In a speech last February at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston, John Marburger, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, defended the significant tilt toward the life sciences in federal science funding. Science was within reach of a “frontier of complexity” that “creates far more opportunities in the life sciences,” he said. “Given the new atomic‐level capabilities [of biological research], the life sciences may still be underfunded relative to the physical sciences,” he concluded.