The Legacy of Vannevar Bush (Part 3: Conclusion)

The response to Pres. Roosevelt’s request closes with Appendix 5: “Report to the Committee of Publication of Scientific Information.” It is short and to the point: except for considerations of military necessity, all scientific publications must return to their culture of sharing and openness. Appendix 4: “Report of the Committee on Discovery and Development of Scientific Talent” addressed the immediate shortage of scientists and projected that demand into the future. Moreover, science exists within a wider culture  so the committee insisted that nothing recommended here should interfere with the recruitment and development of talented people in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. 

“Table 8 shows that for every four able boys in the upper quarter, there were six able girls. Table 11 shows that the ratio of able boys to able girls in the upper quarter enrolled in college was 6 to 4.5. Thus, it is clear that the greatest social and personal loss of human resources comes in the ranks of able girls in the upper quarter” (Page 198) 

Persons who receive benefits under the plan should be selected solely on the basis of merit, without regard to sex, race, color, or creed. -- Page 170.

“Likewise proposals for recruiting more college students into the physical and biological sciences and enlisting more graduate students for training in research in the physical and biological sciences should be viewed in the light of the over-all needs of the country and of the requirements in other fields of research and in the several professions. If too many of the limited number of high quality students are absorbed by fields of scientific research, research in the social sciences and in the arts and humanities may be jeopardized with probably unfavorable reactions upon scientific research.”  — Page 204

“As said in the general preamble to this report, we think that plans for the discovery and development of scientific talent should have a limit related to the needs of the Nation as a whole for trained talent in all activities that are necessary for the national welfare. We think, also as stated, that while we have no fears that too much top ability can be found and developed there is some danger that too many scientists of less than top ability may be trained, thereby debasing the currency of scientific training to the point where scientific careers may not look attractive either to the best or to the second best.”  — page 168

“The findings of this study, in harmony with the findings of other studies, show that approximately as many of the ablest high school graduates are out of college as are in college. 

“On the basis of the sample (of 1,754 cases), the upper quarter of the State’s 16,000 high school graduates would contain a minimum of 4,000 of the ablest individuals, the type of students who really do well in college. Forty-nine percent of 4,000 is 1,960 individuals with high potential college ability, who for some reason or reasons, did not enroll in college. From the point of view of the colleges, as well as of the individuals and of society, the loss in human resources indicated in these data is highly significant.”  Page 197-198

[Citations above are from —“The Utilization of Potential College Ability Found in June 1940, Graduates of Kentucky High Schools,” by Horace Leonard Davis. Bulletin of the Bureau of School Service, College of Education, University of Kentucky. Vol. XV. No. 1. Sept. 1942. — given on page 198]

Total probable deficit due to war 1941 through 1955. Chemistry, Engineering, Geology, Mathematics, Physics, Psychology, and Biological Sciences: 16,870.

“… it takes at least 6 years from college entry to achieve a doctor’s degree or its equivalent in science or engineering.”— page 3, and the fact is repeated on 27, 156, 166, 177-9, and 182.

"No matter how capable and gifted boys and girls may be, if they do not have opportunities to complete elementary and high school, they cannot go on to college and thence to graduate school for research training." -- Page 192 

“All economic groups, except the highest salaried group, are represented in the highest one percentile class.” — (Page 198)

“Brightest seniors are not going to college." (Page 199)

An Indiana study published in 1922 showed:

If we compare the records made on our tests by the group of seniors representing the richest and the poorest homes, we find that there are proportionally more children possessing the highest grades of mental ability among the poorest class than among the wealthiest class, and more individuals with high average grades of intelligence among the wealthier than among the poorer group. The wealthiest group ranks high on central tendency. The poorest salaried group ranks low on central tendency and also has a larger percentage of individuals possessing the lower grades of mental ability.

But there are individuals in this class who obtain the highest intelligence rating made by high school seniors. * * * (Page 161) 

"It is still more significant that so many of this most superior group of high-school seniors will not attend college, while those with the most inferior grades of intelligence are planning to attend, in ever increasing numbers. Twenty-five percent of the brightest seniors found in the entire State said they were not planning to attend college at all, while 65 to 70 percent of the dullest seniors had definitely decided to go to college, most of them having already selected the college they expected to attend."

