Abstract:
Nearly everyone I know in the Research Game grew up in a world that has only
known robust, continuous, vibrant funding mechanisms provided by the Federal
Government to our scientists and institutions.
Seventy-five years ago, research funding was limited, the conduct of
research was free-form, and the scientific community and infrastructure of
today did not exist.
Tomorrow,
July 25, 2020, is the 75th anniversary of the publication of a
report that changed academic research in America forever. We are speaking, of course, about Vannevar
Bush’s masterpiece, “Science: The Endless Frontier”, published on July 25,
1945.
This
article will provide a brief history of Dr. Bush’s rise to the pinnacle of
scientific leadership during World War II, his quest to continue America’s
scientific progress in a post-war model of Federal funding, the folklore
surrounding the creation of a National Research Foundation with a few views of
what really happened, and one measure of how much Federal support of research in
universities and research institutes has impacted science in America.
Scientific
Leadership During World War II
The
contributions that scientists made to the conduct, and eventual winning, of
World War II are legendary. They have
been documented in print and film and are a source of national pride. Planning, organizing, prioritizing, and
assessing the performance of 6,000 scientists during this period fell to a
small staff in Washington DC – the Office of Scientific Research and
Development (OSRD), led by Dr. Bush.
Dr.
Bush was an accomplished academic, inventor and business executive. After receiving two degrees from Tufts, and
earning his doctorate in Engineering from MIT, Dr. Bush launched an ambitious
career that saw him: invent and perfect one of the first successful analog
computers; hold 49 electronic patents; become a founder or leader of numerous
successful technology firms, assume a professorship at MIT, and become
president of the Carnegie Foundation all by the time he was 48.
Dr.
Bush had witnessed first-hand the lack of coordination between the military and
scientists in World War I, a wasteful and inefficient arrangement. After Germany invaded France in May 1940, Dr. Bush
approached President Roosevelt with a one-page proposal to create a National
Defense Research Committee. Roosevelt
approved the plan in 15 minutes.
For
the next five years Dr. Bush led a massive applied research enterprise that
produced technologies that would assure victory. Under his leadership radar was perfected,
weapons were improved, medical advances were brought to the battlefield, and
the first really “big science” project – the Manhattan Project – the atomic
bomb was developed.
By
the end of the war, at the age of 55, Dr. Bush could have taken immense pride
in a lifetime of significant accomplishments and retreated to an academic
position to live out his remaining days with complete satisfaction. But he had one last, immense, task to attend
to – one that is the most important to us as research administrators.
Continuing
Scientific Momentum in Peacetime
The
folklore about conceptualizing the idea of continuous Federal funding for basic
research is mostly fact-based. To story
goes like this:
President
Roosevelt was more of an innovator than any previous US President. His creation of programs, legislation, and
agencies during the Great Depression were numerous and wide-reaching. His New Deal programs created the Tennessee
Valley Authority to build dams, the Works Progress Administration which put
people to work on public infrastructure projects, instituted the Social Security
Act, and the National Labor Relations Act to supervise Union elections and
assure that workers were treated fairly. So it should come as no surprise that as the end
of World War II was in sight, Roosevelt wrote a letter to Dr. Bush asking him
to develop a plan for continuing the amazing progress spawned by US researchers
into the future with a new focus on improving health and welfare and promoting
economic development.
Roosevelt’s
letter, dated, November 17, 1944, laid out four questions to be answered by Dr.
Bush and a blue-ribbon panel of scientific leaders of his choosing.
·
“What can be done, consistent with
military security, and with the prior approval of the military authorities, to
make known to the world as soon as possible the contributions which have been
made during our war effort to scientific knowledge?
·
With particular reference to the war
of science against disease, what can be done now to organize a program for
continuing in the future the work which has been done in medicine and related
sciences?
·
What can the Government do now and in
the future to aid research activities by public and private organizations?
·
Can an effective program be proposed
for discovering and developing scientific talent in American youth so that the
continuing future of scientific research in this country may be assured on a
level comparable to what has been done during the war?”
While
the end of the war was still more than 9 months away, Dr. Bush pursued the
President’s assignment with energy and determination. He quickly embraced the essence of the questions
in order to provide the President with useful ideas that could rival the other
successful Roosevelt programs from the past 12 years. He appointed committees filled with university
and scientific experts, tirelessly held meetings, and consulted with
Congressional representatives and military leaders. He labored over what to call his report settling
on “Science: The Endless Frontier”.
