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This week, America celebrates 1776 — that is, the moment on July 4 of that year when it declared independence from the British. But as the holiday unfolds, leaders in Washington should also consider a year that fell later in the same century: 1791.
This was the moment when Britain discovered just how damaging political populism can be for scientific innovation. And while the episode is barely known in America, it ought to make for sobering reading there, particularly as President Donald Trump pushes his “big, beautiful” tax and spending bill through both houses of Congress.
This is the story of the Lunar Society, a network of entrepreneurs, scientists and curious citizens that emerged in Birmingham in the mid-18th century. It was based around dinners held during the full moon to aid travel (hence its name).
Over several decades, this network unleashed inventions that accelerated the industrial revolution, including the discovery of oxygen and carbonated water (by Joseph Priestley), advanced steam engines (James Watt) and innovative ceramics (Josiah Wedgwood).
Think of it as an 18th-century version of Silicon Valley, a place where innovation erupted because key individuals were close to each other and operated in an intellectually diverse and free community with far fewer political controls than in places such as London.
In 1791 Britain experienced a wave of political polarisation and populism. Mobs attacked Lunar Society workshops, innovators such as Priestly emigrated and the network crumbled. “The damage went beyond physical destruction,” David Cleevely, a British entrepreneur, notes in a new book, Serendipity. “The riots sent a clear message about the vulnerability of intellectual networks to political pressure . . . and a climate of fear descended.”
This resonates 234 years later. In the US there has been a wave of hand-wringing from scientists about Trump’s attack on research. At Harvard, for instance, $2bn in funding for (mostly) medical research is at risk because of the president’s political vendetta against the university. At Nasa, half of the budget for scientific research is at risk under Trump’s 2026 funding plans. Billions of dollars are slated to be wiped from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health budgets too.
Indeed, Cassidy Sugimoto, a professor of public policy at Georgia Institute of Technology, suggested this week in London that the totality of Trump’s moves meant that science faced a “50 per cent cut” in all US government research funding. “Trump has cut science funding to its lowest levels in decades,” she lamented.
But what is as notable as these numbers is the fear aroused by Trump’s political attacks on “woke” causes (like diversity) and the science that his populist supporters dislike (such as vaccine research). This is not just affecting institutions such as Harvard; American scientists tell me that research programmes are being culled across the country if they contain controversial words or prefixes like “trans-”, “bi-” or “gender” — even if used in connection with, say, “binomial stars” or “transgenic” mice.
“It’s Orwellian — like an artificial intelligence program just cuts anything with those words,” one eminent mathematician tells me.
In response, scientists are swapping secretive notes about how to avoid the censors. Internal battles have erupted at prestigious institutions such as the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine about whether or not to capitulate to Trump.
Meanwhile, some scientists are leaving. In April the journal Nature calculated that job applications by US scientists to institutions in Canada, Europe and non-China Asia were 41 per cent, 32 per cent and 39 per cent higher respectively in 2025 than 2024. And this week France proudly unveiled its first official group of US “scientific refugees”: an eight-strong cohort of researchers who are heading to Aix-Marseille university.
Trump supporters tell me these departures don’t matter, since they are just a drop in the vast ocean of American talent. The White House also insists that scientific funding structures were so bloated they needed an overhaul to unleash a new “Golden Age” of science.
Moreover, there is no sign that this assault has actually hurt the innovation machine in places such as Silicon Valley — or at least not yet. That is perhaps no surprise. In fields such as artificial intelligence, a growing proportion of research now occurs in the private sector. And many innovators in California are trying to shut out the noise coming from Washington and focus on their own projects instead. “It’s a coping tactic,” one tells me.
But the moral of the Lunar Society saga is that no innovation network is safe. This attack is crazily self-destructive. So this July 4, let us hope that Trump’s shocking onslaught on science will be reversed. In the meantime, the country’s business leaders and politicians urgently need to back lobby groups such as 314 Action, which is fighting Trump’s plans, and speak up themselves. Think of that when you next see a bottle of sparkling water — and then remember 1791.
gillian.tett@ft.com
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