Modernizing U.S. Scientific Enterprise: Why the NSCEB’s New Vision Demands Action

America stands at a pivotal moment in biotechnology and scientific innovation. The National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB), amplified by the Senate Committee on Biotechnology’s press announcement and its November 2025 paper, The Future of Science: A Playbook for Accelerating American Innovation, argues that the United States must modernize how it funds, conducts, and translates science to sustain leadership in the biosciences. The message is practical and urgent: reduce friction, crowd in private investment, speed discovery, and ensure benefits reach communities beyond a handful of elite institutions. 

The Commission’s warning is straightforward - American leadership is no longer guaranteed. Even with strong U.S. R&D capacity, international competition is intensifying and nations investing aggressively in AI-enabled discovery are closing gaps quickly. NSCEB frames this as more than a biotech race: it is a competitiveness issue with consequences for public health, economic strength, and national security. 

The report points to systemic bottlenecks that have become strategic liabilities. Federal funding and compliance processes burden scientists with administrative work, federal data systems remain fragmented and undermaintained, and agencies can struggle to communicate clearly, move quickly, or take calculated risks. At the same time, science itself is changing - automation improves scale and reproducibility while AI unlocks new ways to leverage data - yet the federal enterprise is not yet operating like the catalyst this moment requires.  

NSCEB’s solution is not to retreat from public investment in basic research, but to upgrade the machinery around it. The federal government still plays a unique role in supporting long-horizon, uncertain science that private capital often cannot. The Commission argues that modernization should also include better coordination across sectors and targeted “down payments” in shared infrastructure - facilities and data systems that individual labs, small companies, or smaller institutions cannot finance on their own - so taxpayer dollars yield greater returns. 

A core recommendation is to make government a better partner in science and technology by streamlining the grant experience. That means simplifying solicitations and reporting, reducing duplicative requirements, and moving toward an interoperable application process that prevents researchers from rewriting the same ideas across agencies. The goal is to shift time and talent back to research. 

The report also calls for a reset in how proposals and success are evaluated. Instead of relying on publication counts and prestige signals that can reinforce incrementalism, NSCEB urges agencies to elevate metrics aligned with modern discovery and impact - reproducibility, high-quality data generation (including negative results), interdisciplinary collaboration, novel tools, commercialization outcomes, and mentorship. It even proposes mechanisms like “golden ticket” reviewer selections to ensure truly bold ideas have a pathway to funding. 

To better reflect how breakthroughs happen today, especially in biotech, the Commission urges adoption of funding models that connect discovery to translation. It highlights research-to-commercialization programs that bridge stages of development, rapid funding mechanisms for time-sensitive opportunities, and structures that encourage matching investment from industry and philanthropy to scale national bets without relying solely on public dollars. 

Looking forward, NSCEB emphasizes enabling autonomous scientific discovery, where AI and robotics can design, run, analyze, and iterate experiments with minimal human intervention. In that future, infrastructure and data become the limiting factors, and the Commission argues federal policy must catch up by investing in the systems that allow AI-enabled science to flourish. 

That requires modernizing U.S. research and data infrastructure, including a “Web of Biological Data” as a single point of entry for federally funded biological data resources, paired with scalable compute and storage. The report calls for improving the full lifecycle of scientific data - preservation, reuse, and interoperability - so the nation captures maximum value from taxpayer-funded research and equips scientists for data- and compute-intensive work. 

NSCEB is equally clear that high-quality training data is strategic. It recommends stronger expectations and incentives to deposit comprehensive datasets, including negative results, alongside NIST-led standards to make research data machine-readable and interoperable for AI use. It also proposes public–private cost-sharing partnerships to digitize large biological sample collections held by federally funded programs that currently lack sufficient resources to make those data widely and securely usable. 

Access is the third requirement: the newest AI tools, autonomous lab capabilities, and compute resources must not be locked behind prohibitive cost or exclusivity. The Commission calls for more open-access provisions in federally funded AI systems and proposes a “Lab of the Future” grand challenge to accelerate the convergence of AI, robotics, and automation in lab infrastructure—and to broaden who can use it. 

Finally, the report argues that American bioscience leadership must be built across the whole country, not concentrated in a few hubs. It proposes Science Extension programs modeled after agricultural extensions, initiatives that let states pilot new funding mechanisms with federal matching support, and interdisciplinary entrepreneurship collaborations that help early discoveries become commercially feasible. For Michigan and the Midwest, this is both validation and opportunity: our manufacturing strength, medical device leadership, research universities, and growing biotech base are exactly the assets a modernized national system should amplify.