Science Revision

Conversations on research policies around the world tend to veer quickly towards Vannevar Bush, an American engineer who advised President Franklin Roosevelt during the Second World War. Bush had blazed a trail before reaching the offices of Roosevelt. He joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1919 and co-founded the American Appliance Company, which later morphed into the defence contractor Raytheon. Following some impressive research on analogue computers, Bush was appointed Dean of the School of Engineering at MIT in 1932. After a few more high-profile appointments, he became the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), which directed most of the R&D during the war. In 1944, Bush appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

Throughout these years, he created a reputation for being an exemplary engineer with a deep faith in the value of knowledge. He read widely, played the flute, raised turkeys. He smoked incessantly. But Bush's most famous contribution to America and the world was not a device or a company or a government department. It was a report that he co-authored called Science: The Endless Frontier (bit.ly/science-frontier). This report, which led to the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF), became an inspiration for several countries, including India. Bush's model of science, with the separation of basic and applied research and the creation of a university-industry-government triad, appealed to several governments around the world. The influence of Bush could be seen in India's Scientific Policy Resolution of 1958. "Technology can only grow out of the study of science and its applications," it stated, right in the first paragraph.

It was a paradigm that was accepted by many without question, almost as an axiom, around the world: create new knowledge through curiosity-driven research, and then apply this knowledge to develop useful products. At that time, it seemed to be no more than applied common sense. After the Bush report and the setting up of the NSF, the U.S. became a science and technology powerhouse in the world, leaving behind all its European partners and competitors. American universities created not just knowledge. They produced technology companies with regularity, many of whom became world leaders, sometimes within a decade or two of their founding.

The annual budget of NSF was $9.06 billion in 2024, according to its website. Of this $9.06 billion, $7.18 billion was spent on funding research, with most of the remaining money going to education and the creation of infrastructure. Sustained research funding had a positive impact on the country. American scientists have won more than two-thirds of the Nobel Prizes given so far. Roughly 40% of the world's top 100 universities are in the U.S. The country leads by a fair distance in almost all technology domains. In spite of this success, the U.S. research model wasn't followed in other countries, at least not to this extent. Western European nations didn't have a Bush or a Roosevelt, the concept of an endless frontier, or an appetite for risky enterprises. Europe had great universities, but they didn't really create technology or wealth as the American educational institutions did.

The Vannevar Bush report is often credited for the intellectual and economic dominance of the U.S. after the war, a dominance now under threat because of significant cuts in funding for NSF and other institutions. And yet, even within the U.S., the Bush method had his critics. Did new technology come only after the creation of new science? Was basic research (Bush's phrase) really separate from applied research? Or did the two go together sometimes as independent but sometimes an indistinguishable pair? How much did America owe its success to decisions based on The Endless Frontier report?

In the 21st century, when funding for science research in the U.S. reduces and systemic challenges mount around the world, are there new ways of defining and practising science?

India was one of the few European colonies, if any, to have developed a scientific foundation before independence. The success of a few physicists and mathematicians, early in the 20th century, had created optimism in India about the potential of science in the country. Over a few decades after independence, India took some of Bush's ideas to new territory. The country created one set of national laboratories just to do basic research, and another set of universities to do teaching. Applied research was to be done in a third set of laboratories. The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) did "research in the purest realms of science", to invoke Bush's parlance from his report. The universities largely focused on teaching, although a few did some research. The freshly minted Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) focused on engineering education. Applied research was to be done in a chain of laboratories under the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR). The private sector did no significant research or development.

In spite of the constraints, science flourished in some pockets within the country. Govind Swarup, an astronomer at TIFR, conceived and built the world's largest radio telescope; and then built another network of telescopes with the largest combined area. G.N. Ramachandran, a physicist in Chennai, solved the structure of the protein collagen using the simplest of equipment. Working in similar austere environments, Kolkata medical scientist S.N. De isolated the cholera toxin. The space programme grew against severe odds. These were isolated achievements. Indian scientists didn't have the funding or the equipment to do research at the frontiers consistently. Research was then driven almost entirely by curiosity, with no practical benefit in mind. The pursuit of knowledge was idealised to a degree that Bush would have approved. But industry was never brought in with the universities to exploit this knowledge.

This system continued for over four decades before the spell was broken. The Indian economy had to be liberalised due to a foreign exchange crisis. The research system had to be changed, too, to be consistent with the new economy, but another decade passed before some change was implemented. In the first decade of the millennium, India started Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs), recognising that education and research had to go hand in hand. Investment on research doubled over a decade. The IITs were encouraged to improve their research. The private sector started doing some in-house research, especially in the pharmaceutical sector.

Multinational centres developed and expanded in information technology, raising the technical capabilities of Indian engineers. Meanwhile, space research and development matured in the country. More than two decades into the new millennium, the Indian research ecosystem had developed capabilities to develop technology in areas such as chemicals, pharma, aerospace, and semiconductors. However, the old dichotomies remained, as the private sector did not build innovative companies. At the beginning of this decade, as an offshoot of a new education policy, India conceived of an institution inspired by the U.S. National Science Foundation but adapted to the new century and milieu. The Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), created in 2023 through an Act of Parliament, will receive ₹50,000 crore till 2028 to fund research.

