Lenin Peak: Historic Climbs and Tragedies on this 'Easiest' 7,000'er
Lenin Peak (7,134m) is located on the border between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in the Pamir Mountains. Its northern slopes are in Kyrgyzstan's Alai Province, and its southern slopes are in Tajikistan's Gorno-Badakhshan region. The summit lies on the border, making it a shared peak between the two countries.
It is the highest peak in the Trans-Alay Range, and the second highest in both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, surpassed only by 7,495m Ismoil Somoni Peak in Tajikistan and 7,439m Jengish Chokusu in Kyrgyzstan.
Lenin Peak is one of five 7,000m peaks in the former USSR. Climbers must summit all five to achieve the prestigious Snow Leopard Award. Decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, climbers still pursue the Snow Leopard challenge.
In 1871, the peak was named Mount Kaufman after Konstantin Kaufman, the first Governor-General of Russian Turkestan. In 1928, it was unsurprisingly renamed Lenin Peak.
The current official name differs between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. In Kyrgyzstan, it is called Lenin Chokusu (Lenin Peak), while in Tajikistan, it is Qullai Abuali Ibni Sino (Ibn Sina Peak or Avicenna Peak). Tajikistan renamed the mountain in 2006 after the Persian scholar Abu Ali ibn Sina.
Local Kyrgyz names include Jel-Aidar (Wind's God) and Achyk-Tash (Open Rock).
We'll call the mountain Lenin Peak, as it bore this name for three of the four expeditions we cover in this article.
Renowned as one of the most accessible 7,000'ers, hundreds of climbers visit Lenin Peak annually. Most climb the classic north face route, approaching from Osh in Kyrgyzstan. However, the mountain's reputation as the easiest 7,000m peak is misleading because of its high altitude, unpredictable weather, and avalanche risk.
In September 1928, a Soviet-German expedition targeted Lenin Peak. The team included German climbers Eugen Allwein and Karl Wien, and Austrian Erwin Schneider, supported by Soviet climbers and porters. The expedition was a joint effort to map the Pamirs.
They approached from the south side, starting in the Saukdara River Valley, continuing up the south slope of the Trans-Alay Range, and then ascending via the Greater Saukdara Glacier. Their route wound from Krylenko Pass (a saddle that connects the Greater Saukdara Glacier to the upper slopes of Lenin Peak at 5,820m) to the northeast ridge toward the summit.
The three climbers faced brutal conditions with rudimentary gear: canvas jackets, wool layers, and leather boots with nail soles. High winds and subzero temperatures tested their endurance. On September 25 at 3:30 pm, Allwein, Wien, and Schneider reached the summit.
During the descent, the climbers suffered severe frostbite that required medical care in Osh. They left no summit proof on top, leading some to question their success. Despite some skepticism, authorities accepted their ascent, marking a historic first. The team also set a new mountaineering altitude record, surpassing that set by Alexander Kellas on 7,128m Pauhunri in 1911.
In 1934, Soviet climbers tried from the northern side. The expedition, backed by the Red Army, included siblings Vitaly and Yevgeny Abalakov, Kasian Chernuha, and Ivan Lukin.
They started from Achik-Tash Canyon, ascending to Lenin Glacier's western ice slope on the north face. They reached the crest of the northeast ridge at approximately 6,500m and continued along the ridge to the summit. En route, they established camps at 5,700m, 6,500m, and 7,000m.
On September 8 at 4:20 pm, Chernuha, Vitaly Abalakov, and Lukin summited after a four-day climb. Abalakov placed a bust of Vladimir Lenin on the summit.
In 1974, Lenin Peak hosted an international mountaineering camp, attracting nearly 200 climbers.
A Soviet all-female team led by Elvira Shatayeva planned a traverse, ascending via the Lipkin Ridge on the north face, and descending the Razdelnaya Route on Lenin Peak's northern side.
The women topped out on August 7, despite warnings from base camp of an approaching storm. The storm, the worst in 25 years, caught them below the summit. The wind exceeded 100kph, shredded the party's thin cotton tents, and exposed Shatayeva's team to temperatures below -20C°. They didn't want to abandon each other, and all eight stayed together until their last breath.
Shatayeva maintained radio contact with base camp, reporting dwindling supplies and frostbite. American climber John Roskelley and some nearby Japanese alpinists attempted a rescue but were repelled by the blizzard. Over two days, the women succumbed to hypothermia and exhaustion.
Shatayeva's last radio message was: "I'm alone now, with just a few minutes left to live. See you in eternity."
