Nine Federally Funded Scientific Breakthroughs That Changed Everything

Science seldom works in straight lines. Sometimes it’s “applied” to solve specific problems: Let’s put people on the moon; we need a Covid vaccine. Much of the time it’s “basic,” aimed at understanding, say, cell division or the physics of cloud formation, with the hope that — somehow, someday — the knowledge will prove useful. Basic science is applied science that hasn’t been applied yet.

That’s the premise on which the United States, since World War II, has invested heavily in science. The government spends $200 billion annually on research and development, knowing that payoffs might be decades away; that figure would drop sharply under President Trump’s proposed 2026 budget. “Basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress,” Vannevar Bush, who laid out the postwar schema for government research support, wrote in a 1945 report to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Look no further than Google, which got its start in 1994 with a $4 million federal grant to help build digital libraries; the company is now a $2 trillion verb.

Here are nine more life-altering advances that government investment made possible.

GPS

The first commercial GPS unit, a $3,000 brick for hikers and boaters, was made in 1988. The technology is now so ubiquitous — in cars, planes, phones, smartwatch running apps — that its existence can seem almost preordained.

In fact its path was long, indirect and paved with federal money. Start in 1957: Two researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory realized that they could pinpoint the whereabouts of Sputnik, Russia’s new orbiting satellite, from the changing frequency of its radio signal as it moved. Now reverse that logic: If a fixed receiver on Earth can locate a moving satellite, then a satellite with known coordinates should be able to find a “lost” receiver on Earth, its location unknown.