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARYFACTS

The Legacy of Vannevar Bush (Part 1) 

Vannevar Bush’s Legacy Part 2) 

The Scientific Method (2016) 

The Scientific Method (2021) 

Vannevar Bush’s Legacy (Part 2)

Bush’s introductory essay ran 40 pages. The committee reports take 160. Of those, Part Three: Science and the Public Welfare, (beginning with its own introduction, “Appendix 3”) comprises 64 pages (70 to 134). It included seven tables of results from questionnaires sent to 315 leading colleges and universities, of which 188 replied in whole or in part. The data all were generally about staffing and funding and the counts upon which those were built. Much of the specific relevance has been lost to time. However, the broad narrative remains important: leading institutions are primaries because they invest in research. 

An interesting counterpoint came from an unidentified school devoted exclusively to teaching: “It is my opinion that the Federal Government should not undertake to establish any far-reaching program for the support of research either in public or private colleges or universities. I do not believe that such relations can be permanently established and maintained without involving political control which has proved so disastrous in Germany and other totalitarian states.”

That warning was presaged by Vannevar Bush himself in his introductory comments and other summaries: centralized political control would prevent the most fruitful research specifically because those advances cannot be predicted and controlled.

Bush says up front (page 88): “But we do not believe that any program is better than no program…” The tabulated data in Part Three reveals the many distinctions that define each of the 188 intellectual enterprises.

Science—The Endless Frontier (1945; republished 1960, 1990, 2020) was Vannevar Bush’s report to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in response to the President’s direct request that four problems be addressed:

First: 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? The diffusion of such knowledge should help us stimulate new enterprises, provide jobs for our returning servicemen and other workers, and make possible great strides for the improvement of the national well-being.

Second: 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? The fact that the annual deaths in this country from one or two diseases alone are far in excess of the total number of lives lost by us in battle during this war should make us conscious of the duty we owe future generations.

Third: What can the Government do now and in the future to aid research activities by public and private organizations? The proper roles of public and of private research, and their interrelation, should be carefully considered.

Fourth: 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?

Working on a federal project in 1996, I was exposed to one concrete innovation resulting from these proposals. In 1944, Civil Service was dedicated to clerical, fiscal, and custodial positions (page 112). In order to bring the best scientists to government employment, the committee headed by Isaiah Bowman (president of Johns Hopkins University), recommended requiring college degrees of all scientists employed under Civil Service. 

“The standards for entrance into scientific and professional positions in the Government should be approximately those maintained for comparable posts in universities and industries. Civil Service positions are subjected to continuous political pressure to relax entrance requirements; and recently the educational requirements for a number of scientific classifications have been removed. This opens the way to possible appointments by personal favoritism and political preference. Action should be taken immediately to re-establish the requirement of a university or college degree for entrance into all scientific and professional services. Exceptions in especially meritorious cases should be granted only upon recommendation of qualified scientists.” (Page 112. [Note that in all editions, differences in prefaces and introductions do not alter the fact that the canonic text is typeset identically].

When I was on that federal project some 50 years later, several of my coworkers had been newly hired into advanced positions because they had (1) college degrees and (2) been graduated with honors, such as dean’s list, magna cum laude, etc. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Science versus Common Sense 

Science Fair: A National Geographic Film 

The Science of Liberty 

The Philosophical Breakfast Club 

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.” 

I read the book at the suggestion of my brother.

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.  

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 

Albeit they possess the Might ...

Nonetheless, we have the will.

Last Tuesday evening (April 15), after arriving home, feeding the cats, and changing out of my work clothes, I opened Google News to discover Harvard's resistance to demands by  President Trump's administration. Columbia's capitulation was easy to retrieve and I quickly built the presentation which I posted that night. 

Driving in to work the next morning and commuting home that afternoon, I decided to send a donation to Harvard. Right now, the check is in an envelope with a cover letter and a printout of that blog post. I will drop it into a Postal Service branch along tomorrow's commute in and it will move to a USPS regional point after 11:30 AM. It took almost a week because my days begin at 4:30 AM and by 5:00 PM composing literature is difficult. Admittedly, the letter betrayed little erudition. Plain speaking is fundamental to technical communication, validating the importance of the narrative. After a few edits, the letter carried my message. 

Originally, the post launched with a bold blue Helvetica kicker: "TANSTAAFL: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." After a couple of days of reading and reviewing, I edited that out because it was too much message without context and delivering those precepts and conclusions would have detracted from the impact of the post. Silence is golden. 

