It’s easy to criticize how someone else does their job, but it’s a lot more difficult to actually do that job properly. In July of 2026, the Trump administration released their vision for remaking the USA’s scientific infrastructure, as the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) published their document, Science: A New Golden Age. I went through the document and gave a full summary of the impact it will have on science and scientists in the United States. But one thing that my analysis lacked — and that I was justifiably criticized for — was a vision for what “doing it right” would look like, and an explanation of why. One of the most important guiding principles for how Federal R&D (research and development) should and must be funded was put forth not by Vannevar Bush in his original vision for the USA as a scientific superpower, 1945’s Science: The Endless Frontier, but rather by Donald Stokes some 50 years afterward in his book: Pasteur’s Quadrant. Instead of dividing the types of scientific research that one can fund along a single axis as Bush did — into “basic” and “applied” research, with Bush demanding a focus on basic research — Stokes brings in a second, essential dimension to the analysis. By augmenting the division between “basic” and “applied” with an analysis of whether the research is “use-inspired” or not, we arrive at four categories to invest in: one foundational, two of which count as basic research, and three of which are worthy of receiving federal investments, yielding significant return-on-those-investments. Here’s what Stokes was writing about back in the 1990s, and why it so successfully served as a guiding light for the USA’s scientific infrastructure — including both the National Science Foundation and the Office of Science and Technology Policy — until this abrupt new direction set by the President in 2026. This aerial view shows the main science hub of the LIGO Livingston detector in Louisiana, with a view peering all the way down one of its 4 km long detector arms. Complemented by LIGO Hanford in eastern Washington, these two detectors not only brought us our first gravitational wave detection, but have netted more gravitational wave discoveries than all other efforts combined. Without investments in cutting edge facilities such as this, our ground-based astronomy efforts, from light to gravitational waves to particles like neutrinos, would still be in their infancy. Credit: Caltech/MIT/LIGO Lab If we think about all of the different ways that it’s possible to engage in science and engineering, including all forms of research and development, we can ask a couple of questions about any such endeavor. Is this endeavor relevant for increasing the generalized body of knowledge for humanity? In other words, will this answer a previously unanswered question about what’s real, possible, or what can be accomplished in our world that hasn’t yet been achieved? Is this endeavor relevant for bringing about an immediately useful application for use by humanity? In other words, is this research that will swiftly result in a product, service, or therapy that can immediately be applied to the world to improve the lives of those who are alive today? If — as Bush demanded — you focus only on the first question, you’ll have two unintended impacts. The first is that you’ll wind up lumping all of basic research together, as well as all of (non-basic) technology development together. What we’ve traditionally called Blue Skies Research, which has no immediate application but rather is more foundational research about the fundamentals of reality, gets lumped together with time-sensitive research, such as vaccine development or the Manhattan project under this framework. The second is that you’ll wind up lumping applied research of all types together, regardless of whether it leads to immediate applications or not. This means that attempting to “build a better mousetrap” or construct an electrical grid falls into the same category as trying to build a perpetual motion machine. That’s why the framework of Stokes is so powerful; it gives us the power to categorize R&D at a more granular level, and to think about the merit of funding a line of research in a more accurate and civilization-focused fashion. In 1997, Professor Donald Stokes, an expert in politics and public affairs, created this two-dimensional matrix with axes of relevance for generalized knowledge, which divides knowledge up into basic and non-basic research, and relevance for immediate utility and applications, which divided immediately useful activity from activity that isn’t immediately useful. The three valuable quadrants are deemed Bohr’s Quadrant, for pure basic research, Pasteur’s Quadrant, for use-inspired basic research, and Edison’s Quadrant, for pure applied research. The fourth quadrant, tinkering, has relevance for neither. Credit: Turadg Aleahmad/Open Education Research According to Stokes, as articulated in his book Pasteur’s Quadrant and as illustrated in the two-axis chart above, all of R&D can be broken up into four quadrants. Bohr’s Quadrant: the most foundational and fundamental of all scientific endeavors, Bohr’s Quadrant encapsulates all forms of pure, curiosity-driven research: seeking to understand nature — what’s out there in the Universe and how it works — at