On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence, the July 2, 2026 issue of Science featured an extended editorial by its editor-in-chief, H. Holden Thorp, titled 250 years of Promise¹:

America has for its entire history been fascinated with science. Although the lofty ideals associated with establishing the country have mostly to do with personal liberty and equality, the founders were very aware of the importance of new knowledge, and scientific knowledge.

At this year’s 250th anniversary of the writing and adoption of the Declaration of Independence, it’s hard to see through the political turmoil whether the promise of knowledge and education envisioned by the founders is still alive. 

To introduce the accompanying article, American Science at 250², Science’s books and culture editor, Valerie Thompson, writes (emphasis mine):

“There are three kinds of patriots, two bad, one good,” wrote the late American clergyman William Sloane Coffin in his 2004 book, Credo. “The bad ones are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics. Good patriots carry on a lover’s quarrel with their country.” On the eve of the US semiquincentennial, the same framework feels useful for reflecting on the first 250 years of the country’s scientific enterprise. Science lovers will rightly note that American research has yielded magnificent benefits and greatly expanded the boundaries of human knowledge. Critics will correctly insist that it has wrought immense suffering and unimaginable destruction. Like Coffin’s quarreling lovers, the scholars writing here do not shy away from grappling with paradoxes in US science history, confronting the complexities of six notable moments,

Here is a short brief of those six moments:

1. The Manhattan Project (Alex Wellerstein) — Looks at the making of the atomic bomb as the moment that fused American science with the federal government at unprecedented scale, setting the template for state-funded “big science” while also introducing the enduring moral weight of nuclear weapons into the national scientific identity.
2. Enslaved people’s contributions to agricultural knowledge (Beronda L. Montgomery) — Recovers the overlooked scientific and botanical expertise of enslaved Africans and African Americans, arguing that their knowledge shaped early American agriculture even as their contributions went uncredited within the official scientific record.
3. Silicon Valley and the state (Margaret O’Mara) — Traces how the rise of the tech industry in California was not purely a story of private-sector entrepreneurship but was deeply enabled by federal investment, defense spending, and university research infrastructure.
4. Biotechnology / “Recombining representation” (Luis A. Campos) — Examines the advent of recombinant DNA and biotechnology, using it to raise questions about who gets represented and included in shaping the governance and direction of powerful new biological technologies.
5. Eugenics and its legacies (Osagie K. Obasogie) — Confronts the eugenics movement as a case where American science was mobilized to justify discrimination and forced sterilization, and considers how that legacy still echoes in debates over genetics and science policy today.
6. America’s final frontier: the space program (Erik M. Conway) — Covers the space program as a landmark of American scientific ambition and Cold War-era state investment, symbolizing both the promise of exploration and the political motivations behind large-scale public science funding.

The same issue of Science includes three additional articles:

1. “WWII and the evolution of US federal research funding” — Daniel P. Gross, Bhaven N. Sampat, Science, 2 Jul 2026 — https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aej2321
2. “From Edison’s Invention Factory to the new architecture of innovation” — Ashish Arora, Sharon Belenzon, Science, 2 Jul 2026 — https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aei5415
3. “Johns Hopkins University and the American research enterprise” — Ronald J. Daniels, Science, 2 Jul 2026 — https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aej0512

Other media have also published their own takes on American science at 250. Just a sample:

1. “Revolutions in Science: Discovery, Imagination, and the Future” (symposium) — National Academy of Sciences & Smithsonian Institution — https://www.nasonline.org/event/revolutions-in-science-discovery-imagination-and-the-future/
2. “Celebrating 250 Years of American Science” — Association of American Universities (AAU) — https://www.aau.edu/newsroom/leading-research-universities-report/celebrating-250-years-american-science
3. “Celebrating America250 Through Science: A Reading List” — American Scientist — https://www.americanscientist.org/blog/science-culture/celebrating-america250-through-science-a-reading-list
4. “The Selective Frontier: The State of the American Experiment After 250 Years” — Harvard Political Review — https://theharvardpoliticalreview.com/america-250-science/

Why all this matters?

America has led scientific and technological development over the past 250 years. If personal liberty and equality have surely shaped the Western world, there is little doubt that American science and technology have defined³ the “Whole” world. Trying to sketch the next 250 years of science and technology would be difficult — impossible, really — and pretentious, even for this blog. Will they stagnate and die? Will they carry us to the stars?

But there is one thing about which we can speculate with far more confidence. It’s probably one of the questions that uncritical lovers, loveless critics, and “good patriots” alike — in America and in many other parts of the world — chew over with their breakfast every morning. As David Baker (2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry) and Simon Johnson (2024 Nobel laureate in Economics) put it bluntly last year⁴:

Will America continue to lead?

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(1) Thorp, H. Holden. ‘250 Years of Promise’. Science 393, no. 6806 (2026): 11–11. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aek0783.
(2) Wellerstein, Alex, Beronda L. Montgomery, Margaret O’Mara, Luis A. Campos, Osagie K. Obasogie, and Erik M. Conway. ‘American Science at 250’. Science 393, no. 6806 (2026): 28–32. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aej4833.
((3) Thorp, H. Holden. ‘America Is Ceding the Lead in Creating the Future’. Science 388, no. 6751 (2025): 1005–1005. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adz3915.
(4) Baker, D. and S. Johnson (2025), “Will the United States continue to lead in science?”, in G. Gensler, S. Johnson, U. Panizza, and B. Weder di Mauro (eds), The Economic Consequences of the Second Trump Administration: A Preliminary Assessment (2nd edition), CEPR Press. https://cepr.org/publications/books-and-reports/economic-consequences-second-trump-administration-preliminary