All eight women perished, and climbers later found their bodies scattered along the summit ridge. The disaster, caused by inadequate gear and the ferocity of the storm, shocked the mountaineering community.
In the summer of 1990, 45 climbers, primarily from the Leningrad Mountaineering Club, were at Camp 2 (5,300m) on what is now called the Razdelnaya Route on Peak Lenin's north face. The party included Soviet climbers Leonid Troshchinenko, Vladimir Voronin, and Alexei Koren (among others), six mountaineers from the former Czechoslovakia (including Miroslav Brozman), four Israelis, two Swiss climbers, and one Spaniard.
On July 13 at 9:30 pm, a 6.4-magnitude earthquake (with its epicenter in Afghanistan's Hindu Kush) shook the Pamirs. It dislodged a serac from nearby Chapaev Peak, triggering a massive avalanche. Snow and ice hit Camp 2 on Lenin Peak, burying the climbers in seconds, and killing 43 people from five nations.
Koren and Brozman, who were positioned at the camp's edge, survived with a broken arm and leg, respectively. They heard the trapped climbers' cries as the debris froze into the glacial ice.
According to Charles Huss's report for the American Alpine Journal, a few other climbers were lucky to survive. Vladimir Balyberdin had decided at the last minute to move to Camp 3 with some friends, and six English climbers escaped because they had established their bivouac some distance from the main camp.
Soviet helicopters searched for the avalanche victims but initially could only recover one body. In 2004, because of glacial melt, human remains surfaced at 4,200m, with more emerging in 2008.
A plaque near the Achik-Tash base camp commemorates the victims of the 1990 disaster. It remains the deadliest single mountaineering accident in history.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Scientific American
7 hours ago
- Scientific American
's First Issue, the Solar System Grew by a Planet
In astronomy, 180 years is a very long time—maybe not for the goings-on in the universe but certainly for our understanding of it. When Scientific American published its very first issue 180 years ago this month, our view of the cosmos was substantively different. We had no idea of the scale of the universe or even if anything existed outside our Milky Way galaxy. We didn't know how stars were born, what powered them or where comets came from—or that supernovae were even a thing. Closer to home, astronomers were wildly guessing about how our solar system formed and how Earth's moon came to exist. Heck, we didn't even know how many planets were in the solar system! On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. To be fair, we still don't. But our understanding of our sun's family was still pretty sketchy in August 1845, and it was scarcely a year later that our solar system would grow by an entire planet. For all of antiquity, Saturn was the most distant planet known to humanity. It wasn't until 1781 that German-British astronomer William Herschel reported seeing a slowly moving 'comet' in the constellation Taurus as he scanned the skies with his telescope. It took two years before orbital calculations showed it was not a comet at all but instead a giant planet orbiting the sun beyond Saturn. Uranus, the first new planet ever discovered, was found by accident. Over the ensuing decades, though, astronomers saw that Uranus was misbehaving. Using the mathematical equations governing gravity and orbits, they calculated the shape of Uranus's orbit and used that to predict where the planet should be in the sky. Observations indicated that the actual position of Uranus significantly deviated from what was predicted, however. Sometimes it 'pulled ahead' of the calculated location, and sometimes it lagged behind. Many astronomers wondered these anomalies were caused by another planet lurking unseen beyond Uranus, which itself was, at best, barely visible to the naked eye; a planet farther out would be much dimmer and could have easily escaped detection. But where was it? The sky is huge when you're trying to search for a dim point of light over thousands of square degrees; remember, back then, skywatchers only had their telescopes and eyes. No cameras or detectors were available. Searching for a faint, distant world was like looking for a planetary needle in a cosmic haystack. The mathematics of orbital mechanics offered a shortcut, though. If you assumed a given orbit for the planet, then its position over time could be roughly calculated by its effect on Uranus. This sort of 'X marks the spot' calculation can be done in moments on today's computers, but in the mid-19th century it was done by hand, and the word 'tedious' hardly describes the scope of the work. Still, in the 1840s, independently of each other, two men attempted exactly this. John Couch Adams, a British mathematician and astronomer at the University of Cambridge, worked