Science, Universities, and National Defense, 1945-1970

Abstract

THE HISTORY OF UNIVERSITIES AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE have been closely intertwined throughout the twentieth century. Their common strands became all the more tangled after World War II, when the federal government began sponsoring the preponderant share of academic research.' Federal support of academic science fact represents a multitude of relationships. The funding of agricultural research universities has a history extending back to the Hatch Act of 1887. Patronage of biomedical research began earnest when the Public Health Service assumed wartime contracts. It expanded greatly during the years that James Shannon directed the National Institutes of Health (NIH; 1956-1968) so that approximately half of federally supported academic research is this area.2 The National Science Foundation (NSF), which Vannevar Bush had proposed as the conduit for federal support for science, was not enacted into law until 1950, and only became the pillar of support for basic academic research outside of biomedical fields the early 1960s. Yet another source of funds for university scientists was the defense establishment-the armed services, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and its successors, and later the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA).3 The link between defense and the university has been most problematic for both contemporaries and historians. Immediately after the war, aside from the Department of Agriculture, virtually all federal support for university research was supplied by the armed services. Most of this support consisted of funds and projects that were in the pipeline, including the massive Manhattan District Project, which was transmuted 1947