as much of an elementary level as possible. Pasteur’s Quadrant (which serves as the namesake of Stokes’s book): another form of basic research, this instead focuses on the basic research that is problem-solving focused. Research into disease, treatment, vaccines, medicine, nuclear fusion, photovoltaic materials, and much more all falls into Pasteur’s Quadrant: the “immediately useful” form of research where new, basic knowledge is generated. Edison’s Quadrant: this form of purely applied research is also useful and applicable to problems that face humanity, but doesn’t necessarily generate or probe any questions about fundamental knowledge in the world. Instead, it builds upon the knowledge that was generated by Bohr’s Quadrant and Pascal’s Quadrant to bring technological applications of that project to life. This includes everything from the light bulb to cars, airplanes, rockets, and beyond. Tinkering Quadrant: this is where you take what we know, don’t add anything fundamentally new as far as human knowledge goes, and build something that doesn’t create a novel technology, use case, or applicable product. Attempts at tinkering can, in principle and on rare occasion in practice, lead to new knowledge (discovery) or a new application (use case), but most often, it adds nothing. Devices like perpetual motion machines, “exhaust-free” engines, and purported cold fusion devices — all of which fail to hold up under scientific scrutiny — fall into this category. This engraving shows Louis Pasteur administering an anthrax vaccine to a sheep as part of his famed sheep experiment in the 1880s. The vaccinated group survived; the unvaccinated group did not, demonstrating the effectiveness and power of vaccines to save lives and prevent infections. Credit: Wellcome Library, London; Wellcome Images; C.E. Chamberland, 1883 Although Stokes, when he wrote his book, did so explicitly to highlight the value of supporting “Pasteur’s Quadrant” with federal funds, the full truth is that three of the four quadrants add tremendous value to our society, and therefore three out of four — on their merits, as well as on their potential to bring a tremendous return-on-investment — should earn a share of federal funding for science and technology. Bohr’s Quadrant, or pure, basic research, is absolutely essential. It serves as the foundation for everything that gets built atop it. As long as you know what the basics are in your field, scientifically and technologically, what you can build atop it is almost limitless. Pasteur’s Quadrant is a form of basic research that does lead to useful applications. It builds upon everything in Bohr’s Quadrant, but also extends knowledge in specific, often complicated ways, that are designed to tackle practical problems facing society: particularly on issues like public health, medicine, environment, agriculture, and more. Edison’s Quadrant is more about development than research, seeking to make better versions of what Bohr’s and Pascal’s Quadrants developed and showed were possible. This serves to make technological applications — things like vaccines, medicine, healthy food, clean air and water, technologies, services, and products — more widespread, accessible, and beneficial to all of society. On the other hand, tinkerers and hobbyists fall into none of these categories. They often fall outside of the mainstream, and typically promote alternative theories, alternative interpretations of reality, or alternative pathways to what’s been established by Bohr’s and Pascal’s Quadrants. Although there is always the possibility that mainstream scientists and researchers in Bohr’s and Pascal’s Quadrants will have missed something, all too often the “tinkerer” category is filled with crackpots, frauds, charlatans, and grifters: things that, in the past, the infrastructure for federal funding has gone to great lengths to weed out. Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein at the home of Paul Ehrenfest, debating many aspects of the nature of quantum physics. Bohr’s atomic model, his invention of the Bohr magneton, the principle of complementarity, and the Copenhagen interpretation are among the many foundational achievements that are still an essential part of fundamental physics today. Credit: Paul Ehrenfest Each of these three funding-worthy quadrants has a namesake whose contributions are worth highlighting. Bohr’s Quadrant is named after physicist Niels Bohr: most famous for deriving the basic structure of the atom and for being one of the original founders of quantum physics. His Bohr model of the atom, where electrons orbit the atomic nucleus in discrete energy levels, was the first description of the atom to explain how the energy levels that govern atomic structure and energy transitions work. His principle of complementarity, where you can use wave-like mechanics to discuss a particle’s wave-like phenomena such as interference, diffraction, and superposition, but particle-like descriptions for properties like mass, cross-section, and scattering amplitudes, remains foundational even more than 100 years after they were proposed. Bohr developed the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics: still the most common way that physicists and physics students conceive of the nature of the wavefunction in quantum physics. The Bohr-Einstein