on the calculations in his spare time starting in 1843. He reported his findings to James Challis, director of the Cambridge Observatory at the time, and to England's Astronomer Royal George Biddell Airy, both of whom treated it chiefly as an interesting bit of math rather than a guide for finding a potential planet. In their defense, however, Adams's calculations were incomplete and not yet suitable to be put into action. At the same time, French astronomer Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier was also working on calculating the presumptive planet's position. He announced his results at a public meeting of the French Academy of Sciences on June 1, 1846. I'll note that Le Verrier only disclosed his calculated locations for the planet on the sky, not his estimates for its mass or orbit. Still, this was enough to cause a minor panic across the Channel when Le Verrier's news reached Cambridge, with Airy realizing the similarity to what Adams was working on. Because discovering the first new planet in 65 years was a matter of great scientific and national pride, Challis went to the telescope and began an urgent, earnest search. Like the calculations themselves, this was a tedious undertaking that involved scanning the sky and comparing what was seen with hand-drawn, not entirely accurate star maps. Making matters even worse, Adams had been working on new solutions to the planet's location and his calculations were flawed, so Challis was looking in the wrong part of the sky. On August 31, 1846, Le Verrier made another presentation to the academy, this time also reporting the putative new world's calculated mass and orbit. Three weeks later, assistant astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle at the Berlin Observatory read of Le Verrier's work. Assisted by a student named Heinrich Louis d'Arrest, Galle took to the observatory's 24-centimeter telescope on the evening of September 23 to look for the planet. Using better star maps than the British had, they sighted the world in the early morning hours of September 24, less than a degree from the position Le Verrier had predicted. As the story is told, Galle read off the coordinates of stars he saw through the eyepiece, and at one point d'Arrest excitedly shouted, 'That star is not on the map!' Thus, Neptune was discovered. Le Verrier is credited for the discovery work, though Adams, upon insistence from the British at the time, is generally also given co-credit. This is controversial because it's not clear just how accurate Adams's results were— see the article 'The Case of the Pilfered Planet,' by science historians William Sheehan, Nicholas Kollerstrom and Craig B. Waff, in the December 2004 issue of Scientific American for details. Still, while Uranus was found by chance, Neptune was found by math (with a helping hand from happenstance). Ironically, that night in September 1846 was not the first time it had ever been observed. Galileo took copious notes when, centuries earlier, he first turned his crude telescope to the sky; we now know he saw Neptune in 1612 and 1613 but mistook it for a star. (Too bad; had he figured it out, he would've been famous.) Neptune had been spotted many other times before as well but passed over for the same reasons. In a very cruel irony, records reveal that Challis himself saw Neptune twice in August 1846 but failed to notice its true nature. I've observed Neptune many times through my own small telescope; it's a wan aqua dot, barely discernable from a faint background star. Still, seeing it myself—knowing those photons took many hours to fly across billions of kilometers of space only to fall into my telescope and onto my retina—has been a thrill. Of course, I've had a huge advantage over Galle, with modern star maps and software that have told me exactly where to look, but that has only shone a spotlight on what an achievement the discovery was almost 180 years ago. And what of the 18 decades since? The universe is vastly larger than we then imagined in 1846, and we can now find Neptune-like planets orbiting other stars by the hundreds. We've also discovered thousands more objects orbiting the sun beyond Neptune, including Pluto. It's almost routine. As for Neptune itself, we've observed it with an array of space telescopes and even sent a space probe, Voyager 2, to fly past the enigmatic giant planet, allowing us to see its array of bizarre moons and weather patterns up close. Scientific American has been there along the way, too, with its first issue in August 1845 nearly coinciding with the discovery of the last known major planet of the solar system. Researchers have taken immense steps in unlocking even deeper secrets of the cosmos over the past 180 years, and during that time, this magazine has played a major role in informing the public about their findings. I'm proud to be a part of this long-running adventure.
