Sciencethe Endless Frontier

7.1.1 Genesis

The outlines of a broad debate about post-war science policy began emerging in 1943, when West Virginia Democratic Senator Harley M. Kilgore introduced the Science Mobilization Act,⁷ which included several provisions for organizing and focusing postwar science and technology resources. Included in the Act was creation of an Oce of Scientic and Technological Mobilization, an independent federal agency coordinat-ing all federal science and technology agencies and providcoordinat-ing assistance for basic and applied research in government laboratories, small businesses, and universities. The oce was to be overseen by a board and advisory committee, each comprised of representatives from science and technology, industry, small business, labor, agriculture, and consumer interests.

In 1944, Kilgore drafted a new bill, renaming the federal science agency the National Science Foundation.

Because Kilgore's emphasis had shifted entirely to postwar science-government relations, hearings on the bill were postponed until the end of the war in Europe.

7Daniel J. Kevles, The National Science Foundation and the Debate over Postwar Research Policy, 1942-45, Isis 68 (1977), 5-26.

Figure 7.2: Left to right: Ernest Lawrence, Karl Compton, Vannevar Bush, James B. Conant, Arthur Compton, and Alfred Loomis at the University of California, Berkeley, 1940. Courtesy of the Lawrence Berkeley Library.

By that time, the Vannevar Bush-led scientic establishment was preparing a counterproposal, in the form of a report entitled Sciencethe Endless Frontier (often referred to as the Bush report). Ocially transmitted to Truman on July 5, 1945, the report came in response to a November 1944 Roosevelt letter to Bush, in which the President emphasized that the research experience developed by the Oce of Scientic Research and Development and by the thousands of scientists in the universities and private industry, should be used in the days of peace ahead for the improvement of the national health, the creation of new enterprises bringing new jobs, and the betterment of the national standard of living.⁸

Roosevelt's letter had raised four questions concerning the declassication of wartime research results;

the organization of a program for medicine and related science; government aid to research activities by public and private organizations; and a program for discovering and developing scientic talent.

Although Science the Endless Frontier included several recommendations intended to strengthen ex-isting research capabilities in bureaus within the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and the Interior, its centerpiece was the recommended creation of a National Research Foundation, which would be a fo-cal point within the Government for a concerted program of assisting scientic research conducted outside of Government.⁹ In addition to awarding scholarships and fellowships, the foundation would furnish the

8Bush, op. cit., 3.

9Ibid., 31.

funds needed to support basic research in colleges and universities. Additionally, it would coordinate where possible research programs on matters of utmost importance to the national welfare. . .formulate a national policy for the Government toward science. . .sponsor the interchange of scientic information among scientists and laboratories both in this country and abroad. . .ensure that the incentives to research in industry and the universities are maintained.¹⁰

An Act establishing the National Science Foundation was signed into law in May 1950. Although its approach to federal support for science was much closer to the Bush than to the Kilgore concept, the scope and authority of the National Science Foundation were considerably diminished from what either Science the Endless Frontier or the Kilgore legislation had envisioned. Indeed, the National Science Foundation that nally emerged in 1950 was a bit player among other more established, more powerful agencies. In particular, Bush's hope that defense research would be included in the National Science Foundation's charter was not realized. While medical research was not explicitly excluded, the legislative history of the National Science Foundation Act of 1950 implied that Congress preferred all such research to be conducted and supported by the National Institutes of Health.

7.1.2 Enduring Contributions

The Bush report laid down the boundaries for most subsequent debates about the relations between science and government. As such, it remains one of the cornerstones of U.S. science policy. It made four enduring contributions to the conceptualization of science policy in the United States: it asserted that, except for national defense, the proper concern of science policy ought to be the support, as opposed to the utilization, of science; it advanced the proposition that basic research should be the principal focus of federal support for science, again with the exception of national defense; it argued that mechanisms for the support of research must be consistent with the norms of the practitioners of that research; and it suggested that universities, as the principal sites for the conduct of basic research and the exclusive sites for advanced education, literally dened whatever national research system could be said to exist in the United States.

Although the arguments underlying those propositions have more often been honored in the breach than in the observation, the propositions themselves have achieved the status of an unassailable ideal against which actual and proposed policies can be measured.

Sciencethe Endless Frontier assigned to its proposed National Research Foundation the responsibility to coordinate where possible research programs on matters of utmost importance to the national welfare.

However, it made no recommendations about how government ought to identify relevant goals, assign scien-tic priorities that might contribute toward their achievement, or support or otherwise facilitate the conduct of research intended to benet the national welfare. The report was reasonably specic about coordinating defense-related research, but it did not consider how, or even whether, strategies could be devised to link research with non-defense objectives.

Thus the report dened the central problem for science policy as assuring that the available pool of new knowledge would remain adequate to the needs of those in the best position to use it eectively, as well as to train new generations of scientists and engineers to identify and make use of it. Government had a legitimate role in aiding the quest for new scientic results, but attempts either to direct research toward specic ends or to facilitate the utilization of existing research for non- defense purposes would be counterproductive.

By 1944, the U.S. science establishment realized that the private sources of support sustaining university research prior to 1940 would be inadequate in the postwar era, particularly since destruction of the great pre-war scientic centers of Europe would require the United States to generate much of the world's new scientic knowledge. Bush and his colleagues seized the opportunity to advance the proposition that the best way for government to assure that science would benet the public interest would be to leave scientists free to pursue their own interests. Central to that vision was the idea that universities dened science's center of gravity in the United States; the politically conservative Bush and most of his establishment colleagues were philosophically opposed to government support or control of non-defense-related science in industry, as that would constitute unacceptable government intervention in the marketplace.

10Ibid.

Academia, according to Bush and his colleagues, was therefore the sole non-defense sector where federal research support could legitimately be contemplated. Yet any arrangement that made federal support for university research contingent upon proof of relevance to social or economic objectives was anathema.

Moreover, government support carried the risk of federal intrusion on traditional scientic norms, the most critical being university autonomy. In the words of the report to Bush by the Committee on Science and the Public Welfare chaired by President Isaiah Bowman of Johns Hopkins University, We do not believe that any program [of government support] is better than no programthat an ill-advised distribution of funds will aid the growth of science. In order to be fruitful, scientic research must be free free from the inuence of pressure groups, free from the necessity of producing immediate practical results, free from the dictation of any central board. ¹¹

At least since the time of Francis Bacon in the sixteenth century, it has been an article of faith that the advancement of science depends upon self-governance by peer communities. The 1935 proposal of Karl Compton's Science Advisory Board had foundered in part because it sought to insulate government support for university research from government control by channeling funds through the privately controlled National Research Council. The more politically astute Bush embedded the Baconian norm into the charter of a government agency that would be virtually free from government control. Fiscal and administrative authority was to be vested in a part-time, presidentially appointed group of approximately nine private citizens. In the 1950 legislation, the size of this group was increased to twenty-four and designated as the National Science Board, to be composed primarily of eminent scientists and other individuals with distinguished records of public service.¹² According to the original Bush formulation, this part-time board was to have had complete authority to appoint and discharge the director of the foundation and the heads of its operating divisions. The principal responsibility of those divisions, also to be comprised of eminent scientists, was to be dispersal of research funds according to their own (and the board's) interpretation of scientic merit. The board itself was to have additional responsibilities for coordination and oversight of the entire federal research establishment so that the foundation would serve as the focal point within the Government for a concerted program of assisting scientic research conducted outside of government.