New year, new science, new beginnings

per data scientia promovetur

If you work in or around the research enterprise in the US, you know 2025 has been … a year. Writing in 1945, Vannevar Bush, architect of the program of federally supported scientific inquiry that has contributed substantially to post-WWII American leadership in science and technology, laid out five fundamental principles he believed were required for the success of his proposed new agency - the vision that would eventually become the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. His first principle articulated the need for stability of funds, “so that long-range programs (might) be undertaken”.

Stability would not be high on my list of descriptors for this year.

Despite the challenges, I find myself looking into 2026 with excitement and optimism. A lot has changed in 80 years. We have access to tools and data that Vannevar and his contemporaries (probably) couldn’t have dreamed of; yet we’ve remained stuck, in a lot of ways, in the framework they set up. Some fairly basic questions about how best to produce innovations that promote human health and flourishing remain unanswered; maybe the extent of our success made it seem unimportant to ask.

I’ll be asking those questions in the coming year, exploring how we can use data to understand scientific progress, and ideally, how we can leverage that understanding to produce more breakthroughs in less time. I hope you’ll join me as I explore here at The Progress Bar.