WHEN THE Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first ever satellite, in 1957, Americans were blindsided. They could scarcely believe that they had been beaten into space. “Now, somehow, in some new way, the sky seemed almost alien,” said Lyndon Johnson, then the majority leader of the Senate, describing what he called “the profound shock of realising that it might be possible for another nation to achieve technological superiority over this great country of ours”.
America’s leaders did not want to be beaten again. In 1958 President Dwight Eisenhower approved the creation of a new institution—the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Its task would be to scan the technological horizon and “invent the future”. Six decades later ARPA’s modern incarnation, DARPA (the d stands for defence) has proved itself so useful—with decisive roles in creating everything from the internet to mRNA covid-19 vaccines—that many medium-sized countries want their own versions.
One of those countries is Britain, which this month announced that its new body—the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA)—would be led by Peter Highnam, a computer scientist poached, promisingly, from DARPA itself. ARIA’s stated purpose is to fund high-risk, high-reward research and it will start with a budget of $1.1bn over four years. This new addition to Britain’s research-funding landscape is welcome—two years after the country left the European Union, it is still unclear whether British scientists will continue to receive any support from the EU’s $108bn Horizon Europe programme.
Yet Mr Highnam will face challenges in bringing the darpa model to a country that has never seen anything like it. Copying his previous employer wholesale is unlikely to succeed—DARPA’s scope and scale (it currently has a budget of $3.5bn per year) far outweigh anything possible in Britain. Instead of trying to replicate DARPA, he should focus on bringing two elements of its model across the Atlantic.
The first is independence. Government interference has hobbled other experimental research bodies, such as Germany’s version of darpa. British ministers have promised the new agency will be free from political interference and the bureaucracy associated with the country’s usual research agencies. But the civil service, science establishment and press may not react kindly to a hands-off agency that is given big chunks of money and resists scrutiny. Mr Highnam should go on a charm offensive to explain what aria is. That includes the tough task of preparing Britain for failures. Lots of them. darpa has succeeded over the decades in part because many of its gambles have not paid off. That is a sign that it is investigating truly radical ideas, rather than confining itself to the sorts of safe scientific bets best left to industry or more conventional research institutions.
The second element is to have a centre of gravity. DARPA’s early successes came from its relationship with America’s Department of Defence, which was trying to win a decades-long cold war. It gave a strategic direction to research and acted as a deep-pocketed customer. As a middling power, Britain does not have a defence budget that remotely matches that of Uncle Sam. Instead aria should focus on another area, where the country has critical mass: life sciences.
Britain is world-class in this domain—as demonstrated in both its academic citations and its scientific response to covid-19. British life-sciences firms raised $3.4bn of venture capital in 2021; more than anywhere else in Europe but far less than the American biotech hubs, Massachusetts ($11.5bn) and San Francisco ($4.9bn). There is ample room, therefore, for stimulation and investment that would direct existing British academic and industrial strengths into tackling long-term health concerns. And with Britain’s National Health Service, aria has a giant customer with a burning need for technological breakthroughs and the resources to buy them. By identifying the challenges that people and health systems are likely to face in the next few decades, aria could show that medium-sized countries can be at science’s cutting edge.
This story was first published in The Economist’s weekly edition of February 12th
