The Laboratory of the World

In the early 1950s polio terrified American parents. Infections peaked in 1952, with more than 21,000 paralytic cases in the United States ⁷. Jonas Salk's inactivated vaccine was licensed in 1955, and Albert Sabin's oral vaccine followed between 1961 and 1963. The last case of wild polio caught inside the United States was in 1979 ⁷.

The oral vaccine became the workhorse of a global campaign launched in 1988. Since then, wild polio cases have fallen by more than 99%, from an estimated 350,000 cases in over 125 countries to just two countries where the virus is still endemic ⁶. The WHO estimates that more than 20 million people are walking today who would otherwise have been paralysed ⁶.

Salk's vaccine was never patented. When the journalist Edward R. Murrow asked him on television who owned it, Salk answered that the people did ⁸. His answer is still quoted in debates about who should profit from medicines developed with public or charitable money.

A more recent breakthrough began in a lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman found that small chemical changes to messenger RNA (mRNA) stopped it from triggering harmful inflammation, and they won the 2023 Nobel Prize for it ¹. When COVID-19 struck, that discovery made fast-to-build mRNA vaccines possible. One modelling study estimated that COVID-19 vaccines of all types prevented 14.4 million deaths in their first year, or 19.8 million when excess deaths are counted ⁹.

Genetics followed a similar path. The Human Genome Project, led in the US by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy, ran from 1990 to 2003 and involved 20 centers in six countries ¹⁰. Its 2003 sequence covered about 92% of the human genome; an international team filled the last gaps in 2022 ¹⁰. In 2020 Jennifer Doudna of the University of California and Emmanuelle Charpentier, working in Germany, shared the Chemistry Nobel for the CRISPR gene-editing method ¹. In December 2023 the US Food and Drug Administration approved Casgevy for sickle cell disease, the first therapy it had approved that uses CRISPR ¹¹. Doctors take a patient's own blood stem cells, edit their DNA so they make more fetal hemoglobin, and put them back. Sickle cell disease affects about 100,000 people in the US, most of them African American ¹¹.

American science also fought hunger and disease overseas. Norman Borlaug spent decades breeding high-yield, disease-resistant wheat in a Mexico program backed by the Rockefeller Foundation, then helped bring it to India and Pakistan ¹⁷. PEPFAR, the US program against HIV/AIDS started in 2003, is credited by the State Department with saving 26 million lives. It was disrupted by a stop-work order in January 2025, but Congress still provided $4.8 billion for it in fiscal year 2026, plus $1.25 billion for the international Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria ¹⁶.

The National Institutes of Health describes itself as the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world ³. About 82% of its budget goes out as grants and contracts that support more than 300,000 researchers at over 2,500 universities, hospitals and institutes. Roughly 6,000 scientists also work in NIH's own labs, mostly in Bethesda, Maryland ². Much of the basic biology behind modern drugs and diagnostic tests was first worked out with NIH money.

The budget doubled between 1998 and 2003, then stalled. After adjusting for rising research costs, NIH's fiscal 2026 budget is about 10% below its 2003 peak ².

In 2025 the White House asked Congress to cut NIH by 40.6%, to $27.9 billion, and to consolidate its 24 research institutes into eight. Congress refused. It set fiscal 2026 funding at $47.5 billion, 1% more than the year before, and kept the existing structure ².

Money is not the only change. NIH has moved toward paying some grants for several years up front, which means fewer but larger awards. It funded 10,086 new competing research grants in fiscal 2024 and 6,095 in fiscal 2025 ². A February 2025 policy capping overhead payments to universities at 15% was blocked by a federal court, a ruling upheld on appeal in January 2026 ².

Nobel counts depend on how you count. Here we used the Nobel Foundation's own data and counted each award in physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine from 1901 to 2025. An award counts for a country if the laureate listed at least one institution there at the time of the prize, using today's borders. By this measure, 327 of the 662 science awards went to people working in the United States ¹.

