Skip to main content

Johns Hopkins UniversityEst. 1876

America’s First Research University

Illustration of six breakthrough achievements funded by federal dollars

Credit: John S. Dykes

Research in action

Funding a world of good

For more than half a century, Johns Hopkins has been a leader in converting federal support into tangible benefits for the American people

It's no exaggeration to say that federal funding for academic research has been foundational to much of modern life, from the smartphones in our pockets to the medicines in our cabinets. Google, GPS, and the internet itself have roots in such funding, as do 354 of 356 drugs receiving FDA approval between 2010 and 2019. You never know where such research will lead.

"People sometimes talk about 'free enterprise' and 'government intervention' like they're opposed, but many of America's largest and most successful companies, from computing to biotechnology to e-commerce, were only made possible by discoveries that emerged from basic research funded by the government," says Angus Burgin, a Johns Hopkins associate professor in the Department of History. "It's no coincidence that the regions that have incubated many of those companies, from Silicon Valley to [Boston's] Route 128, were leading recipients of federal research grants. For generations, the conjunctures between publicly funded research and private enterprise in the United States have been the envy of the world."

For 45 consecutive years, Johns Hopkins University has surpassed all U.S. universities in the amount of federal support it receives for research and development. Baltimore might not be Silicon Valley, but from the proximity fuze the Applied Physics Laboratory developed to help the Allies win World War II, to emerging immunotherapies helping us win the war on cancer, Hopkins has been a leader in converting federal support into tangible benefits for the American people.

This fruitful union of federal assistance and academic inquisitiveness—which has saved countless lives, birthed entire industries, helped tackle social issues, and fueled our national prosperity for decades—dates back to World War II when we needed new technologies in a hurry, and research labs, mostly at colleges and universities, were an obvious place to turn. In 1941, the Office of Scientific Research and Development was founded to direct militaryrelated scientific research and provide research contracts to universities and institutes. Engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Institution and a former MIT dean, was tapped to lead the office. By November 1944, Bush was asked to explore how the government might maintain the brisk pace of scientific advancement into peacetime. In a 200-page report, Science: The Endless Frontier, he makes three points again and again: Funding basic research is vitally important; colleges and universities are well positioned to undertake such research; and the scientists there should be free to decide how best to perform their work.

"Although basic research does not begin with a particular practical goal, when you look at the results over the years, it ends up being one of the most practical things government does."
President Ronald Reagan

"These institutions are uniquely qualified by tradition and by their special characteristics to carry on basic research," the report reads. "It is chiefly in these institutions that scientists may work in an atmosphere which is relatively free from the adverse pressure of convention, prejudice, or commercial necessity."

Federal funding for research grew from $3.5 billion in 1955 to $167.4 billion in 2020, flowing through a host of federal entities, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, NASA, USDA, USAID, and others. Hopkins received $3.4 billion in 2022.

Over the years, this funding has received bipartisan support. "For the past 40 years, the government has been our leading sponsor of basic research," President Ronald Reagan said in a 1988 radio address. "The remarkable thing is that although basic research does not begin with a particular practical goal, when you look at the results over the years, it ends up being one of the most practical things government does."

What follows are a half-dozen examples of how Johns Hopkins and its researchers, scientists, professors, and even students have used or are using federal support in practical, fruitful, meaningful, and often world-changing ways.

Humans versus climate

In 1953, when much of American industry a and electrical generation ran on coal and bulky, chrome-drenched gas guzzlers ruled the road, Time magazine ran a story under the heading "Invisible Blanket," which noted that activities of "modern man" release some 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air each year. "This spreading envelope of gas around the earth, said Johns Hopkins physicist Gilbert N. Plass, serves as a great greenhouse," it read. The piece went on to predict the Earth's average temperature would rise 1.5 degrees every 100 years before concluding succinctly that "if man's industrial growth continues, the Earth's climate will continue to grow warmer."

Plass wasn't the first to explore this topic. "In the 1800s, several scientists began to notice that gases like water vapor and carbon dioxide have a warming effect on air," says Scot Miller, an associate professor of environmental health and engineering at the Whiting School. "During that time, scientists debated the larger implications of this result. If we fast-forward to the 1950s, Gilbert Plass was able to figure out these big-scale implications."

With funding from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, Plass had studied this concept of a warming planet for several years. The Time magazine story and other articles grew out of a talk he'd given at the American Geophysical Union. Three years later, he formalized his position in a study titled "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change." Plass had left Hopkins by this point, but global warming continued to be part of his research agenda in subsequent posts, both in the private sector and academia. The Canadian-born physicist is little remembered today outside of scientific circles, but his prescient pioneering studies and the media coverage they engendered were perhaps the first drips in what's now a tidal wave proclaiming an inconvenient truth. "[Plass] created a detailed model forecasting the effects of carbon dioxide on climate," Miller says. "He predicted that rising carbon dioxide levels would warm the climate, and his predictions have been astoundingly accurate to date."

