Discovery as public infrastructure: Renewing the social contract for science.

Abstract

Scientific capacity built over generations is being weakened by abrupt political disruption just as discovery is becoming faster, more convergent, globally networked, and more socially consequential. Restoring funding and protecting scientific institutions are urgent, but not sufficient: the postwar compact that sustained discovery before its uses were known must be renewed for 21st-century conditions and made resilient to arbitrary disruption. We propose the Discovery Compact, a renewed social contract among government, science, industry, and the public that treats discovery as shared public infrastructure-capacity a plural society builds, tends, and holds in common across generations. It is organized around five criteria: (i) sustaining discovery as national infrastructure; (ii) enabling institutions to move at speed without sacrificing rigor; (iii) building scientific capacity through people, openness, and mobility; (iv) translating discovery without depleting its source; and (v) securing democratic legitimacy and institutional resilience. Together, these criteria direct policy toward durable scientific capacity and insulate against indiscriminate deregulation, compulsory commercialization, arbitrary institutional disruption, and political control of scientific judgment. This Perspective is not a legislative template but an invitation to a national and international process of protecting and renewing the institutions and infrastructure through which societies discover, generate, protect, and prepare.