Many of these laureates were born elsewhere. Only 216 of the 662 awards went to people born in what is now the United States, so American labs have drawn talent from around the world ¹. Counting by citizenship, or only by a laureate's first-listed institution (319 awards), gives slightly different totals, but the US leads under every method.

The lead has grown over time. Since 2000, 120 of 202 science awards (59%) went to US-affiliated laureates, and in 2025 six of the nine science laureates worked at American institutions ¹. By field, US-affiliated laureates account for 123 medicine awards, 115 in physics and 89 in chemistry ¹.

The space race began as a Cold War contest, but it produced a large body of science. Apollo 11 made the first human landing on the Moon in 1969. Between 1969 and 1972, 12 American astronauts walked on its surface ¹².

They brought home 382 kilograms of rock and soil ¹². Scientists are still studying those samples decades later, using tools that did not exist when the astronauts collected them. Apollo was expensive and driven by competition with the Soviet Union, but it left a scientific archive that researchers around the world still draw on.

Robots have carried the work further. In 2021 NASA's Perseverance rover landed on Mars carrying a small helicopter, Ingenuity. On April 19 of that year Ingenuity made the first powered, controlled flight by an aircraft on another planet ¹⁴.

The Hubble Space Telescope launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. Its first pictures were blurry: the edge of its main mirror had been ground too flat by a fraction of the width of a human hair ¹⁴. Engineers designed corrective optics, and astronauts installed them in orbit. Thanks to five servicing missions, Hubble has kept working for more than 30 years ¹⁴. Its images helped astronomers measure the age of the universe and watch changes on planets in our own solar system.

Its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, launched on December 25, 2021, on a European Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana ¹³. Webb is led by NASA in partnership with the European and Canadian space agencies ¹³. It sees in infrared light, which lets it look through dust clouds where stars are born and detect faint galaxies from the early universe.

Both telescopes show how 'American' science usually works in practice. NASA leads and pays most of the cost, but partner countries supply instruments, launches and scientists, and astronomers around the world compete for observing time.

Since November 2, 2000, the International Space Station has never been empty. By 2025 more than 290 people from 26 countries had visited this laboratory in orbit, which is run by the US together with Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada ¹⁵.

Some of the most useful space science points back at Earth. Landsat, a NASA and US Geological Survey program, has photographed the planet since its first launch on July 23, 1972, and holds the longest continuous space-based record of Earth's land ¹⁸. In 2008 the USGS made the images free to everyone. Farmers, city planners and climate scientists around the world now use them to track crops, forests, ice and urban growth. Because the record is long and consistent, researchers can compare the same place across five decades and see slow changes such as shrinking glaciers or spreading suburbs.

Weather forecasting relies on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which runs the National Weather Service, weather satellites and ocean and climate research labs ¹⁹. For fiscal year 2026 the administration proposed eliminating NOAA's main research office, including its climate programs. Congress kept the office, though it cut that office's budget by nearly 10% and gave the Weather Service 8% more ¹⁹. In total, Congress provided about $6.6 billion for NOAA's main accounts, $1.6 billion more than the administration had requested ¹⁹.

Counting research papers is one way to measure a country's science. By that measure China overtook the United States in 2016. By 2024 China was publishing more than 1 million science and engineering articles a year, about 31% of the world total, compared with 12% for the US ⁴. US output has stayed roughly flat, at about 428,000 articles in 2014 and 440,000 in 2024, while India climbed to third place with about 258,000 ⁴.

Volume is not the same as influence. In 2022, 1.7% of US articles ranked among the world's top 1% most cited, compared with 1.3% for China. The US had the higher rate in most fields, including health, physics and computer science ⁴.

The gap in top-tier journals is closing too. In the Nature Index 2026 rankings, which track articles in 178 selected high-quality journals, China ranked first and the US second. China's output there grew 22.4% from 2024 to 2025, while the US grew 4.2%. The US still led in health sciences and social sciences ⁵.

These numbers measure output, not quality alone, and each method has blind spots. Taken together they point the same way: the US remains a leading source of high-impact research, but it is no longer the largest producer, and its lead in top journals is narrowing.