Choosing Science

I’ll start with the potential: a series of 2025 human-made miracles that demonstrate how science – when allowed to work – can revolutionize health and longevity for millions, if not billions, of people around the world. Across medicine and biology, we saw breakthroughs that expanded medicine’s reach in the body, made intractable conditions treatable, and offered a glimpse of a utopian future where compounding scientific miracles make each of our lives healthier, safer, and longer.

From a twice-yearly injection with the potential to dramatically curb global HIV transmission, to the first truly personalized gene-editing therapy developed to save an individual child’s life, to clinical trials of organ xenotransplants engineered across species lines, the arc of progress gave patients around the globe new cause for hope. Scientists also crossed barriers that had long defined the limits of medicine itself, delivering therapies into cellular compartments like the mitochondria and pushing past the blood-brain barrier to treat neurological and other diseases. And new medicines for chronic disease began to replace constant intervention with durable treatments, reducing the need for frequent dosing, repeated procedures, and ongoing disruptions of daily life.

What unites these advances is the nature of what they mean for patients. These are not refinements of existing therapies or marginal optimizations, but expansions of where and how medicine can act, reshaping both treatment and what it means to live with disease. The advances I highlight here represent only a fraction of what emerged this year, and are only a preview of what is possible in the future. For readers interested in a more complete list of 2025’s human-made miracles, we’ve captured them in a companion piece which you can read by clicking here.

In these breakthroughs I see the potential to systematically cure disease, heal the sick, and extend human “healthspan.” They promise to give millions of us the miracle of more time: the gift of longer, healthier lives.

But that future is not a given.

Every one of these human-made miracles was produced through the scientific method, the centuries-old process of hypothesis, experimentation, analysis, and iteration that allows us to turn the “unknown” into the “known.” This process is the greatest miracle-making tool humans have, and an engine of progress and prosperity – but today, it’s under assault. And if we fully abandon its miracle-making power, I fear we are headed for a dystopian future of disease, deprivation, and decline.

The United States, where I live and work, has long recognized and embraced the power of the scientific method – and that has turned our country into the world’s economic, technological, and defense superpower. Since Vannevar Bush argued in 1945 that scientific progress was the foundation for a flourishing society (and therefore a “proper concern” of the government), the U.S. government has invested – consistently, massively, and strategically – in basic scientific research, giving researchers across the country the tools they need to investigate promising “unknowns” and convert them to “knowns.” Our Constitution provides for patent protections with an express goal: to “promote the progress of science and other useful arts,” incentivizing inventors to turn scientific breakthroughs into products and goods that can reach and improve the lives of all people.

This is how Americans invented the telephone, the lightbulb, and the airplane; developed semiconductors, modern computing, and the Internet; and recently beat back a deadly pandemic to save untold lives and safely reopen our economy. It’s how we produce 20% more corn than we did in 1930 – on 25% less land. According to some estimates, 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. We would all be poorer, sicker, and less safe. Technological and scientific dominance is the foundation not only for our country’s economic prosperity but also our national security.

The U.S. has generally grounded its public policy in science for generations: we’ve banned lead-based paint that poisons young brains, set standards to keep contaminants out of drinking water, and taken action against cancer-causing tobacco. Science-based policy has unarguably saved millions of lives.

This is why it’s so alarming to see the U.S. back down from its support for science. In 2025, the U.S. government effectively slashed funding for basic research, making fewer grants in every area of science and medicine and canceling thousands of existing projects. It proposed cutting the budgets of the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation by 40% and 56%, respectively. It eliminated hundreds of fellowships for up-and-coming researchers. And it instituted new visa policies that severely restricted the U.S.’ ability to attract the best scientists from around the world and benefit from their research.

Slashing scientific budgets is disastrous. Even more disastrous is the rejection of the academic scientific enterprise, the severing of its more than 70-year partnership with the U.S. government, and the growing contempt for the scientific method. This both threatens future breakthroughs and turns back the clock on long-established, safe, and effective treatments for deadly diseases – diseases we thought we had consigned to history.

Skepticism is an important part of the scientific method. Debate about approaches and outcomes is central to how science works. But what we are seeing is skepticism that has curdled into an across-the-board, corrosive doubt in the scientific method itself. Not only that: some of the loudest voices are presenting their opinions as alternative scientific facts with no regard for mountains of data from rigorous experiments.

For the first time since the Enlightenment, this raises the question of whether the scientific method is still a viable way to organize and resolve disagreements in science. Do we look to the evidence? Or do we reach conclusions based on our personal opinions or beliefs, or what an “influencer” said, or what is convenient, or what is politically or financially expedient?

If we lose our ability to collectively resolve our skepticism through the scientific method, we won’t just slow the miracle machine, we’ll throw it into reverse. We won’t just stop making new discoveries – we’ll undo past ones. 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 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 47 years and the leading cause of death was pneumonia. But consider that measles – a deadly disease that was declared eliminated in the U.S. 25 years ago – will formally lose that designation if the 2,144 cases documented in the United States over the past year continue to spread in the weeks ahead. We are living simultaneously in the utopian age in which a baby born with a genetic death sentence is given a new lease on life thanks to the miracle of gene editing, and the dystopia in which a disease like measles is on the march in the United States. It’s hard to square.

It is also – let’s be clear – a choice.

The resurgence of measles is not the result of, say, a random genetic mutation. It is the result of choices, policy decisions, to turn our backs on decades of science. A choice by leaders to reject not only science but common sense.