Location, location, location

Next time you're heading somewhere new and seek directions from your phone's GPS app, thank the Soviet Union. Our Cold War nemesis is partly the reason why we never again have to face the challenge of refolding a paper map. Satellites empower our modern navigation systems, and the Soviets famously launched the world's first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. But there's more to it than that, as researchers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory used Sputnik, and the radio signals it gave off, to help develop a precursor to GPS.

Video credit: Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab

APL scientists started listening to and recoding the signals the metallic orb emitted as it passed overhead. They wondered if they could track its location by analyzing the Doppler effect, the physics phenomenon wherein sound and radio waves emitted from a moving object are slightly compressed when heading toward you and slightly stretched out when moving away. And it worked. They could track Sputnik's orbit just by analyzing the changes in its radio waves.

Then researchers got the idea to explore the concept in reverse: If you know a satellite's orbital path, could you use the Doppler effect to determine the location from which you were listening to it? With funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency, what came to be called the Transit system was born. But we couldn't just rely on Soviet spacecraft, so by 1960 the first of an eventual 36 Transit satellites was put into orbit. A Navy submarine could poke a receiver out of the waves, pick up a signal from a Transit satellite overhead, and use it to determine its location in a vast ocean. Civilian ships were later allowed to use the Transit system, which operated until 1996 when the more robust GPS system we know today arrived.

Education for all

In 1964, Johns Hopkins sociologist James Coleman was tasked by the federal Office of Education to conduct a sweeping survey of the American education system. The goal: to examine the state of racial segregation within school systems and determine if Black students' education suffered because of underresourced and inferior schools. It was a giant task. No one knew what the national educational landscape looked like a decade after the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case ended state-sponsored segregation and the so-called "separate but equal" doctrine. Undaunted, in less than two years, Coleman and his team of researchers from Hopkins and elsewhere surveyed 600,000 students and 60,000 teachers at 4,000 public schools. Out of this effort arose the Equality of Educational Opportunity Report (released in 1966), more commonly referred to as the Coleman Report. Its impact is still felt today, its conclusions still debated.

"It's the original equality of opportunity study and became the standard by which all subsequent national research on educational outcomes would be defined."
Stephen Morgan

"It's the original equality of opportunity study and became the standard by which all subsequent national research on educational outcomes would be defined," says Stephen Morgan, a professor of sociology and education at Johns Hopkins.

Some of its findings were eye-opening. "One was that much more of the variation in student outcomes is within schools rather than between schools," Morgan says. "And so, the things that vary within schools, such as student behavior, parents' levels of education, and their ability to help guide students through schooling, matter a great deal."

The report also showed that children perform better in schools with diverse student bodies and provided support for pursuing further racial desegregation. "The research results indicate that a child's performance, especially a working-class child's performance, is greatly benefited by his going to school with children who come from different backgrounds," Coleman wrote.

Shortly after the report was issued, Coleman and fellow Hopkins sociologist Edward L. McDill founded the federally supported Center for Social Organization of Schools to continue researching the educational landscape. The center is still in operation today, now within the Johns Hopkins School of Education.

Today, some schools remain segregated and solutions to this and other educational challenges remain elusive. But any road map to a future of improved scholastic performance needs to start with a thorough understanding of where we are, and Coleman's groundbreaking report became the gold standard on how that can be achieved.

Blindness prevention

As a child, you might have been told to eat your carrots to improve your vision. There's some truth to this eat-your-veggies wisdom as carrots are a good source of vitamin A, an essential nutrient for eye health. Yet children in the developing world often lack access to foods rich in vitamin A, a deficiency that manifests initially as xerophthalmia (or night blindness) before ultimately leading to sightlessness, as corneas essentially melt away.

In 1976, Alfred Sommer—today dean emeritus of the Bloomberg School of Public Health— was an ophthalmologist completing his residency at the Wilmer Eye Institute. Seeking to learn all he could about vitamin A deficiency, he and his family moved to Indonesia for a series of studies, empowered by a multiyear grant from USAID. "We wanted to learn how prevalent and severe the deficiency was. Why some kids got it and other kids didn't, and what was the best way to treat it and prevent it," he says.

Alfred Sommer in Indonesia

Image caption: Alfred Sommer in Indonesia

In Indonesia, Sommer found many children suffering from a lack of the nutrient. At the time, the World Health Organization's recommended intervention was an injection of vitamin A. But as these shots were not always readily available, Sommer wondered if liquid vitamin A given orally might work. After running a randomized trial of injections versus liquid, he got an answer: Yes, a couple of drops of the vitamin on a child's tongue was just as effective as the shot in improving eye health—and it cost pennies per dose and didn't require sterile needles or health care workers for administration.

But his biggest breakthrough happened back in Baltimore while poring over giant computer printouts of an Indonesian study in which 4,000 children were medically examined every three months for over a year. Children who presented with even mild cases of xerophthalmia were less likely to appear for follow-up exams. The chilling reason? They had died. Children with vitamin A deficiency had a significantly higher mortality.

