Science has always led American democracy. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison were all avid students of the Enlightenment, and following the 1776 “science of government” debate between John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, the Founding Fathers established a Constitution according to the principles of mechanical equilibrium. This manifested as checks, balances, and divided authority to preserve American liberty. The Constitution also seeded the creation of the nation’s patent system, something Abraham Lincoln would later comment added “fuel of interest to the fire of genius.”
American science through roughly the first 150 years developed alongside new universities, professional societies, and federal science agencies. Much of it focused on surveying and understanding the continent, agriculture, geology, and natural history, but by the early 20th century, it was also expanding into more abstract, universal fields like precision physics, physical chemistry, and genetics. This seeded preparation for one of the most profound tests of American democracy, was World War I (WWI), also known as the “chemist’s war” due to the widespread use of poison gas. In response to Germany’s chemical weapons, many countries scrambled to latch onto the idea with their own versions. Shortly after entering the war in 1917, the United States Army established the American University Experiment Station in Washington, D.C., to develop defensive gas masks and offensive bombs and explosives. Across the rest of the country, many more soldiers and scientists worked at chemical manufacturing plants and satellite labs, such as Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. WWI underscored the need for collaboration among the scientific community, industry, and the government to drive innovation in chemical warfare, aviation, and medicine, and the continued development of these fields contributed to the success of American WWII efforts. In November 1944, recognizing the crucial role that science played in WWII, President Franklin D. Roosevelt requested recommendations from Vannevar Bush, then head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, on how to translate scientific knowledge to peacetime problems. This evolved into Public Law 81-507, which established the current National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Science Board. The agency’s place in history and posterity was thus cemented as far back as 1950, and its legacy lives on.
Far from the front lines, science has dictated where civilians live and how well they do so. The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the most powerful countries after World War II; one of the frontlines of the Cold War was the space race, as impressive feats in rocketry and space flight became a new dimension of rivalry. The Soviet Union led early with Sputnik, a satellite in 1957, and in 1969, an estimated 650 million people on Earth watched as Neil Armstrong walked on the moon for the first time, planting the United States flag firmly on its surface.
Back on Earth, where people have homes, there are sometimes overwhelming factors that threaten their safety, and normal citizens have often used science to support community action and advocacy. The earliest environmental activism was reported in the 1950s and 1960s, led by conservationists who urged the government to create national parks and regulate the development of natural resources. Women-led activist groups, including the League of Women Voters, banded together to raise awareness of the hazards of industrial pesticides, radioactive fallout from nuclear testing, and overdevelopment of open spaces. Working-class and poor nonwhite communities suffered the brunt of air and water pollution, and this pattern fostered the merging of civil rights, labor rights, and environmental consciousness into the environmental justice movement. During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, such public pressure drove environmentalism to the forefront of the national agenda in the 1960s and led to the enactment of several federal laws to improve the quality of life for all Americans. The Nixon administration experienced more aggressive demands and public scrutiny, particularly due to the Santa Barbara oil spill and the burning of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. President Nixon ultimately signed the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 and promised to launch environmental protection initiatives to preserve many national parks that the US is famous for.
Times have changed, but historically burdened areas rarely do. “Cancer Alley,” a highly industrialized area in Louisiana that is poisoned by PVC plastics, is facing renewed threats of cancer-causing emissions from mega projects. In South Baltimore, an open-air coal facility is polluting the air in adjacent residential Curtis Bay, resulting in significant black dust in their homes. On these fronts, science isn’t standing still either. Because regulatory air monitors are spaced miles apart, researchers and residents alike are turning to low-cost sensor networks and mobile monitoring campaigns to capture block-by-block pollution data that once went undetected. This shift toward citizen science is transforming affected communities from subjects of study into active participants in the research. Satellite data is opening a parallel front, allowing researchers to map pollution disparities at a scale no ground sensor network could match. On the remediation side, nanomaterials and engineered minerals are being developed to absorb pollutants and accelerate the cleanup of contaminated soil and water. But the scale of the problem still dwarfs the response: less than 5% of the world's contaminated sites have been remediated in the last seven decades, despite some $80 billion spent annually.
Some of the most consequential science of the last decade has been the simple act of counting. Until recently, no one knew how many Americans were evicted each year because eviction records sat scattered across thousands of county courthouses, unaggregated and effectively invisible. The Eviction Lab at Princeton, founded by sociologist Matthew Desmond, built the first national database of them, and the number it produced was staggering: roughly 7.6 million people face eviction annually, with low-income women, women of color, and survivors of domestic violence bearing the heaviest burden. That figure did not change a single family's circumstances. What it changed was what could be argued. A housing crisis that had been experienced privately, one household at a time, became a national fact that legislators, courts, and voters could be asked to answer for- and cities drew on that evidence in adopting right-to-counsel and eviction-diversion programs. Since 2021, such programs have been implemented in Washington, Maryland, and Connecticut. This is the quieter half of science's role in a democracy: not building the machinery of government, but supplying the evidence that lets citizens hold it accountable.
Most recently, proposals to upscale AI productivity by building new data centers are facing opposition from community groups. The Stratos project in Utah, poised to lead the infrastructure buildout that defines the AI boom, has raised concerns among residents. This project will occupy 40,000 acres in rural Utah, with power demands exceeding twice Utah’s current power bill and no plans to incorporate renewable energy. In the words of an ecology professor, this will render the surrounding land “comparable to the Sahara Desert” and raise nighttime temperatures by 28 degrees. Across the U.S., communities are voicing dissent over AI investments, and 37 states blocked a total of $156 billion in funding for AI expansion projects. As the latest iteration of science informing citizen participation in democracy, protests against the data center buildouts join a long tradition of science in democracy.
The struggle to balance scientific progress with democratic values continues with no end in sight. Throughout history, scientific discoveries have transformed societies by improving health, expanding knowledge, and driving technological innovation. At the same time, these advances have raised complex ethical and political questions about how science should be conducted, regulated, and applied. Democratic societies must find ways to encourage innovation while ensuring that scientific research remains transparent, accountable, and aligned with the public interest.
