Authors Rebecca Blank, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Brad Schwartz, CEO of Morgridge Institute for Research in Madison, call for a scientific renaissance regarding American policy choices. Their article “The ‘Ice Road Truckers of science’ and why we need them”, featured in The Hill, reminisces on a time when American science dominated the world because of the US government’s commitment to funding basic research at a level higher than all other countries. That commitment made Nobel Prize winning discoveries possible and resulted in tremendous gains for the global community. Blank and Schwartz warn that if American policy choices continue to “sacrifice the opportunity to make [such] discoveries, then [America] will become one of the nations that must figure out how to make someone else’s inventions cheaper, instead of leading the market by capitalizing on new knowledge.”
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