Public investment in science has long been the backbone of American prosperity — a social contract that recognizes research not merely as an intellectual pursuit, but as infrastructure for human flourishing. When the U.S. funded the basic research that defeated polio, launched the Apollo missions and laid the groundwork for the internet, we were making collective choices about the kind of society we wanted to build.
The numbers tell a compelling story: Every $1 we invest in the National Institutes of Health generates $2.56 in economic output, amounting to almost $95 billion in nationwide activity last year alone. Nearly every new drug approved by the FDA between 2010 and 2019 relied on research backed by the National Institutes of Health.
The above excerpt was originally published in The Hill.
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