The Legacy of Vannevar Bush

“Research is the exploration of the unknown and is necessarily speculative. It is inhibited by conventional approaches, traditions, and standards.” 

We all know J. Robert Oppenheimer. But Oppenheimer reported to Vannevar Bush and Bush is less well known today. As director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Bush reported only to President Franklin D. Roosevelt who asked for that document to be produced.

Bush warned several times in his introductions, summaries, and comments, of the consequences of central control and centralized authority. He was also adamant that grants in kind were to run for years: annual appropriations from Congress would have prevented success.

That discontinuity is now a chasm as draconian directives from the President of the United States and his cabinet appointees suddenly discontinue the appropriations from the federal agencies that paid for basic research. 

This book was recently reprinted to celebrate both the 75th anniversary of its issue and the 70th anniversary of the National Science Foundation which it created. I have that as PDFs on my laptop and phone. From the University of Texas Libraries, I borrowed a 1990 edition. (Another from 1960 was also on the shelf.) As far as I can tell, the texts are identical, and only the celebratory Prefaces and Introductions hallmark those printings.

The first forty pages are Bush’s overview and summary points. The other 160 pages are the reports of five advisory committees which addressed medical research and biological sciences, physical sciences (and their impact on the public welfare), the development of talent, and the dissemination of this information and the resulting discoveries. 

Bush points out early in his apology (page 8) that the federal government is tasked to take on these responsibilities by the Constitutional mandates that it provide for the general welfare and common defense. 

"During the nineteenth century the Coast and Geodetic Survey, the Naval Observatory, the Department of Agriculture, and the Geological Survey were established. Through the Land Grant College Acts the Government has supported research in state institutions for more than 80 years on a gradually increasing scale. Since 1900 a large number of scientific agencies have been established within the Federal Government..." 

And "defense" meant more than the military. In his letter asking Vannevar Bush to create a National Research Board, Pres. Roosevelt said that more Americans died from one or two common diseases than total US military fatalities from combat during World War II to that date (November 17, 1944). 

FIVE FUNDAMENTALS

There are certain basic principles which must underlie the program of

Government support for scientific research and education if such support is to be effective and if it is to avoid impairing the very things we seek to foster.

These principles are as follows:

(1) Whatever the extent of support may be, there must be stability of funds over a period of years so that long-range programs may be undertaken.

(2) 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.

(3) The agency should promote research through contracts or grants to

organizations outside the Federal Government. It should not operate any laboratories of its own.

(4) 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.

(5) 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. -- pages 32-33.

An inventor himself and also an administrator, Vannevar Bush recognized that research cannot be held to legalistic limitations and narrow contractual requirements. However, as corollaries to those Five Fundamentals, Bush specified that while funding was to be preferentially long-term, perhaps in blocks running six years, he also understood that not all explorations are profitable in any sense. Therefore, continuing reviews should allow the funding agency to easily and early discontinue projects that are failing. His solution to this conundrum was to recruit fifty of the acknowledged leaders in research from universities, industrial corporations, and not-for-profit foundations, all of which were actively funding research at that time. Among them were: 

• Dr. Linus Pauling, head of the division of chemistry and chemical engineering and director of the chemical laboratories at the California Institute of Technology.
• Dr. Isaiah Bowman, chairman; president of Johns Hopkins University.
• Dr. J. T. Tate, vice chairman; research professor of physics, University of Minnesota.
• Dr. Edwin H. Land, president and director of research, Polaroid Corporation.
• Dr. I. I. Rabi, professor of physics, Columbia University (recipient of Nobel Award).

Isidor [Israel] Isaac Rabi was the only Nobel Laureate because Pauling’s first award came later (1957). Also, on the downside, not one woman was tapped for this. Those negatives may only serve to highlight the underdeveloped state of science research in the United States at that time. As Bush noted in 1944: “In the nineteenth century, Yankee mechanical ingenuity, building largely upon the basic discoveries of European scientists, could greatly advance the technical arts. Now the situation is different.” 

Bush also recognized that the development of professional researchers from the pool of likely undergraduates and high school students of that year 1944 would take another six to ten years or more. Millions of men and women were in the military, waiting to be demobilized, while their academic careers had been interrupted. And it takes time to learn how to be a researcher. 

Bush insisted that these overarching federal grantors were to have few offices of their own. Most of them would continue in their own  individual career  positions while being reimbursed for time and materials invested in serving on the boards of federal research offices. Those offices would have few  laboratories of their own, turning instead to the universities and industries. Without them no advances would be possible. 

I was already familiar with the rubric here, that the government should fund “everything” because there is no way to know in advance what will pay off. I took up the book at the suggestion of my brother, who is also reading it. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Sociology is a Science 

Teaching Ethics to Student Engineers 

Why Evidence is not Enough 

Where All the Children are Above Average