Without Science, America’s Prosperity Is At Risk

Scientists once thought illness was caused by “miasmas,” foul vapors that drifted through the air. For centuries, they were certain that the sun rotated around the Earth. Until the 1950s, they believed lobotomies were the best way to treat mental illness. 

Why did we stop believing these things? In each case, skeptics used the scientific method to produce data that disproved the incumbent theory. They hypothesized, experimented, observed, analyzed, iterated, and then published the results, precipitating a shift in our collective understanding of the world. 

Every great breakthrough in scientific history began with a “what if” that reached past established doctrine into the realm of possibility. Doubt and debate are the prisms that test our current ideas and help to generate new ones. Perhaps, then, it’s good that it’s now more popular than ever to be skeptical of science. 

Yet this most recent wave of skepticism is different. Its loudest voices are making evidence-free claims about COVID-19, climate change, and vaccines. Presenting personal opinions as though they are facts, with no regard for experiments or data, makes a mockery of the scientific method. 

This is profoundly dangerous. The scientific method is the most powerful tool humans have to change the world. It’s how we together convert the “unknown” to the “known,” resolving uncertainty and productively metabolizing scientific doubt when it arises. 

At its best, the scientific method consigns the worst fates that befall humans (debilitating illnesses, devastating diseases) to history. It heals the sick and feeds the hungry. Science makes miracles.

Read more: The Measles Surge Is Just the Beginning

In the wake of World War II, Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, wrote: “But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world.” 

American investments in science turned our country into the world’s economic, technological, and military superpower. We invented the telephone, the lightbulb, and the airplane; developed semiconductors and the Internet; and recently helped beat back a deadly pandemic. 

According to an estimate from the National Science Foundation, as much as 85% of all U.S. GDP growth since the end of World War II is attributable to advances in science and technology. 

The computer or smartphone you are reading this on would not exist but for the scientific method; the banana you ate for breakfast would have been wiped out by a devastating crop disease years ago; and the flu you had last week might have presaged your funeral this week. 

Without science, we would all be poorer, sicker, and less safe. 

If the scientific method is corrupted, we won’t just stop making new miracles; we’ll undo the proven discoveries of the past. Consider, for example, the increasing rejection in certain quarters of the science that led to mRNA vaccines and many childhood vaccines. Who’s to say the same pseudo-arguments won’t apply to life-saving cancer treatments, or to anesthesia, or to germ theory? 

It might sound alarmist to suggest that we could regress to 1900, when the average life expectancy in the U.S. was just over 47 years and pneumonia and influenza were the leading causes of death. But consider that measles—a deadly disease that was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000—will formally lose that designation if the 1,281 cases documented in the United States since the start of 2026 continue to spread in the weeks ahead. 

(For context, for the full year of 2025, there were a total of 2,283 confirmed measles cases reported in the U.S. The reported confirmed cases in the first two months of this year are already over half that number.) 

Ignoring the overwhelming evidence of vaccine efficacy is an abandonment of the scientific method.

At the same time that some in the U.S. are undermining the scientific method, the Chinese government has been investing heavily in it. In just the last decade, China has increased its spending on the scientific method through a 400-fold increase in biopharma research and development spending. China now treats a higher share of global biotech patents than the U.S., and has a similar number of novel medicines under development. 

If we continue to discredit the scientific method, the U.S. risks becoming an innovation desert, reliant on other countries for new medicines and technologies and helpless to protect our own people in times of crisis, ranging from biological warfare to the next pandemic. 

Even more terrifyingly, we risk our health. We risk not having an answer when disease strikes, and losing infants and children to diseases their vulnerable bodies aren’t yet mature enough to withstand. We risk missing out on the next genuine, evidence-backed scientific revolution.

We can choose to keep our miracle machine running and build a future of health, security, and longevity. We can insist that skeptics express their doubts through the scientific method, in the best tradition of history’s most respected scientists. 

Or we can continue to abandon the scientific method and throw a wrench in the gears of science, damning ourselves to a future of disease, deprivation, and decline.