Vox
7 hours ago
- Vox
The fake news that helped put us on a path to Mars
The richest person in the world is obsessed with creating a city on Mars. Elon Musk would like to see a million people living in a self-sufficient Martian settlement by 2050, both as a plan B for Earth and because it gives us something cool to get excited about. Traveling to Mars has been a recurring theme of spacefaring fantasies for decades, from the German rocket innovator Wernher von Braun to science fiction writers Ray Bradbury and Kim Stanley Robinson. Human exploits on Mars have also been the subject of countless movies, TV shows, and comic books. There are many good reasons to explore Mars. The discovery of water deep below the surface and ice at its poles suggests that the conditions to sustain life may have existed on the Red Planet, and perhaps still do. Studying Mars could teach us about how life emerged on Earth. While rovers have made great strides in uncovering the planet's secrets, human explorers could accelerate the pace of discovery. Living on Mars would bring many challenges for humans, among them cosmic and solar radiation exposure, an asphyxiating atmosphere, lower-than-Earth gravity, extreme temperatures, toxic soil, and no ready supply of food, drinkable water, or breathable air. But our cultural and scientific fascination with Mars lives on. And if Musk's SpaceX or a competitor lands humans on Mars in the coming years, it will be the realization of an ancient dream. To think that it all started with an optical illusion that tricked some astronomers into believing that Mars was riven with canals flanked with vegetation and carved by wise, peace-loving extraterrestrials. Today, Explained co-host Sean Ramewaram spoke with David Baron, author of The Martians: The True Story of An Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America, about the belief in intelligent Martian life and the fixation on Mars that has gripped generations of scientists, science fiction writers, and tech billionaires. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There's much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. Why do we all care about Mars? As a culture, Mars has seeped into our collective psyche. There's this sense of mystery and romance. A little more than a century ago, the public believed that Mars was inhabited by intelligent beings. Before Martians were staples of science fiction, they were believed to be a scientific fact. You could open the New York Times in 1906 and read in all seriousness about the civilization on Mars, what the Martians might be like, how we might communicate with them, and what we might learn from them. In 1907, the Wall Street Journal said the biggest news of the year was proof of intelligent life on Mars. Where did the fact that there were Martians come from? It all started in 1877. In the 19th century, all we knew about Mars was what we could see through earthbound telescopes. But in 1877, when Mars came especially close to Earth, an Italian astronomer named Giovanni Schiaparelli decided he was going to make a detailed map of Mars. And so, night after night, he studied the planet and saw what he thought were oceans and continents. But he also saw this network of thin, exceptionally straight lines that he imagined were waterways. He called them 'canali,' which in Italian means channels, but when it was translated into English, it was mistranslated as canals. And so, as soon as 1877, people were joking about these canals on Mars and wondering what they were, but people didn't think they were artificially constructed. In 1894, Percival Lowell, an American astronomer, came along and said, yes, these were irrigation canals that Martians were using to survive on a planet that was running out of water. All of Mars's moisture was locked up in the polar ice caps at the north and south poles, and for the Martians to survive, they had created this global network of irrigation canals. That's what these lines supposedly were. They would come and go with the seasons. They tended to appear in the spring and summer, and they would fade in the fall and winter. Lowell theorized that vegetation along the irrigation canals would appear in the spring and summer, and fade in the fall and winter when the leaves presumably died off. This was also a time when people were looking for hope in outer space. In the late 19th century, at least in the West, there were a lot of reasons for despair. There was anarchism in Europe. There were heads of state being assassinated. President William McKinley was assassinated in the United States early in the 20th century. There was a feeling that society was running down. There were wars, including the Spanish-American War in the late 19th century. The idea was that the Martians were these advanced beings who were what we hopefully would become in the future. The fact that they had this global network of irrigation canals meant that they had pulled together as a planet and evolved beyond war and divisive politics. Because it looked like they were cooperating across a planet. Exactly. So there was a real desire to believe in the Martians. Was there anyone out there saying, 'Guys, just because we see some canals, it doesn't mean there are Martians'? Absolutely. In fact, the astronomical community divided into the canalists and the anti-canalists. Lowell was a self-made astronomer. He was an extraordinarily wealthy and articulate human being from a very prominent family in Massachusetts. And so he was able to write articles for the Atlantic Monthly promoting his ideas. He was out there giving lectures about the Martians. And so he was able to convince the public, even if there were a lot of astronomers he couldn't convince. When was peak obsession with Mars in this era? That was 1908 and 1909. By 1908, the idea was so widespread, you had pastors in church sermonizing about the Martians and expressing to their congregations that we should emulate the Martians and look to our neighboring planet for the kind of society that we should be. Alexander Graham Bell, who of course invented the telephone, was convinced that the Martians were real. He saw no question that Mars was inhabited by intelligent beings. Nikola Tesla, a great inventor who came up with our modern system of generating and distributing electrical power, was convinced that he picked up radio signals from Mars. And when he announced that to the world at the beginning of 1901, it set off an absolute craze. Martians invaded popular culture. They