debates helped scientists better understand the quantum nature of reality. The Bohr magneton links things like angular momentum, including the quantum mechanical property of spin, with the magnetic moment of even a fundamental particle like an electron. These and other insights into the fundamental nature of matter, or the fundamental components of any physical or life science, belong in Bohr’s Quadrant. This 19th century photograph shows Louis Pasteur, inventor of the rabies vaccine, with Joseph Meister: the first person who the vaccine was administered to, saving his life at the age of 9 from a rabies infection acquired from a dog. Credit: The Pasteur Institute Pasteur’s Quadrant is named after the polymath biologist and revolutionary scientist Louis Pasteur. Pasteur was the scientist who disproved the theory of spontaneous generation of life (and organisms) by performing an experiment where he sterilized a nutrient-rich broth, prevented new organisms from outside the broth’s environment to enter it, and demonstrated that the broth remained life-free. The process of sterilization that he used became known as pasteurization: one of the key advances that led to a great increase in public health and safety. Pasteur proved the germ theory of disease, showing that microorganisms were what caused chemical changes and spoilage of food and drink, and extended that research to demonstrate that specific microorganisms caused a variety of infectious diseases in humans. Pasteur also led the way in disease prevention and in the early development of many vaccines, performing a famed public vaccination trial (involving anthrax) on sheep, and developed the first human rabies vaccine, saving the life of a 9-year-old boy, Joseph Meister, who had been mauled and infected by a rabid dog. The idea that science and scientific research can be directly and immediately beneficial to society is borne out by the life and accomplishments of Louis Pasteur. Today, most of the power distributed through power stations and substations is generated through coal, oil, gas, solar, wind, or hydroelectric power, with nuclear power playing a small role as well. Although Thomas Edison is much better known for his many inventions, arguably his greatest sustaining achievement is the creation of the electric utility system, which still, over 100 years later, provides power in a distributed way to billions across the globe. Credit: Steve Karg/pixnio Edison’s Quadrant is named after Thomas Edison, whose light bulb, electric light company, and subsequent empire built upon the scientific foundation of its time to bring the benefits of those advances to the general public through products, services, and infrastructure. Edison, renowned as a great inventor and a prolific device-patenter, didn’t just invent new devices, but improved and democratized many already existing devices: increasing the impact that new technologies could have on society. His electric light bulb wasn’t the first one created, but was rather a long-lasting and commercially viable version of it: the one that replaced open flames in providing light in dark places and under nighttime conditions. Edison wound up holding more than 1000 patents over his lifetime, including patents for inventions like: the phonograph (voice recorder and playback device), the motion picture (through kinetoscope technology), the quadruplex telegraph (which allowed multiple messages to be sent, simultaneously, over a single telegraph wire), and over a thousand more. Edison also created the first electric utility system: a legacy that lives on in the names of many modern electric companies, such as Consolidated Edison and Commonwealth Edison in regions of the United States. Furthermore, Edison’s Menlo Park Laboratory was the first industrial research facility, and transformed “invention” from being an individual endeavor to a team-based venture. Although no new basic, fundamental knowledge was gained from these endeavors, they transformed the world by bringing the benefits of technology to society on a large scale. This photo shows an elderly woman getting an early version of the COVID-19 vaccination: the first vaccines produced using the mRNA platform. They are a class of reactogenic vaccines, meaning that they typically cause a noticeable immune response. mRNA vaccines are a profound and recent example of all three valuable “Quadrants” of R&D, Bohr’s Quadrant, Pasteur’s Quadrant, and Edison’s Quadrant, working together for the greater good of humanity. Credit: Joe Raedle The value of all three of these quadrants often shows up if we look at some of the most famed and ubiquitous technologies that are part of our world today. mRNA vaccines, for example, are an incredibly profound new technology in disease prevention. They began with research in Bohr’s Quadrant, as they rely on an understanding of the cell, its internal organelles, viruses and how they work, knowledge of DNA and RNA, and the mechanism of transcribing genetic code and encoding proteins. They continued with research in Pasteur’s Quadrant, which applied the foundational knowledge from Bohr’s Quadrant to the problem of a novel virus, leading to the most successful vaccines against the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 in record time. This advanced our understanding of how RNA is translated