Science

Science OverviewColonial EraRevolutionary War to World War IFrom 1914 to 1945Since 1945Science and ReligionScience and Popular Culture
Overview Before the early nineteenth century, “science” referred to organized knowledge generally. The few Americans who systematically studied nature spoke of doing “philosophy”; thus they called the first permanent scientific society, established in Philadelphia in 1769, the American Philosophical Society. By the 1830s, however, “science” increasingly designated knowledge of the natural world. Between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, the number of Americans earning a living by doing science swelled from fewer than 25 to an estimated 1,500, most of them working for government agencies or educational institutions. By World War I, the United States had reached parity with the leading science‐producing nations and was supporting over 14,000 scientists, perhaps 400 of whom did original research.

In the post–Civil War decades, as the popularity of science soared because of its association with medical and technological wonders, science increasingly came to represent “another name for truth.” By the early twentieth century, philanthropists were underwriting such scientific centers as New York City's Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, while corporations, led by General Electric, were opening the first industrial research laboratories. Science's contributions to the two world wars elevated it to the status of a valuable national resource. During World War II the federal government emerged as the nation's primary patron of basic science, and this lavish support continued during the Cold War and beyond, swelling from roughly $1 billion in 1950 to about $70 billion as the century closed. By 2000 the United States was funding nearly half of the world's total expenditures on science and technology.

Ronald L. Numbers

Colonial Era Early Spanish missionaries and explorers employed an Aristotelian cosmology; most early reports also used Pliny's Natural History as a guide to describing the fauna and flora of the Americas. Throughout the seventeenth century, Renaissance and Scholastic thought dominated American understandings of the natural world and even persisted into the eighteenth century. Throughout the Colonial Era, astrology figured prominently in almanacs and herbals, especially in discussions of medicine, agriculture and meteorology. Alchemy was conspicuous in the science curriculum at colonial colleges; several Harvard theses on the philosophers' stone were accepted during the eighteenth century. Both astrology and alchemy were taught at Yale and the College of William and Mary but Renaissance science received its most comprehensive treatment at Harvard, where Charles Morton's Compendium Physicae was used until the 1720s.

The eventual triumph of Newtonian science and the acceptance of Enlightenment thought in the eighteenth century coincided with the appearance of small communities of savants throughout the colonies. For many Americans, the Royal Society of London provided inspiration, books, patronage, and scientific instruments; around fifty Americans in the colonial period were elected Fellows of the Royal Society and many more published scientific communications in the society's Philosophical Transactions. Bostonians organized a philosophical society as early as 1683 to converse on natural history, astronomy, and natural philosophy, but it survived only five years. New Englanders, whether Puritan ministers or college tutors, were disproportionately influential in colonial scientific circles until the 1730s. Among their most notable publications were Cotton Mather's The Christian Philosopher: A Collection of the Best Discoveries in Nature (1721) and Isaac Greenwood's A Philosophical Discourse Concerning the Mutability and Changes of the Material World (1731).

During the eighteenth century, science was promoted most comprehensively and effectively by the colonial colleges. In 1711 the College of William and Mary named a professor of natural philosophy and mathematics, the first such appointment at an American college. At Yale, a gift in 1714 of several hundred books, including Isaac Newton's 1687 work Principia Mathematica, from Jeremiah Dummer, Connecticut's colonial agent in London, transformed the teaching of science at the college, most notably through the introduction of advanced algebra. Harvard established the Hollis professorship of mathematics and natural philosophy in 1727, appointing Isaac Greenwood as the first incumbent. His successor, John Winthrop, who taught at Harvard from 1738 until his death in 1779, introduced modern textbooks; conducted research; established a large private scientific library; and re‐built Harvard's collection of scientific instruments after fire destroyed Harvard Hall in 1764.

Mathematics and natural philosophy were introduced at Princeton (then the College of New‐Jersey) during the 1760s and at Brown (Rhode‐Island College) during the 1770s and 1780s, but science at both colleges depended more on the efforts of individual tutors than on initiatives of college administrators. At the end of the Colonial Era, science was especially prominent at the University of Pennsylvania (College of Philadelphia) and Columbia University (King's College). Both institutions established medical schools before the Revolutionary War (in 1765 and 1767, respectively), thus inaugurating the systematic teaching of botany, chemistry, and anatomy in the American colonies. Both colleges, moreover, were led by men who emphasized the importance of science in the undergraduate curriculum. William Smith, appointed provost at Penn in 1756 by Benjamin Franklin, not only introduced a full program of algebra, geometry, surveying, navigation, natural philosophy, and agricultural science but provided apparatus for experimental demonstrations. Science accounted for approximately 40 percent of classroom time. Although Samuel Johnson, president of Columbia from 1753 to 1763, promoted the teaching of mathematics, natural philosophy, and natural history, the scientific curriculum remained modest for many years. Nevertheless, Columbia, like Penn and William and Mary, offered science instruction in all four years of college.

