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The United States needs a department of technology and science policy

Two former NIH directors call for a cabinet-level department to formulate long-range science policy and oversee technology development.
  1. Harold Varmus

    1. Harold Varmus is professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center, New York. He directed the US National Institutes of Health from 1993 to 1999.

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  2. Elias Zerhouni

    1. Elias Zerhouni is professor emeritus of radiology and biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, and directed the US National Institutes of Health from 2002 to 2008.

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Unlike most other advanced economies, the United States has typically relied on a diversity of decentralized federal science agencies to design and conduct the government’s research programmes. With funding decisions made by several congressional committees and with minimal oversight from the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the White House, this approach has been enormously successful.

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Nature 600, 30-32 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-03543-x

References

  1. Bush, V. Science — The Endless Frontier (US Government Printing Office, 1945).

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  2. US National Research Council. Allocating Federal Funds for Science and Technology (National Academies Press, 1995).

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  3. Kline, R. ‘The U.S. needs a federal department of science and technology.’ Sci. Am. (20 February 2021).

  4. Flagg, M. & Garg, A. Issues Sci. Technol. Fall, 51–59 (2021).

  5. Stolberg, S. G. ‘Biden’s 10-year pandemic preparedness plan includes a full-time ‘Mission Control’ office.’ The New York Times (3 September 2021).

  6. Rao, R. ‘The Endless Frontier Act Could Drastically Change NSF.’ IEEE Spectrum (1 June 2021).

  7. Collins, F. S., Schwetz, T. A., Tabak, L. A. & Lander, E. S. Science 373, 165–167 (2021).

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  8. US National Research Council. Convergence: Facilitating Transdisciplinary Integration of Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Engineering, and Beyond (National Academies Press, 2014).

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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