduce the results. This affects psychology, medicine, and many other fields. The system does not particularly care because the incentives to get things right are not there. As long as the work is politically aligned, solidity of the results seems secondary.

There was a TV show (The Big Bang Theory) where the main character, Sheldon Cooper—an awkward genius—gets to work on crazy ideas. That is how Bush imagined it: fund young people like Sheldon Cooper, and you will get extraordinary breakthroughs. In the real world, Sheldon would not get very far on campus. I have met misfits like him. When they are incapable of playing the political game, the system crushes them. But even if that were not the case, extraordinary intelligence needs to be applied to the right problems to be of value. You could have a ChatGPT that is brighter than any of us in every possible way, and it could still be deployed simply to fill out forms faster and better than we do—it may not cure cancer.

The American government has just released what might be considered an update to Bush’s report. Michael Kratsios wrote a report entitled Science, A New Golden Age. The report states outright that the linear model no longer holds. It states what I have argued for vehemently: innovation is not a linear process. Take large-language models, for example, which can be used by engineers and scientists to further their research. I have also argued that the success of large-language models today has as much to do with the users as with the researchers.

At this point, some people engage in the following type of rhetoric: if we had not invented calculus, we would not have AI today; therefore, calculus caused AI. But you could also say that the subsidized nail factory in the Soviet Union, which made overpriced and bad nails, was necessary to hold Landau’s house together, and that without those nails we would not have the theory of Landau levels. The causality argument goes in all directions.

Innovation is the result of a complex system. We see that the United States and, more recently, China are innovative countries. In 2026, you do not go to France for the latest advances. The evidence is overwhelming that scientific and technological progress depends as much on culture as on anything else. It is not something to be managed by bureaucrats.

One of the cultural ingredients that seems essential is meritocracy. You must put the people who are good at building on top of your hierarchy. This does not happen magically. You need a set of incentives in which rewarding the wrong people is costly.

What does Kratsios propose? Many interesting ideas that, I expect, could renew our culture. He proposes to break out of the Cold War–era funding model. Today, the research funding mechanism is centered around the government giving money to the university bureaucracy. The grant might be in the name of one professor, but the recipient is still the university. In the new model, instead of funding universities, the government would assign money directly to individuals in various ways (short grants, prizes, and so forth). This would shift power away from administrators toward individuals who know how to get things done. It would also neutralize some of the political power of the current mandarin class of scientists who control access to the top positions.

The report recommends restoring permissionless innovation. It is sometimes poorly understood how limited the system has become. I once had a graduate student undertake interviews with practitioners. This required an ethics approval which, in her case, took a few months to obtain. Again, the system has built up political structures that seek to block innovation it does not like. They need to be torn down, the sooner the better.

The report has many other interesting recommendations. One that I particularly like is an AI-guided agenda. We need to hook up our brand-new AIs to experimental devices. We are not going to cure aging with chatbots. We need experiments on a massive scale.

Will Kratsios’s vision move from report to reality? History shows that cultural and institutional change is never easy. Yet the stakes could not be higher. By embracing meritocracy, permissionless innovation, and ambitious AI-augmented experimentation, we have a genuine chance to escape decades of stagnation and rekindle the spirit of discovery that once defined the West. The opportunity is before us. It must not be squandered.