Sadly,
President Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945 and never saw the report that he had
commissioned. Undeterred, Dr. Bush
pressed forward with both completing the report and selling its merits.
The
37-page report was finally completed, and printed by the Government Printing
Office, on July 25, 1945. In his
transmittal letter to President Truman, Dr. Bush emphasized,
“The pioneer spirit is still vigorous
within this nation. Science offers a largely unexplored hinterland for the
pioneer who has the tools for his task. The rewards of such exploration both
for the Nation and the individual are great. Scientific progress is one
essential key to our security as a nation, to our better health, to more jobs,
to a higher standard of living, and to our cultural progress.”
A
New Covenant between the Federal Government and Science
Dr.
Bush’s report laid out a bold blueprint for a new covenant between the Federal
Government and the scientific community formulating a framework for Federally
funded research that endures today. It
envisioned one central authority, “The National Research Foundation”, as a new
Federal agency dedicated to fostering and supporting science on a scale not
previously possible. This organizational structure was not the only novelty
proposed by the plan.
The
principles outlined in the report included many things that, today, we take for
granted, but then were unprecedented.
The wisdom of the report is manifested in what Dr. Bush referred to as
“five fundamentals” that characterize all the research programs of our modern
Federal Budget.
·
“The
agency to administer such funds should be composed of citizens selected only on
the basis of their interest in and capacity to promote the work of the agency.
They should be persons of broad interest in and understanding of the
peculiarities of scientific research and education.
·
The
agency should promote research through contracts or grants to organizations
outside the Federal Government. It should not operate any laboratories of its
own.
·
Support
of basic research in the public and private colleges, universities, and
research institutes must leave the internal control of policy, personnel, and
the method and scope of the research to the institutions themselves. This is of
the utmost importance.
·
While
assuring complete independence and freedom for the nature, scope, and
methodology of research carried on in the institutions receiving public funds,
and while retaining discretion in the allocation of funds among such
institutions, the Foundation proposed herein must be responsible to the
President and the Congress. Only through such responsibility can we maintain
the proper relationship between science and other aspects of a democratic
system. The usual controls of audits, reports, budgeting, and the like, should,
of course, apply to the administrative and fiscal operations of the Foundation,
subject, however, to such adjustments in procedure as are necessary to meet the
special requirements of research.”
At
its essence, the report proposed that Congress create an agency that would
enjoy continuous funding, governed by a Board that was independent from
political influence. The report was visionary, not only for the principles it
espoused, but also for the practical advice it articulated.
Fact
versus Folklore
Folklore
tells us that the report was a huge success and scientific research lived
happily ever after. The facts tell a
slightly more complicated story.
The
letter from President Roosevelt to Dr. Bush was actually drafted by Bush
himself. Dr. Bush drafted the letter in
late October, and working with Oscar Cox, the letter made its way to President
Roosevelt through Harry Hopkins – Bush’s best contact in the Whitehouse. After some editing and finessing, the letter
was presented to the President on November 17th just days after he had won an
historic fourth term in office. Roosevelt
agreed with the plan and signed it that day.
Most
of the elements that the report proposed were eventually adopted by the
Congress. But the Bush vision didn’t
materialize completely intact. For example, his plan maintained the current
practice of having applied research for defense purposes executed by the
military agencies while reserving basic research for defense programs to the
jurisdiction of the Foundation, thus assuring civil oversight and
priority-setting. That idea didn’t survive the legislative debate process. The
Defense programs for both basic and applied research instead grew in size
through the creation of such agencies as the Office of Naval Research, the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and others.
Another
proposed element that failed to survive was the idea of a single agency
providing oversight to all branches of research. As the report gained in popularity, competing
forces arose to vie for control of research.
The Public Health Service had already begun its own extramural research
programs dating back decades, and in 1944, The Public Health Service Act was
approved by Congress and the National Cancer Institute became part of NIH. NIH has enjoyed budget independence ever
since. The Department of Energy took
over America’s nuclear programs and created its own scientific infrastructure
and research programs. Thus, NIH,
Defense, and Energy eventually got their own, independent, research programs.
By
today’s standards, the report would have been completely unacceptable by virtue
of its exclusion of minorities and women on the various committees. The report
incessantly refers to scientists and leaders in the male gender.
It
could be easily argued that Dr. Bush and his collaborators had a vested
interest in their proposal for a National Research Foundation. Nearly every member of the advisory
committees would either personally benefit, or their employers would benefit,
from the proposal put forth because virtually all were from the university
community which would receive the majority of the funding provided. But despite this conflict of interest, the
merits of the proposal were abundant.
