Nine state -funded scientific breakthroughs that changed everything

Science rarely works in straight lines. Sometimes it is “applied” to solve certain problems: let us put us on the moon; We need a Covid vaccine. Most of the time it is “fundamental”, aims to understand the cell division or the physics of the cloud formation with the hope that knowledge will prove to be useful. Basic science is applied science that has not yet been used.

This is the premise for which the United States have strongly invested in science since World War II. The government spends 200 billion US dollars for research and development annually because the withdrawals could be removed for decades. This number would drop sharply under President Trump’s proposed budget of 2026. “Basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress,” wrote Vannevar Bush, who created the post -war scheme for the support of state research, in a report from 1945 to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. No further search than Google, which started in 1994 with a federal scholarship of 4 million US dollars to build digital libraries. The company is now a 2 -billion dollar verb.

Here are nine other life -changing progress that have made government investments possible.

GPS

The first commercial GPS unit, a brick for hikers and boaters of 3,000 US dollars, was manufactured in 1988. The technology is now so omnipresent -in cars, airplanes, telephones, smartwatch -Running -apps -that its existence can appear almost predetermined.

In fact, his path was long, indirectly and paved with federal money. Start in 1957: Two researchers at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory recognized that they could determine the whereabouts of Sputnik, Russia’s new, all -round satellite, from the changing frequency of his radio signal during movement. Now, conversely, this logic: If a fixed recipient on earth can locate a moving satellite, a satellite with known coordinates should be able to find a “lost” recipient on earth whose location is unknown.

This idea became transit in 1958, a navigation system to pursue nuclear subs, which was developed by John’s Hopkins and the Ministry of Defense. Then the Navstar Global Positioning System came for a broader military use from 1978; In 1983, commercial airlines were also authorized to use it. All of this required newer satellites; Atom clocks for better accuracy; Rakets to start everything into the orbit; Research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and in the Naval Research Laboratory; and government contracts to companies such as Rockwell International, General Dynamics and Boeing. Now it’s just GPS.

Diabetes and obesity medication

Today, millions of Americans take Ozempische, Wortovy, Mounjaro or one of the other new blockbuster diabetes and weight loss drugs. Many thanks to Uncle Sam – and a slow, toxic lizard that can only survive a few meals a year.

In 1980, Dr. Jean-Pierre Raufman, a researcher who studied insect and reptile toxins at the National Institutes of Health that Venom had a pronounced effect on the pancreas from the Gila monster and prompted him to release a digestive enzyme. This aroused Dr. John Eng, an endocrinologist from the Veterans Affair Medical Center at the Bronx, who with Dr. Raufman has worked together to insulate and identify a new connection, exendin-4 in the poison of the lizard. A synthetic version of the connection that stimulates insulin production and slowed down the gastric emptying was approved in 2005 for the treatment of diabetes.

It was the first drug in the now booming class of medication known as GLP-1 receptor agonists who are examined for their potential for the treatment of a variety of diseases, including kidney disease, Alzheimer’s and alcohol consumption disorders.

Quantum points

If you read this on a screen, look at quantum points, billions of them.

Quantum dots are tiny crystals of semiconductors, 10 nanometers (billionths of one meter) or smaller and have become a main support for entertainment electronics. As Nano, they are subject to the strange laws of quantum mechanics and absorb and make light more efficient than other materials.

Their colors are alive, ideal for televisions, smartphones and computer monitors. They fluorescent to identify cancer cells. They are in clear windows that serve as solar collectors. You can see microwave radiation in military sensors. Quantum points that were first baked in 1980 in 1980 became mass-producing with the financing of Nist, the US Army Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies and other agencies. In 2023, three scientists, including one with chemist who was supported by Army Grants, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the Discovery and Development of Quantum Points.

Sign language dictionary

When William Stokoe, an English literary professor, arrived at Gallaudet College in 1955, many schools asked deaf students to read lips and speak loudly instead of using sign language that was released as raw or less communication form. But to Dr. Stokoe, who was not deaf himself, seemed to be dynamic and complex.

In the following years he used grants from the National Science Foundation to carry out a detailed study of the linguistic structure of the sign language in cooperation with two colleagues at today’s Gallaudet University and to create the first dictionary of the American sign language. Dr. Stokoe’s research laid the foundation for the recognition of ASL as a full language.

