Obama on science

From the text of President Obama's address at the bicentennial celebration of Lincoln's birth in Springfield, Illinois Thursday night:

Only a union could speed our expansion and connect our coasts with a transcontinental railroad, and so, even in the midst of civil war, he built one. He fueled new enterprises with a national currency, spurred innovation, and ignited America's imagination with a national academy of sciences, believing we must, as he put it, add "the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery...of new and useful things."  And on this day, that is also the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth, let us renew that commitment to science and innovation once more.