One of the aims of the ANRF is to address a conundrum of Indian R&D: the lack of interest from the private sector in building research-based companies. Indian industry had grown up in a protected environment, based on licences and revenue caps, and thus had no need for developing advanced technology. After liberalisation, the large software companies were based on services and so didn't need to do original research. The structure of these companies didn't let them take high risks either. The pharmaceutical industry, one of India's most successful industries, was based on generics. Large pharma companies had to provide consistent shareholder returns periodically. Investments in product research, on the other hand, could provide high returns in the long run but inconsistently. The pharma companies, which started drug discovery with high confidence in the 1990s, realised this quickly and shut down their innovation programmes. A few, like Dr. Reddy's, set up separate companies to do the risky business of drug discovery.

It was easier to do risky research in a completely new entity. The company is set up to take risks, and the shareholders know that returns can come only in the long term. Product start-ups therefore begin with the right mindset and often with the right people. Some early examples had shown the value of consistent R&D investment. Tejas Networks, started up in 2000, consistently invested 10-15% of revenues on R&D, investing roughly $500 million (₹4,200 crore) over its lifetime to build telecom equipment. However, it was a rare entity in the country. Selling innovative products required significant additional investments in marketing, while services and trading provided easier options for revenue generation. Unless the government becomes a large customer, the Indian market remains too small in many domains to sustain product companies.

While the private sector remained lukewarm to the idea of R&D, government investments grew over long periods of time. According to the Economic Survey 2025, India's Gross Expenditure on Research and Development (GERD) increased from ₹60,196 crore in 2011 to ₹1,27,381 crore in 2021. Yet, because the country's economy also grew, it was still at 0.64% of GDP. The private sector contributes just over one-third of this investment. In developed economies, the private sector contributes at least two-thirds of the total R&D investment. The Bush model of basic research followed by technology development didn't work in India because the private sector had no interest in using the fruits of research. The markets were immature and the risks too high. Academic research itself was not market-driven, even in areas where the commercial potential was high. There weren't professional rewards for commercial successes of research.

In his Nobel Lecture in 1956, William Shockley – the co-inventor of the transistor effect – made a serious critique of Bush's division of research into basic and applied. "It is frequently said that having a more-or-less specific practical goal in mind will degrade the quality of research. I do not believe that this is necessarily the case," he said as soon as he began his lecture, most of which was a defence of goal-oriented 'basic research', with examples from the physics of semiconductors. He specifically derided the derogatory use of terms such as basic, applied, academic, and industrial. For him, and for his colleagues in several private companies, there was no hard separation between the two kinds of research.

It was an era when American companies did a lot of research driven by curiosity. These researchers rubbed shoulders with others who were developing products, resulting in a free exchange of ideas. There were times when the two were the same person. Bell Labs, where Shockley worked initially, was the best exemplar of this principle. Shockley's reputation went down later because of his racially charged views on intelligence. Gradually, many American companies refocused their R&D around specific business units, thereby reducing curiosity-based research in the corporate sector. Private companies continued to fund research in universities. According to the U.S. National Science Board science and engineering indicators of 2024, the business sector funded 36% of 'basic research'.

In some ways, Vannevar Bush achieved precisely that through his report, although he made every attempt to argue the opposite. His report eventually brought three entities – government, industry and academia – to work together, and thereby actually brought basic and applied research together. However, implicitly, Bush had provided academic scientists with no responsibility to ensure the exploitation of their work for societal impact. In practice, this was followed in spirit not in America but in Europe and other continents. India, specifically, followed this principle for over five decades, with academic research almost always ending with the publication of research papers. Even in engineering.

With the need to solve big problems very quickly, the divisions between scientists and engineers have broken down in the 21st century. Tackling climate change involves understanding complex atmospheric phenomena, which in turn requires researching the physics of the atmosphere and the ocean and several interconnected processes. It needs understanding of ecosystems, how changing temperatures can affect biodiversity and the distribution of species. It requires developing renewable energy, carbon capture and storage, which involves physics as well as engineering. It involves assessing the economic costs of a warming Earth, the response of communities and study of migration patterns, spread of diseases, and so on. Applications merge seamlessly with research meant to understand nature, with the two often reinforcing each other.

A casual look at future technologies reinforces the seamless nature of fundamental and applied research. Quantum technologies require the use of both high science and engineering, sometimes by the same person. Development of artificial intelligence requires science and engineering to similar degrees, apart from technology to keep the energy budgets down. Future therapies are interdisciplinary, with close interplay between science, medicine and engineering. Any sustainable technology requires the use of basic and applied research, not to speak of understanding supply chains and consumer preferences. In all these instances, research functions as one seamless activity. Even cosmology, a field with seemingly no applications, requires complex engineering that can spill over into areas like medicine. Artificial separations only manage to slow down the scientific endeavour.

The budget of the NSF is now in danger of being cut by a significant margin, probably by half, a fact that the scientific world views with alarm. The generous funding of research in America didn't just help the country remain ahead of competition. It also provided a steady stream of knowledge for all countries to build on. The rest of the world is now stepping up their contribution to research, both to fill a void that may be left by America and as a means of solving their own problems. China increased its investments consistently over three decades and is now the second-largest investor in science (see graphic). Europe, South Korea, Japan, and India are looking to increase their share of research investments. These cultures come with differing sensibilities and attitudes to science. They do not follow the philosophy that drove America so far.

Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, Americans had been obsessed with the notion of an expanding geographical frontier. Bush repurposed this idea into notions of an intellectual frontier that always expands, even if the geographical frontier doesn't. Asian countries have no such notions or aspirations. They expect science to produce economic growth and solve social problems, apart from providing strategic benefits. So, they now see science as a lifesaver rather than as an endless frontier.

See also:

Mind the gap in science funding
'Future of science in India is bright'
'AI lacks a conceptual grasp'
'The whole world should team up'