Science not only provides the foundation for understanding disease but also helps address a wide range of societal challenges. Its impact extends across critical areas of modern life, from advancing computing and transportation infrastructure to developing new medicines and improving access to clean water in underserved communities. These innovations not only enhance the quality of life but also drive economic growth.
For this reason, business leaders strongly support federal investment in basic research. While such research often carries uncertainty, it generates the foundational discoveries that enable new industries, strengthen existing companies, and improve lives on a broad scale.
On this page, you will find links to resources that explore the economic benefits of scientific research, highlight business support for these investments, and showcase the many medical breakthroughs that have emerged from basic research, advances that we now rely on every day, often without realizing their origins.
Everything You Need to Understand About American Science Funding
Economic Benefits of Basic Research
Public investment in basic research — particularly through the NIH — delivers strong economic returns while improving health and extending lives, all at a relatively low cost to taxpayers. This article explores how these investments drive innovation, reduce long-term healthcare costs, and shape a healthier, more productive future.
NIH’s Role in Sustaining the U.S. Economy
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the world’s premier health research agency, driving scientific advances that save lives and improve health. But the NIH is also an economic powerhouse, creating jobs and fueling economic activity.
Value & Funding of Basic Research in the U.S.
Jobs in America depend on a strong economy, and America’s economy is increasingly founded on science and technology. America’s technological leadership relies on basic research. But in recent years, the scientific community has inadequately conveyed the importance of science in general and basic research in particular.
What Basic Research Has Accomplished
NIH-Funded Discoveries that Impact Human Health
With an annual budget of roughly US$47 billion, the NIH dwarfs the rest of the world’s funders of biomedical research. The World RePORT project, which tracks global health-research spending, showed that, in 2022, the NIH spent 25 times more on grants than did the next biggest funder.
Science Discovery Stories
Human Diseases That We Need to Conquer
A non-comprehensive list of diseases we still need to cure: acquired diseases, cancers, circulatory diseases…
Fundamental Science Behind Today's Important Medicines
There is much debate about the value to society of fundamental research. In a time of constrained resources, does such work need justification according to its practical outcomes?
Business Leaders Support Federal Funding of Basic Research
Business Backs the Basics
From the Wall Street Journal: Long-term basic research, substantially funded by the U.S. government, underlies some of industry’s most profitable innovations. Global positioning system technology, now a staple in every mobile phone, emerged from Cold War Defense Department research and decades of National Science Foundation explorations.
Business Leaders Agree
Display Ad from the Wall Street Journal: Federal Funding of basic scientific research is an investment in our prosperity, security and well-being.