The commercial and demographic growth of Philadelphia and New York City triggered the appearance of scientific, cultural, and educational institutions in each city. After moving to Philadelphia from Boston in 1723, Benjamin Franklin helped organize, inter alia, the Library Company of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Hospital, the American Philosophical Society (APS), and the University of Pennsylvania. He won international acclaim for his research in electricity, published in 1751 as Experiments and Observations on Electricity; the Royal Society awarded him the Copley Medal in 1753 and elected him a Fellow in 1756. Although Franklin's American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743, survived only two years, a second attempt in 1769 resulted in a permanent society. Society members observed the transit of Venus across the face of the sun in 1769 and published the first volume of Transactions in 1771. John Adams, as American minister to France, was sufficiently impressed with the APS's reputation among the intellectuals of Paris to establish, in 1780, a similar organization in Boston: the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. With these institutions, science in America achieved a critical mass; in subsequent decades, American scientists would build on and extend the achievements of the Colonial Era.
See also Bartram, John and William; Education: Collegiate Education; Mathematics and Statistics; Mather, Increase and Cotton; Medical Education.

Bibliography

Theodore Hornberger , Scientific Thought in the American Colleges, 1638–1800, 1946.
Brooke Hindle , The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789, 1956.
Raymond Phineas Stearns , Science in the British Colonies in America, 1970.
Herbert Leventhal , In the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism and Renaissance Science in Eighteenth Century America, 1976.
Henry F. May , The Enlightenment in America, 1976.
I. Bernard Cohen , Benjamin Franklin's Science, 1990.
William R. Newman , Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution, 1994.

Simon Baatz

Revolutionary War to World War I When Henry Adams wrote in his autobiography, “the American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900,” he was invoking the enormous upheavals—intellectual, social, cultural, and national—of the second half of the nineteenth century. He was also alluding to his favorite thesis: that the pace of history was accelerating, in large part owing to developments in science and technology. Indeed, the era between the Revolutionary War and World War I saw exponential growth in the organizations, journals, and amount of patronage devoted to science. As the U.S. population and economy expanded, so, too, did the industrial infrastructure and the capacity to produce precision instruments. Educational opportunities improved, and career paths, primarily for men, opened up in scientific research and engineering. Religious conservatives' resistance to such scientific theories as geological chronology and biological evolution had no lasting negative impact on science. Most notably, the federal government and a reformed university system became major players in the establishment of a national infrastructure supporting science in America.

Early National and Antebellum Eras.

In 1782 the new nation could boast of one scientist of international repute ( Benjamin Franklin, whose 1751 Experiments and Observations on Electricity was widely translated and reprinted) and two scholarly societies (the American Philosophical Society, based in Philadelphia, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in Boston). While the Revolutionary War stimulated domestic manufactures, science itself played no role in the struggle for independence other than to enhance Franklin's reputation as a diplomat. Franklin's colleague, Thomas Jefferson, however, both promoted American science and symbolized American respect for science. Indeed many of the Founding Fathers employed scientific metaphors in designing and justifying the American “experiment” in government.

Throughout the early republic and Antebellum Eras, most scientists—or men of science, as they were commonly called—were either self‐educated or trained at eastern liberal arts colleges such as Harvard and Yale. Many had earned a B.A. degree; some, an M.D. A few had spent a postgraduate year in Europe studying, touring, and purchasing books and apparatuses; still fewer had received Ph.D.s at European universities. Most scientists identified their special interests in either natural history (botany, zoology, and geology) or in medicine and agriculture. Research in Antebellum America was typically conducted by individual scientists with very limited resources. Much research was done “out of doors” by specimen collectors, weather observers, and explorers. The naturalist William Bartram (whose father, John Bartram, had established America's first botanical garden in Philadelphia in 1728) explored the Southeast in the 1770s, recording plants, wildlife, and 215 species of native birds. Some government funding existed, particularly for geographical and geological exploration. The Lewis and Clark Expedition (1803–1806) gathered geologic, mineralogical, and natural‐history data. The U.S. Coast Survey mapped and improved the nation's harbors; the Army Medical Department conducted a continent‐wide survey of medical geography. The Wilkes Expedition (1838–1842), a six‐ship U.S. naval mission led by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, explored coastal South America, the South Pacific, Hawai'i, and the Pacific Northwest and produced twenty volumes of scientific reports.

Individual scientists of note whose careers began in the Antebellum Era include the zoologist Louis Agassiz and the botanist Asa Gray, both of Harvard; the chemist Benjamin Silliman, appointed professor at Yale in 1802, who did important work on carbon vaporization and also trained a notable group of geologists, including Edward Hitchcock (1793–1864) of Amherst College; the physicist Joseph Henry, who published pathbreaking studies in electromagnetism while a professor at the College of New Jersey, later becoming the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1846; and the chemist John William Draper (1811–1882) of the University of the City of New York, a pioneer in spectrum analysis and human physiology, and, in 1839, using the new daguerreotype process, the first to photograph the moon.

But with a few exceptions, such as the Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce (1809–1880), American scientists had little mathematical sophistication, and few possessed well‐equipped laboratories. Those who conducted research generally did so in more than one field; for example Elias Loomis was both an astronomer and meteorologist. The theoretical foundations and boundaries of physics, chemistry, and biology remained ill‐defined. Scientific papers on all subjects appeared in unspecialized journals such as Silliman's American Journal of Science and Arts, the Journal of the Franklin Institute, and the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society.

The Gilded Age.