in human cells, how the immune system recognizes antigens, and how genetic codes function, while solving the practical problem of not having a vaccine against a novel, deadly, debilitating pathogen. Then, Edison’s Quadrant came into play: optimizing the way the vaccine is mass-produced, distributed, delivered, and administered, enabling billions of vaccines to be deployed across the globe in a matter of mere months. Without these three pillars of science and technology all working together, it’s likely that tens of millions more would have died during the COVID-19 pandemic, with hundreds of millions more likely to suffer from long-term debilitating conditions. This image shows scientist Charles Townes with the first device to produce light, in the microwave portion of the spectrum, by the stimulated emission of radiation with a laboratory device. This ammonia maser paved the way for the modern laser, including the great array of applications that have arrived subsequently. Credit: Dan Rubin/Radio-Electronic Engineering magazine An example from even longer ago is the LASER: a device that produces light amplification from the stimulated emission of radiation. Lasers began with research in Bohr’s Quadrant: from basic physics research. Einstein laid the theoretical foundation for the stimulated emission of radiation back in 1917 with a now-famous paper: Zur Quantentheorie der Strahlung. This paper described the absorption of light, the spontaneous emission of light, and induced or stimulated emission of light: proving that when a photon hits an excited atom, it can trigger the release of a second, identical-frequency photon. Lasers then entered Pasteur’s Quadrant in the 1950s. The theoretical work for the construction of a practical laser, first outlined in the microwave portion of the spectrum, came in 1952 with the work of Joseph Weber. Then, beginning with Charles Townes’ work in 1953-4, the first prototype of a working “microwave laser” (maser) was constructed. Afterward, in 1960, the first working optical maser, or laser, was constructed. Now, lasers are firmly in the realm of Edison’s Quadrant: where lasers of a wide variety of electromagnetic frequencies are produced and applied on a widespread array of scales and now span many scopes. Interestingly, the first astrophysical masers were discovered in 1965: showcasing that investing in Bohr’s Quadrant can still pay dividends even when foundational knowledge has advanced into Pasteur’s or Edison’s territories. This composite Hubble (blue/white/dark) and ALMA (red) image shows not only the colliding galaxy system Arp 220, but also the double nucleus which contains the bright emission from both water and hydroxyl megamasers. Astrophysical masers rely on the same underlying physics as lasers, and if the right sources had been spectroscopically observed, they could actually have been discovered prior to the invention of laboratory masers and lasers. Credit: ALMA(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) From the point of view of Stokes’s framework — and acknowledging the value of Bohr’s, Pascal’s, and Edison’s Quadrants — it becomes easily understandable why the policy positions set forth in the Science: A New Golden Age document by Trump, OSTP, and Michael Kratsios is so alarming to scientists. It’s because what they are proposing: eliminates practically all of Bohr’s Quadrant, including all of pure, basic research in the physical and life sciences, from federal funding, severely reduces or eliminates the funding that goes into Pasteur’s Quadrant, particularly in health, medicine, energy, and environmental science, from federal funding, diverts enormous amounts of funds to Edison’s Quadrant, with most of that coming in the form of computational technologies and applications, and even specifically called out funding “hobbyists” and “tinkerers,” which yields neither new knowledge nor new useful applications for society, and no positive return-on-investment as a result. For any society to be successful, it has to invest in itself and its people. It has to cultivate bona fide expertise, and that includes the cultivation of people — the experts — themselves. It requires strong, ever-growing foundations, which enable the development of new practical applications and scalable solutions to problems and puzzles that plague society. This is something that we don’t just know how to do, it’s something that the USA, from the mid-20th century onward, has served as the template to the rest of the world for how to do it. We know what needs to be done, and the roadmap that’s been laid out is a path that’s completely in the wrong direction from where we need to go. By considering the three main quadrants of advancement: Bohr’s Quadrant, for basic, pure, curiosity-driven research, Pasteur’s Quadrant, for basic research that solves problems, with immediate utility and applications, and Edison’s Quadrant, for scaling, democratizing, and increasing accessibility for technologies that improve the lives of all, we can truly set ourselves back on track toward a bright, successful future. A golden age won’t arrive because of what we name a project, but rather because we made the right moves and made our investments in the right places. This article 3 forgotten keys to a real scientific golden age for the USA is featured on Big Think.