Do we want to encourage more man-made miracles or risk man-made catastrophe?

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 large-scale research and development by 400-fold. It has created regulatory frameworks and research infrastructure that enable its domestic biotech companies to advance innovation at a fraction of the time and cost of their American competitors. Between 2015 and 2018, the workforce at China’s drug regulator quadrupled, allowing a backlog of 20,000 new drug applications to be cleared in just two years (by comparison, the FDA reviews only a few hundred new drug applications each year). The number of STEM Ph.D. graduates in China has soared from less than 10,000 in 2000 to more than 50,000 in 2022. And China has compiled high-quality and freely accessible data sets to train the AI models that will underpin the next generation of scientific discovery.

As a result, China is well on its way to overtaking the United States’ historical lead in biotechnology. China’s share of global biotech patents jumped from 1% in 2000 to 28% in 2019, ahead of the U.S.’ share. The number of novel medicines under development in China has skyrocketed by 8x over the past nine years and is now almost equal to total U.S. output. Ironically, U.S. investors, who might have preferred to fund life-science innovators here at home, are now placing their bets on China. U.S. and other Western investment in China has reached $150 billion over the past five years. In fact, roughly a third of all global biopharmaceutical licensing deals are now for Chinese-developed assets.

These advances by China come on top of existing obstacles to innovation in the U.S., such as long-outdated and overly onerous regulatory requirements and a lack of high-quality data sets to train science-focused AI models on. (For more on these obstacles, see this piece on U.S. innovation and competitiveness that I published last year). Last year, a bipartisan congressional commission warned that the U.S. will fall behind China in biotechnology if it does not change course within the next three years. And a task force at the Council on Foreign Relations – which I was proud to be a part of – issued a report arguing that biotech innovation is key to the future economic and national security of the United States.

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

We risk losing much of the $3.2 trillion the biosciences sector contributes to U.S. GDP every year and the 2.3 million jobs it provides.

And most terrifyingly, we risk our health and that of our loved ones. We risk returning to an era when a sneeze was so potentially dangerous that it became customary to ask for God’s blessing after every sniffle. 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 returning to the days when crop growth couldn’t keep up with population growth and more went hungry.

While “longevity” is the current buzzword for those wishing to extend their lifespans, the reality is we risk living shorter, stunted lives if we retreat from science.

The hopeful news is that we can choose between the two futures I’ve described. There is still time. We can restore funding for basic enabling research; attract top international scientists to work in the U.S.; streamline regulatory pathways for innovation; build high-quality shared data sets; use government investment to get private capital flowing; and screen outbound U.S. investments in Chinese companies that raise distinct national security concerns.

We also can and should welcome skepticism from people who have doubts about scientific claims – but we must insist on doing so within the framework of the scientific method, with its basis in fact instead of opinion. If we defend the scientific method and demand that skepticism be channeled through experimentation and data, we can protect the miracles we’ve already made and our capacity to make more.

This is more important now than ever, because I believe we are on the cusp of an explosion of new scientific miracles.

Last year, my annual letter described the new concept of “polyintelligence”: the coming together of human intelligence with both machine intelligence and nature’s intelligence. As AI models become increasingly sophisticated, they will help humans decode the incredibly complex logic and intelligence of the natural world, unlocking entirely new possibilities for miracles. At Flagship, we are working towards this future with one of our companies, Lila Sciences, which combines sophisticated AI models with autonomous robotic labs to allow AI to perform each step of the scientific method itself. Last year, Lila built a proprietary scientific corpus for its AI models with more than a trillion tokens generated from its platform and two years of autonomous experiments, laying the groundwork for a future where miracles are not just man-made, but even partially machine-made.

We can live in that future. We can accelerate into a world of new miracles and build brighter, healthier, safer, and more prosperous lives for ourselves and our children. Or we can continue to throw a wrench into the gears of science and face the prospect of dystopia and regression. The choice is stark.

Miracles are more often associated with faith traditions than with science. You might think it sacrilegious, somehow, to characterize leaps in science as miraculous, as I’ve done here.

Yet the Bible describes faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” And this, to me, is not only a matter of the spirit; it also describes what drives scientists to propose experiments: the fact that something might be possible, might be solvable, might be proven. At the outset, every new hypothesis is a leap of faith. Every experiment begins with a guess at the shape of the unknown – a leap into the realm of possibility.

The United States, more than anywhere else I’ve lived or visited, is anchored in a faith in what may lie ahead. Faith in a better future; faith in an ever more perfect union; faith in the human capacity to invent and innovate; faith in the power of democratic ideals; faith in the regenerative potential of immigration; faith in the search for truth; faith in science.

It was that uniquely American faith that first caught my imagination as a child living in Lebanon. As early as my twelfth birthday, I dreamed of one day attending MIT. I am not alone: I know such dreams have propelled thousands of other would-be scientists, engineers, and scholars in hundreds of other cities and countries around the world to look to the United States, to do everything they could to become part of the future that America uniquely creates – and recreates – through science.

In this new year, we must reclaim and recommit to that faith; that belief in science and the scientific method. Our advancement in every way depends on it. Our ability to adapt to a rapidly changing world depends on it. And without it, the miracles that deliver us from disease will occur elsewhere, or will never occur at all. The choice is ours.

Noubar Afeyan
Founder & CEO
Flagship Pioneering