The situation changed dramatically as the nineteenth century wore on. The Civil War was the first major conflict affected by the industrial revolution. Although it drew on existing technology rather than generating much that was new, the Union's organizational and administrative accomplishments introduced new national networks—railroads, banking, telegraph lines—and infused new technologies into American society. The earth and agricultural sciences continued to receive the greatest share of federal patronage during and after the Civil War, as they had earlier. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln established the Department of Agriculture and signed the Morrill Land Grant Act for the support of agricultural and mechanical colleges. A national weather service was established by the Army Signal Corps in 1870. The Hatch Act (1887) provided for basic research at state agricultural experiment stations.

Despite the existence of a National Academy of Sciences (1863), centralization of effort proved elusive. By 1886, the federal government had spent an estimated $68 million on various, often overlapping, surveys of the West. The overarching concern motivating most of these government efforts was the central role of western settlement. Scientists who could connect their research to that nationalizing agenda, whether by extending telegraph wires into Indian Territory, mapping mineral deposits, or developing arid‐land agricultural techniques were first in line for government support.

Liberal arts colleges and the new research universities such as Johns Hopkins (incorporated in 1869), Clark (1889), and Chicago (1892) became major patrons of science in the late nineteenth century. Some of the older colleges began offering degrees in science and engineering. The new Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1861) and the post–1862 land‐grant colleges supported applied sciences and engineering. Between 1870 and 1900, the number of bachelor's degrees granted by colleges and universities more than tripled, from about 10,000 to almost 30,000. During the same period the number of American Ph.D.s awarded soared from 1 in 1870 to 382 in 1900.

Specialization and professionalization loomed large as advanced training became a prerequisite for a career in science. Institutional support structures—associations, specialized journals, laboratories, and professional standards—grew up around the new divisions of knowledge established by the universities. As early as 1874, the American Association for the Advancement of Science reorganized itself into special‐interest sections. The first scientific society based on a single discipline was the American Chemical Society, established in New York in 1876. A flurry of professional organization followed a decade or two later. The American Physiological Society (1887), the Association of American Anatomists (1888), the American Society of Zoologists (1890), the Botanical Society of America (1894), the American Mathematical Society (1894), the American Astronomical Society (1897), the American Society for Microbiology (1899), and the American Physical Society (1899) shared the common goals of raising disciplinary standards and insulating their community of discourse from nonspecialists.

The Early Twentieth Century.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, after this era of dramatic disciplinary and professional growth, developments in the corporate board room, in the laboratory, and in scientific theory and practice all prefigured the coming of a new order in American science. In 1901, the General Electric Company opened an industrial research laboratory and the federal government established the National Bureau of Standards; in 1902, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., began funding scientific research with an initial bequest of $10 million; in 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright flew their airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina; in 1904, George Ellery Hale established the Mount Wilson Observatory; and before World War I, Americans won the nation's first two Nobel Prizes in science: A.A. Michelson for his spectroscopic studies and measurements of light (1907) and Theodore Richards for his study of atomic weights (1914). Intellectuals and the general public alike were coming to believe that the key to progress lay in the increased application of the knowledge and methods of science and technology to all spheres of human activity. Science, it was widely believed, was the mother of technology; technology, the worker of wonders. Throughout the Progressive Era an optimistic nation remained convinced that the great engine of progress would operate ever more efficiently thanks to the forces of science and technology. Charles Sanders Peirce (son of the Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce), John Dewey, Walter Lippman, and other pre–World War I social thinkers all saw the methods and values of science—or an idealized version of those methods and ideals—as a model for society as a whole.

America's brief involvement in World War I reinforced this trend. Although the contributions of scientists did little to affect the outcome directly, the National Research Council, founded in 1916 to coordinate research for national security and welfare, made clear to both scientists and the general public that a new era of cooperation between science and government had dawned.
See also Airplanes and Air Transport; Banking and Finance; Biological Sciences; Coast and Geodetic Survey, U.S.; Early Republic, Era of the; Economic Development; Education: Collegiate Education; Education: The Rise of the University; Evolution, Theory of; Geological Surveys; Industrialization; Mathematics and Statistics; Photography; Physical Sciences; Professionalization; Research Laboratories, Industrial.

Bibliography

A. Hunter Dupree , Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940, 1957.
Nathan Reingold, ed., Science in Nineteenth‐Century America: A Documentary History, 1964.
Alexandra Oleson and John Voss, eds., The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860–1920, 1979.
Margaret Rossiter , Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940, 1982.
Marc Rothenberg , The History of Science and Technology in the United States: A Critical and Selective Bibliography, 2 vols., 1982–1993.
Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Margaret W. Rossiter, eds., Historical Writing on American Science, Osiris, 2d ser., 1 (1985).
Robert V. Bruce , The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846–1876, 1987.
James Rodger Fleming , Meteorology in America, 1800–1870, 1990.
Clark A Elliott , History of Science in the United States: A Chronology and Research Guide, 1996.
Ronald L. Numbers and Charles E. Rosenberg, eds., The Scientific Enterprise in America: Readings from Isis, 1996.