He published these findings in the journal Lancet. "And absolutely nobody believed it," Sommer says. So, with new USAID funding, he went back to Indonesia to lead a large, randomized trial following kids receiving vitamin A supplements and those who didn't. Same tragic results: The kids who did not receive the vitamin had a 34% higher mortality rate. More such trials were necessary before he brought his many public health skeptics on board. Some thought it too good to be true: that pennies' worth of vitamin A saves not only eyes but lives as well. We now know that vitamin A also bolsters immune systems to better combat measles and diarrheal diseases.

Putting our pieces together

The Human Genome Project has been billed as the biological sciences' "moon shot." Funded largely by NIH, the 13-year, $3 billion international scientific collaboration to map the human genome wrapped up in 2003. It provided new insights into the genetic bases of diseases, facilitated the growth of personalized medicine (where treatments are customized to an individual's genetic makeup), and greatly expanded our understanding of evolution, to name but some of its accomplishments.

Its designation as among the most important scientific endeavors of all time is not diminished by that fact that this map of the human genome—some 3.2 billion nucleotide base pairs forming the "rungs" of our DNA "ladder"—had gaps and was only 90% complete. It was essentially a draft. The sequencing technology and software of the day were just not up to the job, particularly where sequences were repetitive and challenging to place in order. Several Hopkins scientists worked on this project, but the university had an even larger role in its follow-up, the largely NIH-funded collaborative effort that completed the genomic map in 2022. In those intervening years, Hopkins scientists corrected thousands of earlier sequencing errors, discovered over 100 new genes that can create proteins, and helped develop the advanced tools and programs that make sequencing faster and more accurate.

"Once you build the complete genomic map, the human blueprint, you can study how changes across the genome are important for different diseases."
Michael Schatz

Thirteen Hopkins researchers were part of this international project, called the Telomereto-Telomere consortium (T2T), referring to a section of repeating DNA at the ends of each chromosomal sequence. "Once you build the complete genomic map, the human blueprint, you can study how changes across the genome are important for different diseases," says Michael Schatz, a Johns Hopkins professor of computational biology and oncology who worked on the project. "I'm currently involved in a study where we're using these technologies to study pancreatic cancers. We're finding things that are only possible because of this new genome and these new technologies. So, in a variety of different diseases and traits, that last 10% is proving to be incredibly important."

Fighting cancer from within

The human immune system is a complex network of specialized cells, proteins, and organs working together to defend the body against nefarious invaders such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi.

Robust as our body's defenders are, they can struggle in identifying and attacking cancer, perhaps the most pernicious invader of all. Cancer can be elusive because it hijacks existing cells and disrupts the cellular signaling that might alert our immune system to a threat. Historically, most cancer therapies focus on attacking the cancer itself with surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy. These approaches often include collateral damage to healthy cells and organs that can make patients feel sick or lose their hair. The emerging field of cancer immunotherapy instead focuses on empowering immune cells to recognize cancer as an invader (to pull the sheep's clothing off the wolf, if you will). It's been called a "game changer" in the war on cancer, with most of the NIH-funded research in this field at Hopkins taking place at the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.

Among the breakthroughs empowering this field is the increased understanding of "immune checkpoint proteins" on the surface of immune cells. These serve to dampen their defensive response, ostensibly to keep our immune system from overreacting and potentially damaging healthy cells. But when some cancerous tumors bind with these proteins, the immune cell receives a signal to stand down. Researchers have developed ways to block this "stand-down" signaling so the immune cell gets back in the fight. Hopkins research in this arena has led to numerous FDA-approved therapies, including the drug Nivolumab, which in clinical trials quadrupled the survival rate of lung cancer patients.

Research Saves Lives graphic identifier
More coverage
The impact of funding cuts

Without research—and the federal support that makes it possible—scientific breakthroughs suffer, and the lifesaving treatments of tomorrow are at risk.

One of the first immunotherapies developed here was the cancer vaccine called GVAX, which has shown great promise, in combination with other treatments, in treating pancreatic cancer, one of the most lethal forms of the disease. There is also some promising early research around using mRNA vaccines to fight cancer and other diseases. Drew Pardoll, director of the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute, concludes that if their work continues on its encouraging arc, "there isn't a single cancer that the patient's own immune system ultimately can't beat.

Coda: Where we are now

Through September of this year, Hopkins has received 40% fewer new federal research awards, representing approximately 50% less research funding compared to the same period last year. The Research Saves Lives website offers more information about the recent and proposed cuts to federal research investments and how they stand to undermine the successful and longstanding partnership between Johns Hopkins and the federal government. Here you will learn what's a stake, including delays in the development of breakthrough treatments and therapies for cancer, Alzheimer's, diabetes and other diseases. Also discussed is how cuts may facilitate a brain drain, as the best and brightest researchers opt to take their talents to other shores, and the devastating economic impact the cuts can have on both university operations and the surrounding communities. Nearly 9,000 Hopkins researchers are working on projects to benefit the American public, collaborating with researchers at other universities in 47 states and Washington, D.C.

Brennen Jensen is a senior writer for Johns Hopkins Magazine

Posted in Science+Technology

Tagged nih funding, nsf