showed up on the vaudeville and Broadway stages. There was a popular show called 'A Yankee Circus on Mars.' You had a Martian that became a comic character in the newspapers. They showed up in Tin Pan Alley songs. In fact, I have an original wax cylinder recording of a song called 'A Signal From Mars' from back then. The Martians were just everywhere in popular culture. How did it fall apart? Astronomers by the 1910s had pretty well convinced themselves that this whole canal theory was bunk. But the idea had so taken hold in the brains of the public that the idea of canals on Mars persisted until the 1950s and 60s. In 1938, there was the famous 'War of the Worlds' radio broadcast by Orson Welles. And there were people who actually believed, listening to the radio, that the Martians were invading. I actually found a letter to Orson Welles that was written by one of those listeners who was fooled, who was angry about it. And what she wrote was, well, haven't astronomers found canals on Mars? Don't we know that there are Martians there? The idea persisted well into the 1960s when NASA sent its first Mariner spacecraft flying by Mars to take the first close-up pictures of the surface. And there was not only no sign of a civilization, there was no sign of straight lines. It just looked like a dead world. Thinking back to what you said earlier, when people were first enchanted by this idea of Martians in the early 20th century, it was this idea that we could all work together that really captured imaginations. And it's still a nice idea. Do you think there's still a chance that we could get together as a human race to unite in an effort to get to Mars? It doesn't look that likely. I think what will inspire the United States to get to Mars more than anything is competition, because the Chinese want to get there. But there is still this dream of Mars as this techno-utopia that will be better than Earth, that will be more egalitarian, where we can start over again. I think there are two lessons from the Mars craze. On the one hand, it's a cautionary tale. We tend to project onto Mars what we hope is there, not what's really there. A hundred years ago, we believed in Martians because we wanted to believe that there was a better world next door. Today, I think a lot of the talk about Mars is that we're going to create this utopia next door. That's going to be so difficult: technically difficult, and, as you said, getting humans together to make this possible, Lord knows if that's ever going to happen.
Atlantic
a day ago
- Atlantic
How States Could Save University Science
Whatever halfway measures Congress or the courts may take to stop President Donald Trump's assault on universities, they will not change the fact that a profound agreement has been broken: Since World War II, the U.S. government has funded basic research at universities, with the understanding that the discoveries and innovations that result would benefit the U.S. economy and military, as well as the health of the nation's citizens. But under President Trump—who has already targeted more than $3 billion in research funding for termination and hopes to cut much more, while at the same time increasing the tax on endowments and threatening the ability of universities to enroll international students —the federal government has become an unreliable and brutally coercive partner. The question for universities is, what now? It will take time for research universities to find a new long-term financial model that allows science and medicine to continue advancing—a model much less dependent on the federal government. But right now universities don't have time. The problem with recklessly cutting billions in funds the way the Trump administration has done—not just at elite private universities such as Harvard and Columbia but also at public research universities across the country—is that 'stop-start' simply doesn't work in science. If a grant is snatched away today, researchers are let go, graduate students are turned away, and clinical trials are halted with potentially devastating consequences for patients. Unused equipment gathers dust, samples spoil, lab animals are euthanized. Top scientists move their laboratories to other countries, which are happy to welcome this talent, much as the United States welcomed German scientists in the 1930s. Meanwhile, the best students around the world enroll elsewhere, where good science is still being done and their legal status is not up in the air. The result, ultimately, is that the U.S. leaves it to other nations to discover a cure for Alzheimer's disease or diabetes, or to make fusion energy practicable. No easy substitute exists for federal support of academic R&D—the scale of the investment is just too large. In fiscal year 2023, federal funding for university research amounted to about $60 billion nationwide. University-endowment spending, as reported by the '2024 NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments,' is just half that—$30 billion, with much of the money earmarked for financial aid. Universities by themselves cannot save American science, engineering, and medicine. However, there is also no easy substitute within the American economy for university-based research—universities are the only major institutions that do what they do. The kind of curiosity-driven rather than profit-driven research pursued by universities is too risky for private corporations. By and large, industry conducts research to achieve milestones along a well-considered road map. It is up to universities to find the new roads and educate the experts who know how to travel them. Those roads are where the real potential for growth lies. After all, the internet and the artificial neural networks that enable generative AI arose out of basic research at U.S. universities. So did the most fundamental discoveries in molecular biology, which are now enabling astonishing one-time treatments that are potential cures for painful genetic diseases such as sickle cell. University research is particularly important in states where technology-intensive industries have grown up around the talent and ideas that universities generate—states such as Washington, California, New York, Massachusetts, Texas, Maryland, and North Carolina. Although the Trump administration may characterize federal research grants as wasteful spending, they are really an investment, one with higher returns than federal investment in infrastructure or private investment in R&D. There is a