Ignorant White House techbros are destroying our seed corn

David Singer, White House Tech Bros Are Killing What Made Them (and America) Wealthy, NYTimes, April 28, 2025.

What’s seed corn? It’s corn the farmer preserves through winter so it can be used to seed next year’s crop. It’s a metaphor.

One would think that venture capitalists, especially those with ties to the Trump administration, would be the most forceful champions of America’s research universities, given how much these institutions have fueled our careers and fortunes. Instead, many of us are scratching our heads as to why officials from the industry have turned their backs while the government chaotically terminates funding for this work. Harvard and Columbia have been in the headlines, but the hatchet has also fallen on Michigan State in the Midwest and the University of Hawaii farther west. It is as if the V.C.s in Washington had just enjoyed a fine meal in Silicon Valley and decided to skip out on the check.

Breakthroughs in technology are grounded in a fundamental truth: that transformative innovation often begins with a new understanding of the natural world at its most basic level. And this understanding almost always emerges from challenging accepted wisdom. That requires space for free inquiry and a culture that protects it, something that Vannevar Bush understood in his landmark 1945 report “Science, the Endless Frontier,” where he argued that basic research generates “scientific capital” — the foundation for practical applications, new products and new processes. Even patent law reflects this principle, requiring that an invention be “nonobvious to one skilled in the art.” This is the crux of the matter.

Drawing a causal link between federal investment in basic science research and the rise of the venture capital industry is about as difficult as reading a map. The geographic centers of venture capital and the industries it has spawned overlap precisely with the locations of our great research universities. Think of Cambridge and Route 128 in Massachusetts (Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard), or the stretch from San Jose to San Francisco (Stanford and University of California, San Francisco and Berkeley). This is no accident. It’s why world leaders visit these places to understand how we do it. It is also why Mr. Vance left Ohio for Yale and then high-tailed it to Silicon Valley for a job.