Basic research conducted by America’s universities is crucial to our world-class entrepreneurial culture. How do we know this? Let’s take a short tour through the White House.

The venture capitalist David Sacks of Craft Ventures runs the White House’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. Scott Kupor of Andreessen Horowitz is the nominee to run the Office of Personnel Management, and Sriram Krishnan, from the same firm, is a policy adviser on artificial intelligence. They have all successfully financed companies in the digital economy. The infrastructure beneath those businesses — the foundational internet protocols known as TCP/IP — was developed in part by the computer scientist Vint Cerf, (Stanford University).

Andreessen Horowitz has been active in biotechnology, as has Vice President JD Vance’s former firms, Mithril Capital and Narya. The field owes much of its success to the decoding of the human genome, which has transformed modern medicine in areas such

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