While Washington slashes funding for the sciences, Beijing is clinching its lead in everything from patent applications to publications After the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803, which almost doubled the size of the United States’ territory, US president Thomas Jefferson commissioned the legendary Lewis and Clark expedition, which surveyed new routes from the Missouri river to the Pacific coast. It also carried out work in agriculture, ethnography (with indigenous peoples) and geography. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, that was the kind of science the US government was willing to pay for – practical, applicable (especially to the military) and, where possible, profitable. It would be absurd to think it should fund basic science with no immediate discernible applications or payoffs. That was certainly the case in the United States up to the 1930s. “Practically since the start of the United States, the federal government has invested in science,” University of California, Santa Barbara history professor Patrick McCray told his university system’s news publication in September. “But for most of our history, those were investments of a very practical nature.
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