Have we finally come to the end of the frontier?

Published on January 14th, 2026

On 25 July 1945, as World War II was nearing its end, Vannevar Bush presented to US President Harry Truman a report that would become the foundational text of science policy in the west.

‘Science: The Endless Frontier’ made the case for publicly funded basic research. Bush argued industry and government are too focused on the application of existing science to generate new knowledge where it is most needed: battling disease, supporting national security, and spurring economic growth. Public funds, provided to universities and research institutes, could fill this gap and repair what is, in effect, a profound market failure.

Bush’s report constituted a social contract between society and the scientific community: industry would look after bringing innovative products to market, but the ideas, knowledge, and inventions that fuel innovation need support and this support should come from the public because the benefits will accrue to society more broadly. Paraphrasing Bush’s own words, society would invest in a form of scientific capital from which practical applications, and so economic innovation and expanded well-being, would eventually be drawn. 

Eighty years on, this arrangement has clearly paid off. Life expectancy across the world has more than doubled since 1900 and two thirds of economic growth between 1995 and 2013 are attributable to scientific research according to the European Commission (2017), with the return on investment being as high as 20%. 

Yet it won’t have escaped anyone’s notice that the social contract between science and society is under strain. This is most obvious in the US where the Trump administration has cut funding to the National Science Foundation, the major funder of non-health related research, by over 50% according to the New York Times.  But the strain has been growing for some time, with calls to rethink or reform the social contract to better manage environmental  and industrial challenges. 

The central tension motivating calls for reform stems from society’s desire for research that is relevant and scientist’s insistence that relevance comes from freedom of enquiry. In practice, the political class is increasingly impatient with universities and the academic research they support, arguing they have not lived up to their promise to provide solutions or be engines of innovation. Scientists counter that solutions are or will be available, just in ways that are hard to predict because research is fundamentally a creative endeavour.  

The result is a growing estrangement between science and society that is stretching the contract to its breaking point. The defunding of federal research grants to US universities, even if motivated by a strongly partisan agenda, is the clearest evidence the social contract is dispensable. Similar signals, though not as blatantly partisan, are everywhere. Canadian universities are confronting deficits, hiring freezes, restrictions on capital spending, and stalled federal grant funding for research. New Zealand’s Marsden Fund, the country’s main source for curiosity-driven research, cut all funding to social sciences late last year. And even 442 year old Edinburgh University has eliminated 350 positions, restricted hiring, and paused academic promotions. 

Does it matter? Maybe the money we spend on research could be used more effectively and more immediately elsewhere. University-based research cost Canadian taxpayers approximately $644 CAD each in 2022 (the last date for which reliable figures are available). Yet the cost of groceries for a family of four in Canada is expected to be over $800 CAD more expensive in 2025 compared to 2024. It seems increasingly hard to make the case for public investment in research that may or may not be important at some indefinite time in the future. 

Nevertheless, success stories abound. We need only look to how mRNA vaccines were developed and deployed during the COVID-19 pandemic for reassurance: decades of research, in both universities and the private sector, often ignored and sometimes derided as unimportant or low impact, became essential for saving millions of lives in record time. Many other stories like this can be told. The scientific capital invested through the social contract does eventually pay off. 

Maybe the real question is can the social contract work better? By better I mean more practical solutions to improve our lives faster, while still nurturing the kind of undirected, curiosity driven research that, without having any foreseeable practical impact, could prove essential in the future. Here are three suggestions. 

The first acknowledges Bush’s model of innovation, which was, in essence, ‘understand first, apply later’, is almost certainly wrong. Pathways to innovation are far more complex and circuitous than the linear path from lab bench to market imagined by Bush. Impactful solutions require sustained collaboration and commitment across all dimensions of the innovation ecosystem including both public and private sectors as well as the various actors in both spaces such as academia, industry, government, NGOs and community groups. 

Second, be outcome and impact oriented. Setting goals is an effective way of rallying support to a cause and focusing decision-making on how to get there. The development of mRNA vaccines rested on basic research done over 30 plus years but took the urgency of a global crisis to be realized within months of the first SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence being published. Surely we can do the same again. Reducing the scourge of pathogenic disease could be one topic. The transition to net zero and sustainable, renewable energy could be another. Intelligent and safe use of AI to achieve both goals would be a third. 

Third, recognize that curiosity-driven, blue-skies research is not a luxury, it is a necessity. Were one to have laid a bet on the cause of a pandemic, almost certainly the safe money would have been on influenza rather than coronaviruses. We need researchers studying the uncommon and the arcane, both because there is beauty in knowledge for knowledge’s sake and because that is where innovation comes from. This knowledge may one day prove useful in ways we - nor for that matter any AI engine - can imagine. Call it a venture capital or de-risked model of investment in research. Not all the ideas will pay off but some will. Invest in the process, and the returns will follow. 

Copyright: © 2026 [author(s)]. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in Frontiers Policy Labs is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. 

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