With the Trump administration’s mass firings from federal agencies and slashing of funding to universities and research hospitals, many are worrying about the future of American innovation. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is eagerly wooing the scientists and researchers either fleeing or choosing not to come to America: The European Union launched a campaign earlier this month to attract them with grants and new policy plans.
This global scramble for R&D talent reflects a reality explored in a 2019 Fortune feature: Inventing things has gotten incredibly expensive and labor-intensive, and more so each year. Citing a recent paper from MIT and Stanford, Ryan Bradley explained that the “remarkable, near-exponential growth since the beginning of the industrial age” was driven in part by innovation—and that world-shifting, economy-enhancing, life-changing innovation was slowing, due to a range of factors.
Moore’s law holds that processing power on a computer chip doubles approximately every two years—meaning that the devices we carry in our pockets wield the computing power it took warehouses to hold in the 1970s. Bradley wrote that in 2019’s innovation economy, “[t]he computers may be much smaller, but now it’s the people driving their advances that fill many, many buildings.”
“And,” Bradley writes, “just as we’ve moved from single computers to supercomputers, we’ve moved from a culture of individual researchers making breakthroughs to one of massive teams of highly educated and compensated experts attempting to solve far more complicated problems. We’re way past the low-hanging fruit, trying to build the tools and systems that will get us to the tippy-top of the tree.”
This doesn’t mean there are no good ideas left to discover, Bradley wrote; we might just have to look in new places for them. He cited one of the study’s researchers’ analogy of pumping for oil until a field is tapped out, while there may be “a whole new oilfield out there we haven’t found yet.”
The most promising new fields for innovation that Bradley mentioned proved prescient: artificial intelligence, of course, which has reached a tipping point in the last couple of years, and is rapidly becoming an economy-shifting force. And gene-editing, particularly the tool known as CRISPR.
This week saw a major, and heartwarming, breakthrough in that field: A baby with a rare genetic disorder was cured with a custom gene-editing treatment at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. It’s the kind of innovation that feels like a miracle.