James Rodger Fleming

From 1914 to 1945 In 1916, two years after war erupted in Europe but before America's declaration of war, the astronomer George Ellery Hale began to organize and recruit scientists in universities and industrial laboratories across the nation to work on military problems. His plans for an organization to support such work, operating under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), culminated in the creation of the National Research Council (NRC). As a wartime science advisory board, the council dealt with problems ranging from the manufacture of nitrogen compounds for the production of explosives to the building and testing of submarine‐detection devices and the physiology of battlefield shock. With the help of two coworkers, the chemist Arthur A. Noyes and the physicist Robert A. Millikan, Hale, who saw World War I as a great opportunity to promote the advancement of science in America, then orchestrated the transformation of the NRC into a permanent arm of the NAS. Reorganized on a peacetime basis in 1919, Hale's NRC now included a postdoctoral fellowship program for research in physics and chemistry, with the Rockefeller Foundation putting up the money and the council selecting the fellows and administering the program. The program, which later encompassed other disciplines, reinforced the role of universities as the traditional seats of American research. By the end of World War II, universities had emerged as the strongest and largest centers of scientific research in the United States. The number of Ph.D. degrees in science and mathematics awarded by American universities rose from 525 in 1920 to more than 6,000 in 1950.

The period 1920–1940 saw the rapid development of many scientific fields and the expansion of the scientific research establishment in the United States. While some government agencies carried out research with the help of government funds, the American scientific community relied largely on private patronage and philanthropy, especially from the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Guggenheim foundations, to pay for research.

The research ranged from Drosophila (fruit fly) genetics and the biochemistry of Neurospora crassa (bread mold) in biology to the development of particle accelerators and cosmic rays in physics. Geographically, scientific research spanned the nation; indeed, three of the important early developments in nuclear physics—Carl Anderson's discovery of the positron, Harold C. Urey's discovery of deuterium, and Ernest O. Lawrence's invention of the cyclotron—took place in California. In astronomy, Edwin Hubble's discovery of the expansion of the universe and the construction of the two‐hundred‐inch telescope, the world's largest optical telescope, paved the way for a revolution in cosmology. The theory of turbulence and airplane wing design in aeronautics opened new vistas in the applied sciences. Linus Pauling's application of quantum mechanics to molecular structure provided a deeper understanding of the nature of chemical bonding. Glenn Seaborg's research on the chemistry of the transuranium elements, starting with the discovery of neptunium in 1941, played a crucial role in the Manhattan Project's plutonium project and the development of the atomic bomb.

Pure mathematics was among the most successful scientific fields in the United States during the early twentieth century. The initial stimulus came from the contact of Eliakin Hastings Moore, Norbert Wiener, Griffith Evans, and other aspiring mathematicians with particular German, English, and Italian mathematical schools. As a result, American mathematicians were able, within a short time, to play prominent roles in developing research groups in academic settings in the areas of analysis, number theory, and the new fields of topology and mathematical logic. The leading centers of mathematical research and graduate education included the University of Chicago, Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, and the nearby Institute for Advanced Study.

While American mathematicians tackled problems in pure mathematics, applied mathematics was at first largely ignored. The subject first emerged as an independent discipline in the United States during World War II. European‐born scientists played an important role in closing this particular scientific gap in the United States. Theodore von Kármán, a Hungarian‐born engineer and applied scientist and the first director of the Graduate School of Aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), was among those who campaigned vigorously before the war to make applied mathematics respectable to engineers and mathematicians. In 1941, Brown University's R.G.D. Richardson inaugurated the nation's first program in applied mathematics. Later, New York University's Richard Courant, who immigrated to the United States in 1934, established its program. The head of the Rockefeller Foundation's Natural Science Division, Warren Weaver, was also instrumental in advancing and expanding the academic base for applied mathematics in the United States in the 1930s. During World War II, Richard Courant served as a member of Weaver's Applied Mathematics Panel of the Office of Scientific Research and Development.

The arrival of émigré scientists from Europe, which coincided with the Great Depression of the 1930s, brought out the best and the worst in university deans, college presidents, and other representatives of American higher education. Relatively few institutions opened their doors to these displaced scientists, many of whom were Jewish. Latent anti‐Semitism, a resistance in many physics departments to theoretical physics (a specialty of many of these refugees), antipathy in some quarters to foreigners, and a concern for young unemployed American‐born scientists all exacerbated the problem.

Nevertheless, several hundred central European refugee physicists, mathematicians, and physical chemists, dismissed from academic positions on racial grounds following the Nazi rise to power in Germany and other countries after 1933, eventually found new employment in American universities and colleges, industry, and research institutions. Albert Einstein, fleeing Europe in 1933, accepted an appointment at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. Later on, many of the émigré theoretical physicists, including Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, Emilio Segrè, Edward Teller, and Victor Weisskopf, were recruited to work on the Mahattan Project. Despite their technical status as enemy aliens, these physicists proved essential to the atomic‐bomb enterprise. Ironically, fascist dictators overseas helped level the playing field in science. In physics, especially, the émigré scientists contributed substantially to a marked shift of the centers of excellence from Europe to America.

Between the two world wars, the American geological community resisted the theory of continental drift and the notion of plate tectonics, subjects popular in Europe. Seismologists, however, at such universities as California at Berkeley, Caltech, and St. Louis, turned their research into a powerful tool for exploring the Earth's interior. Although interdisciplinary fields such as geochemistry and planetary science took off after World War II, war‐related research, which brought together nuclear physicists and chemists, provided the intellectual spark.