How
was the Bush report received by President Truman? Not a great deal is known about Truman’s
reaction to a report that was requested by Roosevelt, but we do know that he
vetoed the legislation when first proposed.
Truman’s greatest objection was that the Director of the National
Research Foundation would be named by its Board, rather than the
President.
The
US Congress and Senate debated ways to implement the report for five years,
with conflicting visions, and political wrangling that today we assume is the
norm. When Congress was finally able to
agree on a compromise bill, as noted above, President Truman vetoed it. Dr. Bush
tirelessly worked the halls of Congress and the Executive Branch and finally, a
version of the legislation passed Congress and was signed by Truman. The National Science Foundation Act of 1950, Public
Law 507, or 42 U.S.C. 16, gave birth to Bush’s great plan.
Fast
Forward 75 Years
The
vision and positive impact of “Science: The Endless Frontier” has been
chronicled by many.
Business
Week called the report “an epoch-making report” that is “must reading for
American Businessmen”.
The
Washington Post praised Bush for delivering a “thorough, careful plan for
putting the needed push of the federal government behind our scientific
progress and yet keeping our science independent of government control.”
I
cannot describe the meaning of the report any better than Jonathan R. Cole, former
Provost and Dean of Faculties at Columbia University, in his 2016 article “The
Triumph of America’s Research University”.
“. . . the implementation after
World War II of the most enlightened federal science policy that the world has
ever produced—one that used taxpayer money to fund research; that outsourced
the work to the great universities on a competitive basis; that linked research
and teaching by concentrating the training of advanced students with laboratory
work with a leading professor; that produced funding for veterans to return to
school and to those who could not afford college without financial aid; and
that granted great autonomy to universities in exchange for the production of
new discoveries, increased human capital, and more enlightened citizens—then
you have some of the conditions that led to the international preeminence of
the American research-university system.”
You
could write an entire book about Dr. Bush and his report, but do not bother –
Bush’s biographer, Professor G. Pascal Zachary of Arizona State University, has
done a superb job with his book, “Endless Frontier”. I highly recommend it to you.
One
Measure of the Impact
This
historical odyssey caused me to wonder, “Has the explosive growth in Federal
support for science in America had any impact on the most obvious symbol of
scientific accomplishment – Nobel Prizes?”
To answer this question, I did my own research.
Using
the official Nobel Prize website and focusing only on the “scientific prizes”
(chemistry, physics, and physiology or medicine), I have charted the number of
prize recipients by country (at the time of the award). If you look at the period from 1901 to 1940
(the first Nobel prizes were awarded in 1901) the graph looks as follows:
Scientists
in Germany, the UK and France initially received the most prizes, but
Scientists in the United States were being recognized increasingly with time.
If
we now look at the data from 1901 until today, the results are more dramatic.
Epilogue
“Science:
The Endless Frontier” represented a paradigm shift in research funding in
America – a change that endures today.
We all owe a debt of gratitude to Vannevar Bush for his determination in
pushing forward an idea that profoundly changed the world. The Internet, mapping the human genome,
exploring the universe, personalized medicine, computers and information
technologies, efficient batteries and electric vehicles, materials science and
advances in chemistry – virtually every technological development of this
modern age are the result of basic research.
I
think Dr. Bush would be enormously proud of how far we have come since his
legacy’s greatest work. And everyone
involved in the Research Game can celebrate the contributions he made to our
profession.
Cary
E. Thomas
July
24, 2020
References
Altbach, Philip G. "The Past. Present, and
Future of the Research University." Philip G. Altbach and Jamil Salmi,
Editors. The Road to Academic Excellence: The Making of World-Class
Research Universities. World Bank, 2011.
Bush, Vannevar. Science: The Endless Frontier.
Report to the President of the United States. Washington, DC: US Office of
Scientific Research and Development, 1945. Report.
Cole, Jonathan R. "The Triumph of America's
Research University." 20 September 2016. The Atlantic. Article.
26 March 2019.
Mayer, Michael. The Rise and Fall of Vannevar
Bush. 7 July 2018. Article. 28 February 2020.
<https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/the-rise-and-fall-of-vannevar-bush>.
Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1986.
Roosevelt, Franklin D. Letter to Vannevar Bush.
Washington, DC, 17 November 1944.
Times Higher Education. "World's Most Impactful
Research Institutes." 22 October 2016. Document. 22 March 2019.
Zachary, G. Pascal. Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century. Free
Press, 1997.
