By Kritika Agarwal and Bianca Licitra
On a stormy Philadelphia day in June 1752, historians say, Benjamin Franklin flew a kite during a thunderstorm to prove that lightning is a form of electricity. Franklin had hypothesized that, if lightning was indeed electricity, iron rods could be erected to draw electric current from storm clouds. Franklin's "curious experiments" lead to the widespread use of the lighting rod, a simple device that is still used today to protect homes and ships from the destructive powers of lightning.
The United States has been a country of citizen-scientists from its very beginning. Franklin was not the only founding-era luminary who was deeply engaged in curiosity-driven science and scientific inquiry. For example, Thomas Jefferson collected fossils and weather data (among many science-and-engineering-focused hobbies), while George Washington experimented with crop rotation and soil science at Mount Vernon. They treated the young country as a place where ideas could be tested, improved, and shared. In fact, both science and democracy were intertwined from the very beginning of this nation.
That spirit – skeptical, yet open to discovery and revision based on evidence – is today an integral part of the American character. As we celebrate America’s 250th birthday, we also celebrate American ingenuity and curiosity-driven science that has yielded some of the most transformative innovations in human history.
Today, most of the curiosity-driven research in America takes place at its research universities. At universities around the country, faculty and students pursue new knowledge and answers to questions that are not yet tied to a product, a patent, a profit, or a quarterly report. They probe the mysteries of the universe, the workings of the human mind, the dynamics of our climate, and the foundations of mathematics and computing.
These pursuits have led to discoveries that have reshaped societies and expanded human potential. On this 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we celebrate America by looking back at 12 technological breakthroughs that have changed our lives in profound ways and can be traced back to curiosity-driven science, as well as applied research, at America’s research universities.
- The Internet
With funding from the Department of Defense, and later the National Science Foundation, university research contributed to the advent of the internet.
In the 1960s, four AAU institutions – Stanford University; the University of Utah; the University of California, Los Angeles; and the University of California, Santa Barbara – hosted the initial nodes of the Department of Defense’s ARPANET – creating the first host-to-host connections between node computers. By 1969, they established a four-node network that laid the foundation for nearly all electronic communications in the world today.
Stanford University also played a part in the history of Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were both graduate students at Stanford, where they developed the idea for the search engine with the support of NSF funding.
- Artificial Intelligence
Though AI has a multifaceted history with roots in both philosophy and computer science, university research played an influential role in the field’s development. In 1956, mathematicians and scientists gathered at Dartmouth for a workshop about recreating human intelligence in machines. It was there that the term “artificial intelligence” was coined.
In the 1980s, Geoffrey Hinton, who was a postdoc and professor at the University of California, San Diego and John Hopfield, a professor at Princeton University, developed learning algorithms for neural network models informed by their expertise in psychology and neuroscience. In 2024, Hinton and Hopfield were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for these networks that are the foundation of today’s machine learning.
- Semiconductor Technology
A semiconductor is a material, like silicon, that can either conduct electricity or block it. All electronics have a chip, or several chips, that are made from semiconductors, which makes these materials necessary for the fabrication of many modern technologies – from cell phones to LED lights and cars to computers.
University research (alongside work by private companies, like Bell Laboratories and Texas Instruments) played a crucial role in the development of semiconductor technology. Felix Bloch, who immigrated from Europe in the 1930s and ended up spending most of his career at Stanford University, contributed Nobel-winning foundational discoveries in crystal structures and metallic conduction. Purdue University researchers studied germanium during World War II, when it was not yet well understood. Their discoveries made further proprietary research, like transistor technology, possible. Now germanium is an essential material in semiconductor technology. Later, Walter Kohn, who worked at both the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of California, San Diego, contributed major advances to sciences of semiconductor purity and structural design and computation, for which he also won a Nobel Prize.
- GPS
Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory created the world’s first global satellite navigation system, called Transit, with funding from the Department of Defense and the U.S. Navy. By studying the radio signals emitted from the Sputnik satellite, first launched in 1957, they discovered that shifts in the signals could determine the satellite’s orbit. If the satellite orbit was predictable, they found, they could use it to locate a signal receiver back on Earth. A few years later, the Navy began using signals from its own satellites for submarine and ship navigation.
- MRI Technology
Columbia University physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi and Stony Brook University Professor Paul C. Lauterbur each won a Nobel Prize for research that led to the invention of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology. Rabi’s discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance in the 1930s and Lauterbur’s development of the first MRI cross-sectional images in the 1970s led to the life-saving medical technology doctors still use today.
