What Democracy Makes Possible
I photographed Arati Prabhakar at her home on May 9, 2022. I couldn’t help but notice a telescope on the deck, something you don’t see every day in downtown Palo Alto. Over tea, we talked about DARPA and how she chose which research to pursue. I wanted to understand the judgment involved in giving an uncertain idea years of someone’s time.
Born in India and raised in Lubbock, Texas, she studied electrical engineering before becoming the first woman to earn a doctorate in applied physics at Caltech. She went on to lead the National Institute of Standards and Technology and, later, DARPA. Between government appointments, she worked in technology companies and venture capital. She had seen promising ideas fail and others survive long enough to become useful.
The month after our visit, President Biden announced her nomination to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She served as its director and his science adviser until January 2025.
Today, she is defending public research as part of a functioning democracy. A country’s ability to care for its people depends, in part, on work whose usefulness cannot be known in advance. A treatment available today may owe its existence to an experiment funded decades ago. The people who approved that funding could not have known whose life it would eventually save.
Prabhakar is trying to make those connections visible. She is developing a project about the many people behind major American innovations, while speaking against research cuts and the disregard of scientific evidence in government. Her concern extends to the uncertainty that makes a laboratory unable to plan, or a young scientist reconsider a career. Restoring a budget does not necessarily bring those people back.
She is also pressing for public investment in artificial intelligence that improves education and helps develop medicines. She wants the ambitions of the field to include the needs of people with little influence over its direction.
What interests me about her argument is the experience behind it. She has had to decide what deserves support, knowing that some of the work will fail. She understands the patience discovery requires. Now she is asking a country accustomed to the benefits of science to take responsibility for the conditions that make it possible.
