Abundance

by Ezra Klein

The key to the rebuild was that the people in charge of the rebuild could act.

When the center lost its state funding, she sold her car for nine hundred British pounds and sewed the cash into her daughter’s teddy bear to elude Hungarian currency-control laws. She moved to Pennsylvania with her family.

With human-edited mRNA, she thought, scientists could theoretically turn human cells into factories for producing any protein under the sun—to repair organs, or to fight disease—and then, poof, the therapy would disappear from the body without a trace.

For two years, she submitted a new grant application almost every month.

Throughout these years of failure and disappointment, Karikó stayed motivated. She loved science: the painstaking discovery of the new, the long and winding road out of ignorance. On her wall hung a Leonardo da Vinci quote that offered inspiration during the dark years when the rejections piled one on top of another: Experiments never err, only your expectations do.

By the mid-1990s, Katalin Karikó’s future as a scientist—and the future of mRNA science itself—had hit a dead end.

A year into the pandemic, researchers were still debating the most elemental questions, such as: Do masking rules even work?

To bring the pandemic to heel, the world needed something more universally applicable than a rule, or a law, or a border control policy. We needed a global fix: a medicine that would achieve immunity protection at scale.

Unlike most behavioral interventions, the vaccines were immediately and obviously effective at reducing mortality for adults in every age cohort and in every country.

Here was a problem we couldn’t regulate, or subsidize, or merely build our way out of. No number of masks for shoppers or plastic dividers in restaurants could do what the vaccines did.

Invention—the act of solving problems by bringing new products, systems, and ideas into existence—is the basis of human progress.

The world of 2025 is therefore just three modern lifetimes away from the world of 1785—three eighty-year-olds holding hands across time.

What principally distinguishes the past from the present is not biology, nor psychology, but rather technology. If the world has changed, it’s because we have changed the world. Modern liberal politics is made possible by invention. Almost every product or service that liberals seek to make universal today depends on technology that did not exist three lifetimes ago—or, in some cases, half a lifetime ago.

It is tempting to say that, with these essentials already in existence, it is time for society to focus at last only on the fair distribution of existing resources rather than the creation of new ideas. But this would be worse than a failure of imagination; it would be a kind of generational theft. When we claim the world cannot improve, we are stealing from the future something invaluable, which is the possibility of progress.

The world is filled with problems we cannot solve without more invention.

If disease is a universe of mysteries, we have scarcely explored one minor solar system of its cosmos. Inventions that may seem outlandish today may soon feel essential to our lives.

As unrealistic, or even ludicrous, as some of these ideas might seem, they are not much more ludicrous than a rejected, ignored, and unfunded mRNA theory that came out of nowhere to save millions of lives in a pandemic. To make these things possible and useful in our lifetime requires a political movement that takes invention more seriously.

Technology expands the value of universalist policies. If progressives underrate the centrality of invention in their politics, conservatives often underrate the necessity of government policy in invention.

But many of Silicon Valley’s most important achievements have relied on government largesse.

Musk has become a lightning rod in debates over whether technological progress comes from public policy or private ingenuity. But he is a walking advertisement for what public will and private genius can unlock when they work together. Beyond merely regulating technology, the state is often a key actor in its creation.

Federal science spending is so fundamental to the overall economy that a 2023 study found that government-funded research and development have been responsible for 25 percent of productivity growth in the US since the end of World War II.

Waiting to use the photocopier, she struck up a conversation with an immunologist named Drew Weissman.

When they teamed up, their partnership felt like kismet. “Each of us had exactly the knowledge and skills that the other needed,” Karikó wrote.

But progress was painfully slow, and the NIH rejected practically all of their grant applications.

But the scientific community largely ignored their discovery.

The night before the paper came out, Weissman told Karikó that “starting tomorrow, your phone is going to ring off the hook.”26 He was wrong. In the years following publication, Karikó received only two speaking invitations.

