Bob Mumgaard

The energy entrepreneur talks about the state of science innovation in the U.S.

Bob Mumgaard is an engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Commonwealth Fusion Systems and serves as its chief executive officer. Trained in applied plasma physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he has worked on fusion energy technologies and efforts to commercialize fusion power.

How would you describe the current state of American science?

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In America, science innovation is very good, and the tools are getting even better. At the same time, we are seeing institutions under threat, both internally and externally, and an overall erosion of trust in science. As a result, some of the public doesn’t really understand what they get from science.

This is unfortunate because the ability of science to make a meaningful difference in the world is accelerating. We have better tool sets, whether in artificial intelligence or other computational tools, and that gives us better ways to model and analyze things. A single researcher has more power in their fingertips today to analyze data than entire institutions had even 10 years ago. For every field of science, the ability to work with huge datasets, sophisticated simulations and new ways to manipulate things will only make research faster and better.

While science is getting faster, it still takes time to produce results. We don’t have the long-term stable investment base that will allow us to realize the gains. At the federal level, for example, funding is not there, especially if you’re fighting every year for a budget and the priorities for what you should research change every four years.

We are, in some ways, overconstrained by bureaucracy, contrasting with China, [where it] is getting faster and easier to get things done. The fact that an increasing number of new drugs are licensed from China because the cost to run a clinical trial there is so much lower should be concerning. But I also think it is indicative of the costs to innovate across the whole ecosystem.