0.2 Introduction  (Page 12/6)

Roots of a concept

The government has gone through decades of ad hoc situations, arrangements regarding science and technology which have not been based on any firm policy but have responded merely to the current crisis. The results have been a marked inconsistency in utility and effect. In some cases things have worked well; at other times they have worked poorly.

—Legislative History of the OSTP Act of 1976 Legislative History of the National Science and Technology Policy, Organization, and Priorities Act of May 11, 1976 (Public Law 94-282) which, among other things, established the Office of Science and Technology Policy within the Executive Office of the President.

The objective of this book is to examine the history not so much of science policy itself but rather of various concepts of what science policy is or ought to be, and the ways in which those concepts have been implemented.

During the two years immediately prior to the entry of the United States into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt took two relatively low-key actions that were destined to have significant impact on the relationship between science and government in the United States. On September 9, 1939, he issued an Executive Order establishing the Executive Office of the President (EoP), following the recommendation of the President’s Committee on Administrative Management, chaired by Louis Brownlow; and on June 15, 1940—five days after the fall of France—he accepted the proposal of Vannevar Bush, President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), to establish a National Research Defense Council (NRDC) that would aid national defense by placing relevant non-governmental science sectors at the disposal of the government. In 1941, the NRDC joined the Medical Research Council as a component of the emergency Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), whose director—Bush—reported directly to the president. This set a significant precedent for the special treatment of science by government.

The five or six years immediately following World War II are frequently cited as the period in which serious considerations of U.S. science policy were initiated. Between 1945 and 1951, more science- and technology-related federal agencies and advisory bodies were established than in any comparable period before or since. These included the 1946 establishment of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Scientific Advisory Committee to the Office of Defense Mobilization (SAC/ODM), which was elevated to the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) in 1957. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) also grew during these years from a relatively minor agency to the nation’s principal support of biomedical research.

Debates about the charters of these agencies thrust large numbers of working scientists into overt political roles for the first time in American history.