My point then (and now) is that university researchers always believed that government money came with no other requirements than honesty. After a submitted proposal is accepted, following the norms of research were all that was required. The political progressivism of academia was never challenged by the granting agencies which largely shared those assumptions--and when not, they still gave out the money, lest they deny a valid inquiry for an invalid motive. 

That began with Vannevar Bush.  "In Science, The Endless Frontier, his 1945 report to the president of the United States, Bush called for an expansion of government support for science, and he pressed for the creation of the National Science Foundation." -- (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush) As an inventor, and then director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, Bush articulated well the fact that the ultimate rewards of original research are often not predictable at the moment of creation. So, the government should fund "everything" (within reason; subject to peer review). 

But there is no such thing as a free lunch. Finally, the government came to collect its due and what it wanted was less, not more. There was now a political price to be paid. The social agenda of the party in power is now the norm and there is no peer review. Lysenkoism and Aryan Physics were someone else's problems and now they are ours. 

Edward Jenner's small pox vaccines (1796) were predicated on over 50 years of general scientific reporting from Constantinople and other Asian entrepôts. This was the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason. Experiment, publication, discussion, and debate brought material progress which included the steam engine. But there was no theory of thermodynamics--and no germ theory of disease. For over 100 years, the "animicules" revealed by Anton Leeuwenhoek's microscope were accepted as a consequence of disease, rather than the cause. Common knowledge credits Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and others with the proofs, but ahead of them, in 1847, John Leonard Riddell of the New Orleans Medical College argued well. (NecessaryFacts here .) 

Does inoculation have unintended consequences? How could it not? Exploring those, understanding them, and building a theory that can be tested is a scientific project. 

"Cloudy Nights" is a discussion board for amateur astronomers. Chatting about the recent discovery of dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, I pointed out that DNA can edit and repair itself. My current library here in my office includes Genetics for Dummies. I make no pretense. And that is just one reason why I am not the U.S. Secretary of Health & Human Services.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Lightbulb Does Not Need to be Changed 

If a Philosopher Falls in the Forest 

Innovation and Discovery 

20% of Scientists are Crooks 

Emily Levesque and the Last Stargazers

This book is mislabeled. If observational astronomy is in any danger as a profession it is from overpopulation as researchers line up to use the world’s observatories. This is just a bunch of cute stories. In not one of them has a dispirited stargazer turned to another profession for lack of opportunity or (worse) from a lack of interest in a field long closed to discovery. No one is vanishing here.

The Last Stargazers: 
The Enduring Story of 
Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers 
by Emily Levesque 
Source Books, 2020

Seldom do I not finish a book. Even less often do I give a negative review. I also am fully cognizant of the limitations of “the boy brain.” Men are too easily characterized by our passions for food, sex, and combat. That said, as the father of a daughter, it was too easy for me to see the girl brain at work here: I’m cute; I’m smart; Everyone likes me. I am sure that she is and we do. Halfway through, I just turned the pages until the end.

 

Emily Levesque has been granted awards for her ground-breaking research into red supergiant stars. She also advocated successfully to have the Physics Graduate Record Examination dropped as a basic requirement for astronomers and physicists seeking admission to graduate school. It was a stellar victory, but from my point of view 50 years late. See, The Tyranny of Testing by Banesh Hoffmann (1962), which I learned about in 1966 from Ayn Rand’s Objectivist Newsletter. 

Levesque writes well. Her modern style is close enough to literature that her neologisms do not detract from her narrative. But the narrative just stopped being interesting halfway through the book. It was recommended on an astronomy discussion board that I participate in. So, I bought it without hesitation. 

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Levesque
• https://www.emlevesque.com
• https://thelaststargazers.com/about-the-author/

Except for the fact that their mirrors are larger, these folks only do what any amateur astronomer does: put up with cold and heat, animals and instruments, just to get a look at a star (or planet, etc.). As for the observing, amateurs also engage as radio astronomers. Photography and spectroscopy have long been tools. And we publish our results. 

The key difference there is that for amateurs on discussion boards, peer review is after the fact, whereas for an academic researcher, peer review is a form of censorship. Moreover, it so happens that in astronomy, peer review is a form of vanity press. Researchers must pay journals to publish their works—though only after the report has been approved. Levesque is silent on that.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Focus on Simon Georg Ploessl 

Cosmos: A Spacetime Travesty 

Questions about "A Brief History of Time"

Females and Women 

U.S. Patent Law Does Not Add Up