way forward—a way to bridge the huge gap in funding. It starts with the assumption that a bridge will be needed for several years, until some measure of sanity and federal support returns. It is based on the premise that, because universities are not the sole nor even the most significant beneficiaries of the scientific research they conduct, they should not be alone in trying to save their R&D operations. And it is focused not on Washington but on the individual states that have relied most on federal research spending. These states have the power to act unilaterally. They can set up emergency funds to replace canceled federal grants, allowing universities to keep their labs open until a shaky present gives way to a sturdier future. These states can also create incentives for corporations, investors, philanthropists, and of course universities themselves to step up in extraordinary ways at a time of emergency. This is not merely wishful thinking. Massachusetts has already made moves in this direction. At the end of July, Governor Maura Healey introduced legislation that would put $400 million of state funds into university-based research and research partnerships. Half would go to public colleges and universities, and half to other institutions, including private research universities and academic hospitals. Obviously, with $2.6 billion of multiyear research grants threatened at Harvard alone, action by the state will cover only part of the funding deficit, but it will help. It makes perfect sense for Massachusetts to be the first state to try to stanch the bleeding. With just 2 percent of the nation's workforce, Massachusetts is home to more than 11 percent of all R&D jobs in the country. It has the highest per capita funding from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation in the U.S. Every federal dollar invested in academic science in Massachusetts generates about $2 in economic return for the state. And that's before taking into account the economic impact of any discoveries. In particular, Massachusetts has a powerful biomedical-research ecosystem to protect. But each state has its own strategic imperatives, and many ways to structure such emergency funds exist. Because the grants canceled by the Trump administration have already undergone the federal peer-review process, states don't need to force themselves into the challenging business of judging the worthiness of individual research proposals. They could make a large difference simply by refilling the vessels that have been abruptly emptied, possibly with grants that allow the universities to prioritize the most important projects. States could require that, in exchange for state help, universities must raise matching funds from their donors. In addition, states could launch their own philanthropic funds, as Massachusetts is also doing. Philanthropy—which already contributes an estimated $13 billion a year to university research through foundations, individual gifts, and the income on gifts to university endowments—is particularly important at this moment. As federal-grant awards become scarcer, it is a fair bet that federal-funding agencies will become more risk averse. Philanthropists have always played an important role in encouraging unconventional thinking because they are willing to fund the very earliest stages of discovery. For example, the philanthropists Ted and Vada Stanley funded a center at MIT and Harvard's Broad Institute specifically to explore the biological basis of psychiatric disorders. In a landmark 2016 study, researchers there found strong evidence of a molecular mechanism underlying schizophrenia, establishing the first distinct connection in the disorder between gene variants and a biological process. Foundations can also launch sweeping projects that bring together communities of scientists from different organizations to advance a field, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has mapped a third of the night sky, or the Sloan Deep Carbon Observatory, which studied the carbon cycle beneath the surface of the Earth. States could also incentivize their business communities to be part of the rescue operation, perhaps by offering to match industry contributions to academic R&D. Some sectors, such as the biopharmaceutical industry, are particularly reliant on university discoveries. NIH-funded research contributed to more than 99 percent of all new drugs approved in the U.S. from 2010 to 2019. But China is now catching up to the U.S. in drug innovation. American biopharmaceutical companies are already dependent on China for raw materials. If they don't want to become completely reliant on China for breakthrough drugs as well—and able to access only those drugs that China is willing to share—they should do what they can to help save what has long been the world's greatest system for biomedical research. The same is true for science-based technology companies in fields that include quantum computing, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and batteries. Academic breakthroughs underlie the products and services they sell. If they want to remain ahead of their global competition, they should help support the next generation of breakthroughs and the next generation of students who will contribute to those breakthroughs. Among those who would benefit from keeping U.S. university labs open are the venture capitalists and other investors who profit from the commercialization of university ideas. From 1996 to 2020, academic research generated 141,000 U.S. patents, spun out 18,000 companies, supported 6.5 million jobs, and contributed $1 trillion to the GDP. One of those spinouts was named Google. In our current state of emergency, investment firms should be considering ways to provide a lifeline to the university-based science that supports a high-tech economy. Governors and other leaders in states with major research universities will need to work quickly and decisively, bringing various parties together in order to stave off disaster. But what is the alternative? If states, corporations, donors, and other stakeholders do nothing, there will be fewer American ideas to invest in, fewer American therapies to benefit from, and fewer advanced manufacturing industries making things in the U.S. No contributions from elsewhere can completely replace broad-based federal support for university R&D. But until that returns, states with a lot on the line economically offer the best hope of limiting the losses and salvaging U.S. science.
