Partners in Science: Foundations and Natural Scientists, 1900–1945 by Robert E. Kohler

Abstract

638 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Partners in Science: Foundations and Natural Scientists, 1900—1945. By Robert E. Kohler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Pp· xv + 415; ilustrations, tables, notes, index. $34.95. The dustjacket of Robert Kohler’s book, Partners in Science, displays a 1939 photograph of a lean scientist gripping the controls of the robust sixty-inch medical cyclotron at the University of California. A midget by comparison to today’s cyclotrons, this joint creation of scientists and their philanthropic patrons represented the frontier of science in the 1930s. This vanguard also included smaller but no less impressive technologies: ultracentrifuges, electrophoresis, electron microscopy, spectroscopy, X-ray and electron diffraction—machines that penetrated and transformed the inner sanctum of science, the laboratory. The image on the cover conveys the principal message of this valuable book. Judiciously tempered, the argument is that during the interwar era the natural sciences in America underwent major technological and organization transformations, patterns that formed a bridge between the small-scale personalized style of 19th-century science and the megascale team projects that came to characterize “big science” after World War II. These transformations, the book argues, were shaped by the partnership of scientists and the large philanthropic founda­ tions, notably the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Founda­ tion. The author’s point of departure is that the production of scientific knowledge is a complex social process reaching beyond the laboratory. Science is done not only by scientists: “Foundation managers were doing science no less than the scientists whose work they helped make possible” (p. 2). He thus focuses on how these systems of patronage worked, how these networks were constructed, and how they shaped and were shaped by the institutional structures they supported. In fact, Partners in Science is not about intellectual pursuits and cognitive products; it offers important insights into the social process that empowered them. The material is organized mainly chronologically. The first part, 1900—20, traces the creation of the patronage systems of the Carnegie and Rockefeller philanthropies and the evolution of a limited part­ nership between scientists and patrons. After the mobilization of science for World War I, the national value of science rose sharply, making the 1920s a watershed in foundations’ commitment to re­ search and to strengthening elite universities. The second part examines the institutional relations governing the Rockefeller Foun­ dation’s American and European activities in the natural sciences in the 1920s. The third part focuses on the Rockefeller Foundation’s support of molecular biology in the 1930s and in particular on the managerial role of Warren Weaver, the director of the natural science TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 639 division. The last chapter is devoted to the emergence of sophisticated laboratory technologies that altered the organization of knowledge and the social practices of life science. Together these chapters reconstruct the important elements of the system of patronage that propelled the natural sciences closer to the threshold of big science. The book is instructive both because of its scope and limits. With deftness and wit that has characterized his earlier works, Kohler has managed to integrate voluminous findings, dexterously surveying scores of institutions and following the trajectories of hundreds of actors. The densely woven biographical and administrative threads have produced a richly textured pattern of the American patronage of science. But the book seldom steps out of this enchanted institu­ tional realm, and has little critical distance from the actors and events it describes. Primarily on the basis of records of the patrons and their scientific partners, the author tends to tell mostly their stories. His study traces the capillary workings of power without sufficient sensi­ tivity that these were indeed transactions of knowledge and power nested within a broader political and ideological context. As Kohler himself states, the foundations were as natural a devel­ opment in the field of philanthropy as Standard Oil and United States Steel were in the field of manufacturing. He also notes that the foundations made their operations a business. And after all, the foundations did not support all sciences in all places; they promoted select fields in elite institutions. What was the cognitive and cultural significance of this kind of...