The Edifice of Science

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The word science has its origins in the Latin word scientia, which translates to knowledge. Over the past several months, the institution of science has been in the news regularly, with its accompanying researchers and innovators expressing their concern about announcements of aggressive policy change from our new president’s administration, which will include significant defunding of science-based research. The prestigious journal Nature recently published an editorial titled “An Assault on Science Anywhere Is an Assault on Science Everywhere,”¹ conveying the worldwide interdependence of all scientific research and advancement. An insightful description from Nature on the current upheaval states:

“For much of our 155-year history, the United States has been the global leader in research, including in its provision of funding for education and training in science, to the great advantage of itself and the wider world.”

The dust has not yet settled to clarify what the final outcome will be, as numerous lawsuits are making their way through the courts and federal judges are blocking some of the executive orders pending appropriate judicial review. A silver lining of these events is the associated public exposure to the depth and breadth of the institution of science in every facet of our day-to-day life. Virtually every aspect of our daily life has been the result of scientific discovery and innovation. Some of the biggest foundations of science can be seen in the Figure.

FIGURE. Foundations of Science

The Science Guy

One of my favorite quotes about science is from Bill Nye the Science Guy, whose signature quote is, “Science rules.” Nye’s interest and passion for science have been lifelong, inspired by his mother, who worked as a code breaker for the United States government during World War II, and his father, who was captured by the Japanese military while serving in World War II. His father spent 4 years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, which had no electricity or watches, and hence taught himself to tell time with the shadow of a shovel handle. While Nye attended college at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, his love for science skyrocketed, especially while attending an astronomy class there taught by Carl Sagan. Nye’s flagship quote is, “Science is the process and the body of knowledge that enables us humans to know nature. So far, it’s the best idea we’ve ever had.”

I have shared Nye’s love and passion for science for as long as I can remember and was proud of my childhood reputation as a science nerd. The inherent beauty of science is that it is an edifice independent of language, culture, politics, and opinions. Rather, it is a constantly evolving, growing understanding of the natural world, always a working hypothesis awaiting further refinement and advances. Its beauty and strength also reside in its foundational consistency and reproducibility over the centuries.

The Last Half-Century

In 1975, at the age of 39 years, my mother was diagnosed with a congenital fistula connecting her left coronary artery with her coronary sinus. Likely the diameter of a thread at her birth, it had gradually enlarged to the diameter of a pencil, shunting the oxygenated blood away from her heart muscle and back to her right atrium and resulting in shortness of breath with minimum activity. Hence, at 39 years, she became one of the first patients to receive open-heart surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Today, open-heart surgery is a common and routine procedure with short hospital stays and good outcomes thanks to the rigorous medical research that is ongoing.

In 1980, as a senior in college, I worked in a biochemistry laboratory. We sequenced DNA through a rigorous process of cleaving the DNA into tiny pieces, adding a radioactive phosphorous atom to the end, running the pieces down an electrophoresis gel, deep-freezing the gel on a piece of x-ray film for days or weeks, developing the x-ray film, and then reading the rows one by one to learn the tiny piece of DNA sequence—nucleotide by nucleotide. The first draft of the complete sequencing of the 3 billion base pairs composing the human genome (92% complete) was an international scientific collaboration named the Human Genome Project that began in 1990 and was completed in 2003 at the cost of $3 billion. Today, an individual’s entire DNA genome of 3 billion base pairs can be sequenced in a few hours and cost approximately $600.²

During my psychiatry residency training in the late 1980s, the field of psychopharmacology was still in its youth. Very little was known about what psychiatric medications were doing at the molecular level, and our understanding of pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, and pharmacogenomics was slowly expanding. Today, as you—our readership of Psychiatric Times—know, we have a vast treasure trove of information that remains challenging to keep up with. Worldwide collaborations and resulting publications in evidence-based journals have advanced our knowledge base and treatment armamentariums to a degree that I never thought possible in my lifetime.

Concluding Thoughts

The edifice of science stands stronger than ever. However, inherent in its structure is the continued evolution of knowledge and expansion of current and new paradigms. Although basic science research is often out of the public limelight, it is the fuel that drives innovation and advances in every profession and ultimately delivers to us better quality of life, health, safety, and technology. I am proud to be a citizen of the United States with its well-deserved legacy of leadership in science, research, innovation, technology, and international collaboration. May it continue once the current dust has settled.

Dr Miller is Medical Director, Brain Health, Exeter, New Hampshire; Editor in Chief, Psychiatric Times; Voluntary Consulting Psychiatrist at Seacoast Mental Health Center, Exeter/Portsmouth, NH; Consulting Psychiatrist, Insight Meditation Society, Barre, Massachusetts.

References

1. Trump 2.0: an assault on science anywhere is an assault on science everywhere. Nature. 2025;639(8053):7-8.

2. Gunukula SR. Whole genome sequencing costs 2024: new prices and future projections. 3billion. August 14, 2024. Accessed March 10, 2025. https://3billion.io/blog/whole-genome-sequencing-costs-2024-new-prices-and-future-projections