Research Funding and the Future of Scientific Invention

May 8 2012, 7:02 PM ET Comment

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"Do you know what this is?" Arun Majumdar held up a piece of yellow cardboard at the beginning of his speech, the first of two keynote addresses that closed the Innovation Summit. It was a punch card, a truly vintage method of data entry from an earlier era. Majumdar raised his other hand to reveal a smart phone. "In the span of 35 years we've come from here to here," he said. It raises the inevitable question: Are we on track to make the same kind of progress in the next 35 years?  

From his post at the head of the government research department ARPA-E, Majumdar thinks so. The group funds some of the most imaginative and ambitious scientists in the world. The centerpiece of Majumdar's talk was a presentation on "a few chapters in the ARPA-E story," a handful of scientists who are paving the way toward energy sustainability. These are futuristic thinkers, but Majumdar was eager to connect them to the past. 

He framed their research in the context of a long history of American ingenuity, showing slides of such innovators as the Wright brothers and the inventor of the polio vaccine James Salk. He also framed it as part of a global competition. "The world is hungry for alternative solutions to energy. Make no mistake: there's a global race going on to seize this opportunity," he said.

The next and final speaker was Nobel Prize Laureate Peter Agre, the Johns Hopkins University scientist who took home the honor in 2003 for his discovery of aquaporins, a plumbing system in cells. His outlook on scientific opportunity was less positive than Majumdar's. 

Agre dwelled on the sober financial realities of research science and the "prohibitive" cost of running a research university. "Our best and brightest young scientists can't get started," said Agre. When The Atlantic's Steve Clemons asked Agre for two or three things the federal government could do to advance science and technology, Agre offered only one: "A stable source of predictable funding."

It's a strange feeling, sitting in a room with a Nobel Laureate. But the bottom line is, Agre is just a person. In fact, behind all the technologies and innovations that will propel us toward what's to come are people -- innovators and inventors, thinkers, dreamers, boundary breakers. Investing in the future means investing in them.

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