OSRD taught a lesson that was too soon forgotten: You get more from the seeds of new ideas if you’re willing to invest a bit in the planting stage. “NSF and NIH are really focused on supporting basic scientific investigation, but they don’t really fund, for example, early manufacturing capacity, or efforts to reduce drug costs,” Gross said. “That’s a market failure. There might be a productive role in government funding of clinical trials and manufacturing capacity.” There is an interesting irony here. World War II’s highly focused innovation policy led to a postwar innovation system that is almost proudly unfocused. I came away from my conversation with Gross and Sampat with a question I had never quite thought of before: What would an NIH for applied research look like? In other words, what if, in addition to using NIH to give grants to scientists who set their own priorities for basic research—stage one on the assembly line—Americans put the weight of government funding behind solving high-priority problems? We could do this by investing in the translation of basic research into practical technology, as Japan seems to have done, effectively, with solar power. A National Institute of Applied Science wouldn’t bring the U.S. all the way back to wartime industrial policy. But it might be the sort of institution that could kick-start a new golden age of innovation—by drawing on the last one.