Captcha

Are you a robot? Probably not. We know this – “we” are a website that you visit that you ask this question – thanks to a security technology called captcha, a digital puzzle that provides non -human bots that may try to disturb a billing system or another valuable database.

Captcha, which stands for the fully automated public Turing test to tell computers and people, was invented by people in 2000, especially Luis von Ahn, an computer scientist whose research at Carnegie Mellon University was supported by NSF subsidies. People are better than computers when they decrypt letters and words; Early Captchas showed a picture of distorted text that the viewer had to enter correctly to continue. (In 2007 Dr. Ahn worked with the New York Times to digitize the archives for a century.)

Since then it has been an algorithm race with increasingly demanding captchas that have increasingly demanding captcha solving bots. Dr.

Life without a screw worm

Heard of the screw worm? Probably not, at least when they are Americans; In 1966, the United States became freely explained by screwing worms after a concerted federal effort to study and exterminate agricultural scourge.

The new globe worm is the larvae shape or maggot of the new world -blowing fly, Cochliomyia Hominivorax, which resembles a house fly in size and charmelosity. A parasite, he dug into living meat and feeds. For decades it was plagued by cattle and other cattle and cost the agricultural industry hundreds of millions of dollars a year. (It also cost the occasional human life cruelly-hominivorax means “man-eating”.)

Fortunately, the female Blowfly friends was only once in their 30 days of life. In 1950, scientists from the US Department of Agriculture recognized that they could deceive the females if they could create sterile men and get the population out of existence. Sterile insect technology worked two decades and 750 million US dollars later. Since then, the technology has been adapted and used abroad against other agricultural and disease -free insects.

Bladeless Lasik surgery

An almost terrible laboratory error led to the progress in Lasik surgery, an operation that perform hundreds of thousands of Americans every year in order to shape their corneals and to correct their view.

In 1993, Deto Du, doctor at the center for ultra -fast optical science of the University of Michigan, briefly his safety glasses, while working with the laboratory’s femtosecond laser, and a stray pulse from laser light hit his eyes. A femtosecond laser emits strong light impulses that only hold a 1 quadrillion of one second; It happens more like an ultraPrecise jackhammer than, for example, a knife blade. The accident did not lead to major visual problems, but Dr. Ron Kurtz, who examined the eye of the student, was impressed by the clean work of the laser.

In the following years, Dr. Kurtz with Gérard Mourou and his colleagues in the Optical Science Center, which was financed by the National Science Foundation, together to transform the laser into a ophthalmological instrument. Her work led to a fold -free LASIK surgery that uses a femtosecond laser instead of a blade to move into the eye of a patient.

Infant

The intensive care unit for newborns can be a cold and insulating place where premature babies are kept in incubators and the life -saving care can sometimes contain endless poking and interrogation. In the past few decades, many Nicus have started to offer and promote more calming forms of touch, including the baby massage – an innovation that emerged from a random observation in a university councilor.

In the 1970s, Dr. Saul Schanberg and his colleagues at Duke University determine that the activity of an enzyme that was crucial for the growth and development of the rodents, which dampened the activity of an enzyme that was crucial for the growth and development of rodents. When the researchers, which were financed by the NIH, used a wet brush to stroke the rat puppies – simulated the way in which a mother rat licks their descendants, these growth markers returned normally.

Dr. Schanberg began with Tiffany Field, a psychologist at the University of Miami, who had studied tactile stimulation and infant development. Together and with additional NIH financial means, they showed that premature infants who regularly stroke and received massages were increased faster to weight and released from the hospital earlier than those who did not.

The dark

During the Apollo years, NASA not only wanted to go on the moon, but also return with rehearsals. The search for the perfect moon drill would ultimately deliver a product that became an integral part in American houses – and helped the residents to keep these houses properly and properly.

In order to collect soil tests under the surface of the moon, NASA had to arm its astronauts with a compact, light, cordless drill. That is why the agency Black & Decker has entered to develop the Apollo -Lunar surface drill.

“In the course of the development, Black & Decker used a specially developed computer program to optimize the design of the drill engine and to secure a minimal electricity consumption,” wrote the space agency in its edition of Spinoff from 1981, a publication that was devoted to products and innovations that benefit from the research and financing of NASA. The company’s work on the moon drill paved the way for the development of a series of cordless consumer goods products, including the Dustbuster, a hand -held vacuum cleaner that has defined a completely new category of cleaning products.