If mRNA was failing to impress the scientific establishment, its reception in the private sector was a different story. In the US, Karikó and Weissman’s work caught the attention of a brash group of postdoctoral researchers, professors, and venture capitalists.

“Drug development is highly regulated, so people don’t like to deviate from paths with which they have experience.” BioNTech and Moderna pressed on for years without approved products, thanks to the support of investors and philanthropy groups, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

On January 11, 2020, Chinese researchers published the genetic sequence of the virus. Within forty-eight hours, Moderna’s mRNA vaccine recipe was finalized.

In 2023, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, who struggled for years to get a dollar of funding from the NIH, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for a technology that saved millions of lives.

Karikó said she “never got a dime” from the US government to directly support her mRNA projects in her years at Penn.

At the highest levels, American science has become biased against the very thing that drives its progress: the art of taking bold risks.

The last few years have witnessed the remarkable emergence of new gene therapies, drugs to thwart diabetes and obesity, and a suite of artificial intelligence tools—such as ChatGPT from OpenAI and DeepMind from Alphabet, the parent company of Google—that can perform a wide range of complex tasks, from writing essays and code to predicting the shape of proteins.

From medicine to agriculture, basic science is becoming less productive.

“In heart-disease research, the number of journal publications has increased, and the number of clinical trials has soared, but the quantity of lives saved or extended has slowed significantly.

First, nobody is born an expert. Second, total expertise in any given domain of knowledge—say, physics or chemistry—grows over time, as we unravel the mysteries of the natural world.

Jones called this escalating challenge “the burden of knowledge.”

Almost any high school chemistry student could replicate this experiment today (please don’t), but they shouldn’t expect it to break open any new scientific frontier.

Element 117, tennessine, was discovered only when a Tennessee laboratory created an isotope of the rare metal berkelium and sent twenty-two milligrams of the radioactive material to Russia, where a separate group of scientists at a nuclear research facility hit it with a beam of 6 trillion calcium ions per second for 150 days and used specialized equipment to detect the faintest whispers of tennessine flickering into existence for less than a second.

Such research—called genome-wide association studies—takes hundreds of geneticists, neuroscientists, computer programmers, assistants, and more working together in organized teams over many years to get us one small step closer to solving the riddle of schizophrenia. It is absurd to imagine that one person, even as brilliant as Gregor Mendel, could do all this alone in his backyard.

Meanwhile, recruiting brilliant immigrants to the US has for decades been the “secret ingredient” to America’s success in science and technology, according to Jeremy Neufeld, a fellow at the Institute for Progress.

In fact, in the same way that throwing housing vouchers into a market with insufficient supply raises home prices, throwing more money into a flawed science system might exacerbate its problems.

In 2012, Gregory Petsko, a biochemist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, published a satirical essay in which King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain mock Christopher Columbus for not collecting preliminary data about the voyage across the Atlantic. When King Ferdinand suggests that the explorer try a shorter trip—say, to Portugal—Columbus exclaims, “Everybody knows that Portugal is immediately west of Spain.… What will you learn from that?” “Not much, if anything,” Queen Isabella responds. “But it can’t fail, now, can it? Besides, you’ve sailed to Portugal before, so the Study Section would know you can do it.”

Before the twentieth century, science and invention had largely been a job for solo entrepreneurs.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Thomas Edison proved a new model: the corporate research lab.

Edison’s team-based success became too obvious to ignore, and other companies copied him, with magical results.

Meanwhile, the university scientists who worked outside these labs mostly relied on funding from private philanthropies, such as the Rockefeller Foundation.

Washington played almost no role in supporting innovation before the 1900s, outside of a few programs that subsidized research i...

In June 1940, as the German army invaded and occupied Paris, the eminent engineer Vannevar Bush delivered grave news to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in an urgent White House meeting: America was technologically unprepared to take on the Axis powers.

Roosevelt approved the creation of an agency that grew to become the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD)—a multibillion-dollar hydra of wartime science and technology operations that supported the work of thousands of scientists and engineers.