The roots of molecular genetics, too, go back to two revolutionary World War II discoveries. By the early 1940s, Stanford University professors George Beadle and Edward Tatum had shown that the absence (or presence) of an enzyme was inherited as a single‐gene trait. Their Neurospora genetics research cemented the idea that genes control enzymes (the one‐gene, one‐enzyme theory), the chemical stuff of life, and led to the rise of a discipline that cut across conventional boundaries—biochemical genetics. In 1944, Oswald T. Avery, Colin M. MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty at the Rockefeller Institute produced the first experimental evidence that genes are made of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Their discovery that DNA alone was the carrier of genetic information greatly influenced the later work of James D. Watson and Francis Crick on the structure of DNA.

The growing strength of science in the United States in the interwar years was signaled by a substantial number of Nobel prizes awarded to Americans in the 1914–1945 era. These included, in physics, Robert A. Millikan, Arthur H. Compton, Isidor Isaac Rabi, Otto Stern, Ernest O. Lawrence, and Carl D. Anderson, and, in chemistry, Theodore W. Richards, Irving Langmuir, and Harold C. Urey.

In July 1945, Vannevar Bush, the director of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development, sent President Harry S. Truman an influential report, Science: The Endless Frontier, laying out a program for postwar scientific research. Insisting on the federal government's duty to support scientific research and scientific education, Bush argued eloquently that economic progress, the health and well‐being of Americans, and national security depended on advances in science. He recommended the creation of a federal agency to carry out these activities. The National Science Foundation, established in 1950 in fulfillment of Bush's vision, would play a crucial role in the further development of science in America.
See also Biological Sciences; Education: The Rise of the University; Engineering; Genetics and Genetic Engineering; Mathematics and Statistics; Medicine: From the 1870s to 1945; New Deal Era, The; Physical Sciences; Professionalization; Research Laboratories, Industrial; Scopes Trial; Technology; Twenties, The; Wigner, Eugene.

Bibliography

Daniel J. Kevles , The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America, 1977.
Nathan Reingold and and Ida H. Reingold , Science in America: A Documentary History, 1900–1939, 1981.
Paul S. Hoch , The Reception of Central European Refugee Physicists of the 1930s: U.S.S.R., U.K., U.S.A., Annals of Science 40 (1983): 217–46.
Maclyn McCarty , The Transforming Principle, 1985.
Richard Rhodes , The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 1986.
John W. Servos , Physical Chemistry from Ostwald to Pauling: The Making of a Science in America, 1990.
Judith R. Goodstein , Millikan's School: A History of the California Institute of Technology, 1991.
Nathan Reingold , Science, American Style, 1991.
John Lankford , American Astronomy: Community, Careers, and Power, 1859–1940, 1997.

Judith R. Goodstein

Since 1945 World War II transformed American science. Before the war, the private foundations—Rockefeller, Carnegie, Macy, Guggenheim, and others—were the dominant patrons of university‐based research in the natural and social sciences. Beginning with the mobilization of science for war in 1940, the federal government, especially the armed services, assumed this role, dwarfing prewar philanthropy while transforming both the political economy of science and the content of technical knowledge. Understanding this profound transformation lies at the center of much recent scholarship in the history of American science and technology.

Science and the Military in Cold War America.

At war's end, the leaders of the wartime research and development effort—including Vannevar Bush, James B. Conant, and Karl T. Compton (1887–1954)—attempted to craft the postwar relationship of science and the federal government through Bush's landmark 1945 report, Science—The Endless Frontier. Bush sought to insulate federal patronage of the natural sciences from political interference while arguing that only basic research guided and performed by academic scientists would produce the knowledge necessary both to fuel the nation's economy and to protect national security. Bush proposed a National Research Foundation to support research in the physical and biomedical sciences, leaving out the social sciences. Although Congress established a National Science Foundation in 1950, the foundation envisioned by Bush and his colleagues never materialized. Instead, between 1945 and 1950, the American military became the patron of choice on American campuses. Bush tried to manage this dominance through his chairmanship of the national military establishment's Joint Research and Development Board, but this effort, like many to follow, failed to control the military's appetite for science and technology.

Military support of academic research rested on an assumption derived from wartime research: Given enough money, one could build any weapon. For example, the Manhattan Project, with two billion dollars of federal funding, took a rare laboratory‐bound phenomenon, nuclear fission, and transformed it into an awesome new bomb. For the military, this suggested that the scientist could deliver almost anything with enough funds. Believing this, the Air Force and Navy assumed that a massive research investment would produce the ballistic missile, a weapon (the V–2) that the Nazis had developed during the war. Although millions of dollars flowed into countless guided missile projects, the United States did not have a successful and operational ballistic weapon until the late 1950s.

Weapons research was not isolated or secluded. Instead, such work took place in academic and corporate laboratories under various labels. For example, researchers at a variety of institutions used captured German V–2 rockets to investigate the upper atmosphere. The knowledge gained was not only of academic interest but of value to missile design. Basic research in the physical sciences was deemed essential to national security. Researchers might claim that they were using the military to fund “pure science,” but such claims erroneously assumed that military patrons were easily duped. In fact, an important by‐product of the war was the development of a technological intelligentsia within the military. University laboratories became sites for the education of a new kind of military officer, as familiar with calculus as the carbine. Members of this new class, possessing master's and doctoral degrees, understood the complexity of the technologies under development as well as the science behind them.

