The “Golden Age of Science” had no scientists. For nearly three centuries, discoverers like Darwin and Copernicus, still wrestling to break free from Greek thought, called themselves “natural philosophers.” They made discoveries based on their own curiosity. The purest of them answered to no one: Robert Boyle had an earl’s fortune, Henry Cavendish a banking one, and Charles Darwin a family inheritance that bought him 20 years to dwell on barnacles.
This era of the “gentleman scientist,” of course, was limited to those with wealth, but that was considered a kind of purity—that nothing but curiosity fueled their discoveries.
So when the word “scientist” was coined in 1833, half in jest, many of the men it described refused to answer to it. They could see what it implied: a salary, an institution—a profession, with all the red tape and standards the 19th century’s Enlightenment was so eager to build. Indeed, science would go on to get departments, degrees, grant applications, and, eventually, a federal budget.
The Trump administration wants to bring back this era of the gentleman scientist. In a 123-page report published Tuesday, titled “Science: A New Golden Age,” the White House argued the professionalized machine those stuffy Victorians built had calcified into exactly what the gentlemen feared, a system in which researchers spend half their working hours on paperwork. Its solution is to fund the person, not the institution.
The report’s authors want fellowships to follow particular scientists, as opposed to sticking to a university; they want reviewers to get “golden tickets,” meaning the power for a single believer to fund an unconventional proposal a panel would have otherwise killed; they want “fast grants for agencies.” They also want the government to charter new institutions outside the universities entirely, called “X-labs,” small, focused outfits built to chase a single hard problem and then dissolve, the way a Victorian gentleman might have devoted a decade to one obsession and moved on.
“Too much of our research enterprise has come to serve itself rather than the scientists within it,” the authors wrote.But the report’s gentleman scientist has a tool—nay, a colleague—the Victorians couldn’t dream of. The document argues AI should become a “new instrument of scientific discovery,” a partner that will help scientific enterprise maximize the “marginal returns to intelligence.” The White House put $5 billion behind the idea after the report’s release, though the Wall Street Journal calculates the overall cost of the overhaul at $200 billion.
Indeed, lay scientists and mathematicians have recently made some breakthroughs in their fields with large language models. An Anthropic employee and mathematician recently overturned a nearly century-old axiom with the help of Claude, prompting Garry Tan, CEO of startup-funder Y Combinator, to announce the era of the gentleman scientist is back.
Many scientists lauded the proposal on social media for its depth. Alec Stapp, a cofounder of the Institute for Progress, a think tank whose recommendations appear in the report, praised its funding experiments, but said it misses on international scientists—a nod to the administration’s continued attack on immigration.
“Being the top destination for global science talent is America’s superpower,” Stapp wrote on X. If scientists are leaving the U.S. after grad school, he argued, the answer is to make it easier for them to stay.Some academics were less pleased. Steven Durlauf, an economist at the University of Chicago, wrote on X the report shifts support from basic to applied research in a way that “misunderstands the scientific enterprise,” and its proposals undermine peer review “in favor of political control and oversight.” Durlauf signed an open letter opposing what it calls the administration’s “assault on science”; the letter now has more than 10,000 signatories, including two Nobel laureates.
“As scientists, we are committed to a discipline that is decentralized and self-scrutinizing,” the letter reads. “Instead, this administration mandates a centralized system serving the political beliefs of the President and the whims of those in power.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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