- Lasers
While researching at Columbia University in the 1950s, Charles H. Townes built a maser, a precursor to the laser that used microwaves instead of light. Years later, building on their maser innovation, Townes and his brother-in-law came up with the idea of amplifying light, which led to the invention of the laser. This basic research innovation was described as “a solution looking for a problem” when the researchers first presented it. Today, lasers are used across science, industry, and medicine, with diverse applications ranging from LASIK eye surgery to laser printing. Grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense helped support Townes’s research.
- mRNA Technology
The world came to know mRNA vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the U.S. government had been investing in mRNA research for decades prior. The story behind the basic research that led to the COVID-19 vaccine discovery is complex, with many researchers from multiple universities contributing to the science. However, two researchers from the University of Pennsylvania’s mRNA vaccine research team won a Nobel prize for their foundational discoveries that helped modify mRNA for effective therapeutic use. Compared to other vaccine approaches, mRNA vaccines can be quickly manufactured and scaled up for a wide variety of diseases.
- CRISPR Technology/Gene Editing
Scientists use CRISPR-Cas9 technology to edit DNA in precise locations, a process also known as gene editing. Gene editing has already been used in humans as therapy for genetic diseases, as well as in plants and animals to improve agriculture.
University of California, Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna is the co-inventor of CRISPR-Cas9 technology. Her discoveries were made possible by funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
- GLP-1 Drugs
Although Ozempic and Wegovy have fast become household names, having revolutionized the treatment for Type 2 diabetes and obesity, many are still unaware that these drugs have their origins in university research. In the 1970s, Harvard University researcher Joel Habener, with support from the National Institutes of Health, set out to study the hormone glucagon and its role in blood sugar regulation. Through his research on the anglerfish, Habener discovered the molecule that became the basis for GLP-1 drug therapies.
- Weather Prediction
Swedish scientist Carl-Gustaf Rossby founded the country's first academic program in meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1928. The mathematical and scientific rigor the program brought to the meteorological discipline – up to that point more of an art than a science – would soon prove crucial to the Allies’ World War II efforts. MIT researchers Jule Charney and Edward Lorenz would later pioneer numerical weather prediction, which meteorologists have continued to advance in the decades since to improve accurate weather forecasting.
Likewise, the University of Chicago produced enormous amounts of groundbreaking research that has led to countless advancements in weather prediction and storm preparedness we take for granted today. In the 1960s and 70s, Chicago professor David Atlas’s research on the Doppler effect and wind measurement helped contribute to not only the development of Doppler weather radar, but also its deployment through the national NEXRAD Doppler network and airport Doppler radar. Both systems save countless lives every year by peering into storms to gauge their levels of precipitation, as well as their wind speeds and directions. For example, warning lead times for, and average annual deaths from, tornadoes have decreased significantly since the broad deployment of Doppler radar across the United States.
Speaking of tornadoes, professor Tetsuya “Ted” Fujita’s decades of research at the University of Chicago essentially created modern tornado science, leading to vastly improved understanding of storms that, previously, had been very poorly understood. Indeed, the scale on which the intensity of U.S. tornadoes is officially measured – the Enhanced Fujita Scale – is based on one he developed.
- Mapping the Human Genome
In 1990, 20 institutions across the world embarked on a collaborative project to generate the first complete sequence of the human genome, the Human Genome Project, considered the largest biomedical research undertaking of the 20th century. By 2003, the project had mapped more than 92% of the human genome, as much as was technically possible at the time.
Four AAU institutions – the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford University, and the University of Washington – were members of the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium. The University of California, Santa Cruz was also a part of the project and made the sequence freely available for public use online. Research in the United States was funded by the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health.
The completed sequence has proven crucial to advancing the field of genomics, including innovation in genetic disease diagnosis and personalized medicine. The project also demonstrated the possibilities associated with large-scale research projects and research that is discovery driven rather than hypothesis driven.
- Blood thinners
Millions of Americans take Warfarin, a common blood thinner, and other medications like it to prevent blood clots and lessen the risk of stroke or heart attack. The drug has its origins in agricultural research, which began when farmers discovered that eating spoiled clover and wet hay caused their cows to hemorrhage and die. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin – Madison were able to isolate the compound in the hay that prevented the cow blood from clotting and develop an anticoagulant that could prevent dangerous clots in humans, as well as acting as a poison to kill rodents.
As Americans around the country celebrate our nation’s founding this Independence Day, they can also take pride in the 250 years of science and innovation that have shaped the United States.
Kritika Agarwal is assistant vice president for communications at AAU; Bianca Licitra is editorial and communications assistant at AAU.