The ballistic‐missile and continental‐defense programs dominated the physical sciences in Cold War America. These massive projects had significant consequences at both the institutional and intellectual levels. New institutions, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), now famous for its funding of the ARPANET, a forerunner of the Internet, were created. Others, such as the Lincoln Laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the MITRE Corporation, became important actors in national security research and development. The digital computer and mass‐produced semiconductor owe their existence to the military's ability to fund research that produced expensive and rare technologies. Military production experience allowed for semiconductor manufacturers, including Fairchild Semiconductor and Texas Instruments, to learn the art of growing silicon wafers and writing on them. Although the computer industry has been portrayed as an example of laissez‐faire capitalism at work, in truth, the capital fueling research at California's Silicon Valley and Boston's Route 128 were as much a product of government contracts as they were of private investment. The massive government‐funded projects often produced unexpected results. The ballistic‐missile program yielded the Atlas booster that launched John Glenn into orbit and other feats of the early space program. The IBM corporation repackaged software developed at government expense (SAGE) to produce the automated airline‐reservation system (SABRE).

An emphasis on utilitarian projects turned American physical science into a large‐scale development effort in which the crafting and manufacture of new technologies became more important than the work conducted with the apparatus. The industrial mindset directly affected laboratory life and practice, especially in so‐called “big science.” Before the war, successful laboratory instruments were often cannibalized for new investigations. In high‐energy physics, for example, accelerators quickly became obsolete and new ones were constructed. The built‐in obsolescence of mass production entered the physical sciences. Old accelerators might lose their cutting‐edge research function, but they were easily turned to other purposes, such as medical research or the production of radioactive isotopes, atomic physics' most commercial product. Skills once essential for research changed. Prewar scientists had been forced to build apparatus from scratch: their postwar successors simply modified preexisting hardware and software to perform research, and purchased lab equipment and instruments from catalogs.

Military patronage also affected the social sciences. A key element of military social science, operations research (OR), illustrates the point. OR's origins lay in the application of mathematical techniques to strategic and logistical problems. Two campaigns secured OR's fame: the wartime antisubmarine effort in the North Atlantic, in which physicists, economists, mathematicians, and others developed new means of searching for submarines under various conditions and constraints; and the mining of the Sea of Japan. These successes generated support for continuing military investment in this new field, both at American universities and at new research institutions such as the RAND Corporation of Santa Monica, California, and the Johns Hopkins University Operations Research Office. OR became the leading edge of mathematical thinking in the social sciences, a trend that included the development of game theory, systems thinking, rational‐choice theory, and econometrics. The spread of this quantitative approach to military strategy allowed for the rice paddies and villages of Vietnam to become laboratories for social science.

The Biomedical Disciplines.

The other great federal patron of science after World War II, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), concentrated on the biomedical disciplines. A multimillion dollar enterprise with ever increasing budgets, the NIH set the tone of U.S. biomedical research. Only with the arrival of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's grants program in 1987 did a private institution rival NIH in support of biomedical research. At the same time, NIH research was increasingly directed by Congress toward particular diseases. Although President Richard M. Nixon declared war on cancer in 1970, members of Congress were always eager to support disease‐directed research for constituents, partly to compensate for their failure to establish national health insurance.

Two landmarks greatly affected the biomedical disciplines in the postwar era. First, the HIV/AIDS epidemic provided NIH with a disease that required research at multiple levels, from etiology through treatment. In turn, government‐funded research catalyzed work in the pharmaceutical industry and other corporate settings. AIDS activists brought the military's assumption that “with enough money we can do anything” to the biomedical disciplines, as did those suffering from other diseases, such as breast cancer. Second, the Human Genome Project (HGP), which mapped and sequenced the genetic blueprint for Homo sapiens, profoundly altered conceptions of illness and causality. Wielding computers and drawing on molecular biology and medical science, the HGP promised to alter the biomedical disciplines in ways previously unimagined. By the end of the century, big science, once the physicists' domain, had invaded the biomedical disciplines, with an important twist. For the physical sciences, big science was about location: a single accelerator or telescope served as the focus of research by individuals at an array of institutions. The HGP form of big science was decentralized, with multiple laboratories, public and private, sequencing genes and circulating this information on the Internet. Given the HGP's commercial potential, issues of intellectual property and government ownership arose in unprecedented ways, although the U.S. government preferred to see the genome remain in the public domain. At the same time, HGP threatened to become the biomedical equivalent of the Internet, that is, a foundational technology with standards set by the federal government that served as the base for a massive commercial enterprise. After 1945, science in America became a ward of the state; it remained so as the post–Cold War marketplace increasingly directed the aims and goals of federal funding.
See also Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome; Bioethics; Biological Sciences; Biotechnology Industry; Education: Education in Contemporary America; Genetics and Genetic Engineering; Internet and World Wide Web; Mathematics and Statistics; Medicine: Since 1945; Missiles and Rockets; National Aeronautics and Space Administration; Nuclear Strategy; Technology; Vietnam War.

Bibliography

Stephen P. Strickland , Politics, Science, and Dread Disease: A Short History of United States Medical Research Policy, 1972.
Paul Forman , Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940–1960, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 18 (1987): 149–229.
Stuart W. Leslie , The Cold War and American Science: The Military‐Industrial‐Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford, 1993.
Daniel S. Greenberg , The Politics of Pure Science, rev. ed., 1999.
Jessica Wang , American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War, 1999.

