Basic research conducted by America’s universities is crucial to our world-class entrepreneurial culture. How do we know this? Let’s take a short tour through the White House.
The venture capitalist David Sacks of Craft Ventures runs the White House’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. Scott Kupor of Andreessen Horowitz is the nominee to run the Office of Personnel Management, and Sriram Krishnan, from the same firm, is a policy adviser on artificial intelligence. They have all successfully financed companies in the digital economy. The infrastructure beneath those businesses — the foundational internet protocols known as TCP/IP — was developed in part by the computer scientist Vint Cerf, (Stanford University).
Andreessen Horowitz has been active in biotechnology, as has Vice President JD Vance’s former firms, Mithril Capital and Narya. The field owes much of its success to the decoding of the human genome, which has transformed modern medicine in areas such as prenatal diagnostics and cancer treatment. Who do we have to thank? On the long list: Marshall Nirenberg (of the National Institutes of Health), Har Gobind Khorana (University of Wisconsin, Madison) and Robert Holley (Cornell University), who were recognized by the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and later Paul Berg (Stanford), Walter Gilbert (Harvard) and Frederick Sanger (Cambridge), honored with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980. More recently, Jennifer Doudna (University of California, Berkeley) shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing CRISPR, the gene editing technology.
Few of Elon Musk’s companies would have been possible without the energy density and stability of lithium-ion batteries. In 2019, John B. Goodenough (University of Texas, Austin) shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with two others for the work that helped develop them.
And what about the president himself? President Trump’s recent physical exam revealed elevated cholesterol. It’s a reasonable bet he’s taking a statin, as are more than 90 million Americans. Few drug classes have done more to improve public health. Discoveries about how the body metabolizes cholesterol — which would lead to the invention of statins — earned Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein (University of Texas, Southwestern) the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
One would think that venture capitalists, especially those with ties to the Trump administration, would be the most forceful champions of America’s research universities, given how much these institutions have fueled our careers and fortunes. Instead, many of us are scratching our heads as to why officials from the industry have turned their backs while the government chaotically terminates funding for this work. Harvard and Columbia have been in the headlines, but the hatchet has also fallen on Michigan State in the Midwest and the University of Hawaii farther west. It is as if the V.C.s in Washington had just enjoyed a fine meal in Silicon Valley and decided to skip out on the check.
