illustration on an orange background featuring a massive black-and-white elephant’s foot poised directly above a small, fragile Erlenmeyer flask

Illustration: Ben Hickey

May 21st 2025|Boston and Los Angeles|10 min read

SCIENTISTS IN AMERICA are used to being the best. The country is home to the world’s foremost universities, hosts the lion’s share of scientific Nobel laureates and has long been among the top producers of influential research papers. Generous funding helps keep the system running. Counting both taxpayer and industrial dollars, America spends more on research than any other country. The federal government doles out around $120bn a year, $50bn or so of which goes towards tens of thousands of grants and contracts for higher-education institutions, with the rest going to public research bodies.

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