Michael A. Dennis

Science and Religion Beginning at least as early as the last third of the nineteenth century, the metaphor of war came to dominate discussions of science and religion in America. The historian Andrew Dickson White sounded the keynote in 1869 with a public lecture on “The Battle‐Fields of Science,” which he eventually expanded into a two‐volume best‐seller, History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). White's characterization dominated scholarly opinion for nearly a century, but in the last quarter of the twentieth century historians of science and religion increasingly came to regard his view as inaccurate and simplistic. They found as much religious support for science as opposition, and they noted the slipperiness of the categories “science” and “religion.” White, for example, sought to avoid being labeled anti‐religious by equating “religion” (which he professed to value) with the Golden Rule, and “theology” (which he scorned) with dogmatic ignorance. Similarly, conservative Christians commonly praised “true science,” based on observable facts, even as they railed against “science falsely so‐called,” based on theories that challenged their religious views.

Colonial Americans, who were carving a society out of a “howling wilderness” during the so‐called scientific revolution in Europe, displayed more indifference than hostility to science. The New England Puritans, who left the best records of their feelings toward what was then called natural philosophy, led the way in embracing the new physics and astronomy. Cotton Mather, for example, wrote a book to “demonstrate, that Philosophy is no Enemy, but a mighty and wondrous Incentive to Religion.” In the early 1720s he proposed the novel measure of inoculating the citizens of Boston against smallpox, widely regarded as a divinely sent punishment. The town's leading physician, William Douglass, denounced Mather for his impious attempt to thwart God's will. In this struggle for authority, a man of science wielded a theological weapon to attack a man of God for promoting what turned out to be a life‐saving medical procedure.

The more that science explained about epidemics, earthquakes, and electricity, the less colonial Americans invoked the direct agency of God. This troubled some religious leaders, such as the Anglican divine Samuel Johnson, who complained that “it is a fashionable sort of philosophy (a science falsely so‐called) to conceive that God governs the world only by a general providence according to certain fixed laws of nature.” Most Christian writers, however, seemed content with attributing the laws of nature to divine will.

The decades preceding the Civil War presented a number of scientific challenges to devout Christians: astronomers traced the origin of the solar system to a primitive nebula, geologists discovered the antiquity of life on Earth and the absence of evidence of a worldwide flood, anthropologists speculated about the existence of human beings before Adam and Eve, and phrenologists correlated personality traits with the contours of the head. As God‐fearing Christians themselves, most American men of science assured the faithful of their genuine desire to reveal God's wisdom, power, and goodness in nature, and repeatedly demonstrated the harmony of God's two books: the Bible and nature. Some Christians disapproved of the tendency to make “science lead the way and the Bible follow,” but perhaps the sharpest criticisms came from competing scholars. Biblical exegetes with hard‐won expertise in ancient languages and history resented the presumption of scientists, who presumably didn't know one Hebrew letter from another, in instructing them on how to interpret ancient texts. The quarrel involved scientific and religious matters, but it centered on the protection of professional turf.

No topic in the history of science and religion in America attracted more attention than the debates over organic evolution that erupted with the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). Scientists and laypersons alike disputed the implications of evolution for natural and revealed religion, but there was little pattern to the sides. Although religious orthodoxy correlated with antievolution sentiment, conservative and liberal Christians, like traditionalist and reform Jews, could be found in both camps.

In the later nineteenth century, the meaning of “science” grew increasingly narrow and rigid. As the Princeton theologian Charles Hodge (1797–1878) observed in 1874, the very word science was “becoming more and more restricted to the knowledge of a particular class of facts, and of their relations, namely, the facts of nature or of the external world,” which scientists insisted on explaining naturalistically. Long fond of science, Hodge sensed a growing “alienation” between scientists and theologians, which he attributed to the former's “assumption of superiority” and practice of stigmatizing their religious critics “as narrow‐minded, bigots, old women, Bible worshippers, etc.” The aging theologian may have overreacted, but he accurately observed the increasing compartmentalization of science and religion among American intellectuals.

The early‐twentieth‐century rise of the social and behavioral sciences, which made religion itself an object of scientific study, threatened to become the focal point of science‐religion interactions, but evolution, particularly human evolution, continued to occupy center stage. During the 1920s Christian fundamentalists waged a holy war against evolution, symbolized most memorably by the Scopes trial in 1925. But even the most outspoken critics of evolution typically lauded what they regarded as true science. “It is not ‘science’ that orthodox Christians oppose,” a fundamentalist editor explained in Bible Champion in 1925. “No! no! a thousand times, No! They are opposed only to the theory of evolution, which has not yet been proved, and therefore is not to be called by the sacred name of science.”

The late‐twentieth‐century battles between creationists and evolutionists appeared to provide one more example of White's “warfare” thesis, but appearances were deceiving. In one celebrated contest between the two sides, in a federal courtroom in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1981, the plaintiffs, who opposed “creation science,” overwhelmingly represented religious organizations. In contrast, virtually all the experts testifying in support of creationism possessed graduate degrees in science. It was confusing enough to make a latter‐day White long for the imaginary days when a predictable dichotomy between science and religion prevailed.
See also Biological Sciences; Fundamentalist Movement; Physical Sciences; Puritanism; Social Sciences.

