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The \u201cGolden Age of Science\u201d had no scientists. For nearly three centuries, discoverers like Darwin and Copernicus, still wrestling to break free from Greek thought, called themselves \u201cnatural philosophers.\u201d They made discoveries based on their own curiosity. The purest of them answered to no one: Robert Boyle had an earl\u2019s fortune, Henry Cavendish a banking one, Charles Darwin a family inheritance that bought him 20 years to dwell on barnacles.<\/p>\n
This era of the \u201cgentleman scientist,\u201d of course, was limited to those with wealth, but that was considered a kind of purity\u2014that nothing but curiosity fueled their discoveries.<\/p>\n
So when the word \u201cscientist\u201d was coined in 1833, half in jest, many of the men it described refused to answer to it. They could see what it implied: a salary, an institution\u2014a profession, with all the red tape and standards the 19th century\u2019s Enlightenment was so eager to build. Indeed, science would go on to get departments, degrees, grant applications, and, eventually, a federal budget.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration wants to bring back this era of the gentleman scientist. In a 123-page report published Tuesday, titled \u201cScience: A New Golden Age,\u201d the White House argued the professionalized machine those stuffy Victorians built had calcified into exactly what the gentlemen feared, a system in which researchers spend half their working hours on paperwork. Its solution is to fund the person, not the institution.<\/p>\n
They want fellowships to follow particular scientists, as opposed to sticking to a university; they want reviewers to get \u201cgolden tickets,\u201d meaning the power for a single believer to fund an unconventional proposal the panel would\u2019ve otherwise killed; they want \u201cfast grants for agencies.\u201d They also want the government to charter new institutions outside the universities entirely, called \u201cX-labs,\u201d small, focused outfits built to chase a single hard problem and then dissolve, the way a Victorian gentleman might have devoted a decade to one obsession and moved on.<\/p>\n
\u201cToo much of our research enterprise has come to serve itself rather than the scientists within it,\u201d the authors wrote.<\/p>\n
But the report\u2019s gentleman scientist has a tool\u2014nay, a colleague\u2014the Victorians couldn\u2019t dream of. The document argues AI should become a \u201cnew instrument of scientific discovery,\u201d a partner that will help scientific enterprise maximize the \u201cmarginal returns to intelligence.\u201d The White House put $5 billion behind the idea after the report\u2019s release, though The Wall Street Journal calculates the overall cost of the overhaul at $200 billion.<\/p>\n
Indeed, lay scientists and mathematicians have recently made some breakthroughs in their fields with large language models. An Anthropic employee and mathematician recently overturned a nearly century-old axiom with the help of Claude, prompting Garry Tan, the founder of startup-funder Y-Combinator, to announce the era of the gentleman scientist is back.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Many scientists lauded the proposal on social media for its depth. Alec Stapp, a cofounder of the Institute for Progress, a think tank whose recommendations appear in the report, praised its funding experiments, but said it misses on international scientists\u2014a nod to the administration\u2019s continued attack on immigration.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing the top destination for global science talent is America\u2019s superpower,\u201d Stapp wrote on X. If scientists are leaving the U.S. after grad school, he argued, the answer is to make it easier for them to stay.<\/p>\n
Some academics were less pleased. Steven Durlauf, an economist at the University of Chicago, wrote on X the report shifts support from basic to applied research in a way that \u201cmisunderstands the scientific enterprise,\u201d and its proposals undermine peer review \u201cin favor of political control and oversight.\u201d Durlauf signed an open letter opposing what it calls the administration\u2019s \u201cassault on science,\u201d which now has more than 10,000 signatories, including two Nobel laureates.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs scientists, we are committed to a discipline that is decentralized and self-scrutinizing,\u201d the letter reads. \u201cInstead, this administration mandates a centralized system serving the political beliefs of the President and the whims of those in power.\u201d<\/p>\n
#Trump #administration #revamping #era #gentleman #scientist #Itll #cost #billion<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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