Bibliography

Theodore Dwight Bozeman , Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum American Religious Thought, 1977.
Ronald L. Numbers . Creation by Natural Law: Laplace's Nebular Hypothesis in American Thought, 1977.
Ronald L. Numbers , Science and Religion, Osiris, 2d ser. 1 (1985): 59–80.
Jon H. Roberts , Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859–1900, 1988.
Ronald L. Numbers , The Creationists, 1992.
David N. Livingstone , The Preadamite Theory and the Marriage of Science and Religion, vol. 82 of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 1992.
Ronald L. Numbers , Darwinism Comes to America, 1998.
Jon H. Roberts and and James Turner , The Sacred and the Secular University, 2000.
David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., Science and the Christian Tradition, 2001.

Ronald L. Numbers

Science and Popular Culture From Colonial Era newspapers to twentieth‐century television, American popular culture has always incorporated science, presenting images and information adapted to changing media formats and evolving audience interests. Even when presented as entertainment, popularized science has been packaged as “useful knowledge,” with implied utilitarian benefit.

In the early republic, ideals of democracy, progress, and egalitarian education determined the popular diffusion of scientific information. Interest in North American natural history and resources ran high. As the new nation defined itself in relation to European civilization, its periodicals offered descriptions of newly discovered flora, fauna, and fossils, alongside discussions of inventions, politics, and civic life.

The most democratic venue for popularization was the science museum. When the portrait painter Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827) in 1786 assembled a “cabinet of curiosities” and promoted his Philadelphia museum as appropriate Sunday entertainment, visitors could admire “God's handiwork” by peering at entomologists' carefully arranged insects or models of marvelous inventions.

During the nineteenth century, popular lectures by European and American scientists and increased attention to science in general periodicals such as Harper's Monthly attested to Americans' continuing appetite for scientific information. Specialized magazines such as Scientific American (1845), Popular Science Monthly (1872), and National Geographic Magazine (1886) disseminated the latest scientific findings and convinced readers of science's importance. The Smithsonian Institution became another important venue for popular consumption of scientific knowledge. When the Smithsonian expanded to include inventions as well as natural history, and created a “living” collection in its National Zoo, it placed science at the heart of national culture.

Early twentieth‐century newspapers and magazines treated scientists such as the physicist Robert A. Millikan and the astronomer George Ellery Hale as celebrities. Even the rarified ideas of theoretical scientists such as Albert Einstein, were translated for the mass media. Readership of general science books grew; “dime novels,” such as the Tom Swift series (1910–1941), entertained young readers with descriptions of fanciful inventions, while the new genre of “science fiction” infused fantasy with scientific credibility.

From the 1920s on, the burgeoning film industry treated scientists primarily as colorful stock characters, although Hollywood also perpetuated the cultural image of the menacing “mad scientist” with various “Frankenstein” movies based loosely on Mary Shelley's 1818 novel. A few films such as The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and Madame Curie (1943) featured scientists as heroes, but science‐fiction movies more typically portrayed them as well‐meaning, politically naive, and manipulable. After 1945, the atomic bomb provided new images of terror for moviemakers.

Most mid‐twentieth‐century science popularizers saw themselves as explainers, not apologists, yet they were among science's biggest boosters. Some were themselves scientists. In the post–World War II decades, biologist Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) emerged as a prolific nonfiction communicator, while physician Michael Crichton successfully translated scientific fact into fiction in novels such as The Andromeda Strain (1971) and Jurassic Park (1993), which also became successful movies. Science‐based periodicals such as Omni and Discovery attested to the public's strong interest in science, but also underscored the continuing appeal of sensationalized science. Although books by biologist James D. Watson, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, and the British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking topped bestseller lists, serious attention to science never eclipsed the frivolous or fictionalized treatments.

Americans incorporated science into the popular culture on their terms, not necessarily those of the scientific community. Early television shows about science mimicked scientists' formal tone and manner of presentation, preserving a dignified distance between teacher and pupil, but this model eventually gave way to lively demonstrations such as Watch Mr. Wizard, first broadcast in 1951, and to narrated film footage of animals and natural phenomena in such shows as Wild Kingdom, launched in 1962; Nova, first shown in 1973, and astronomer Carl Sagan's Cosmos' series (1977). More often, television wove discussions of biomedical research into hospital dramas, as in Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare, or fantasized it within science fiction, as in the popular Star Trek series.

In the 1980s, science museums, zoos, and aquaria, responding to the ever‐increasing importance of technology, built interactive exhibits and invited visitors to participate in demonstration activities. The Exploratorium in San Francisco pioneered this combination of education and entertainment; its exhibits replaced static collections with light, sound, puppets, films, and computer terminals. Extending this process, science content on videos, CD‐ROMs, and computer networks in the 1990s, produced by many diverse institutions and organizations, allowed audiences of all ages and educational backgrounds to access and select from popularized science on their own terms and on demand. While some observers praised these imaginative efforts to popularize science, others found them too celebratory and insufficiently attentive to the social and ethical issues associated with science and technology.
See also Hospitals; Literature, Popular; Medicine; Museums: Museums of Science and Technology; Nuclear Weapons.

Bibliography

Rae Goodell , The Visible Scientists, 1977.
John C. Burnham , How Superstition Won and Science Lost: Popularizing Science and Health in the United States, 1987.
Dorothy Nelkin , Selling Science: How the Press Covers Science and Technology, 1987.
Marcel C. LaFollette , Making Science Our Own: Public Images of Science, 1910–1955, 1989.
Christopher P. Toumey , Conjuring Science: Scientific Symbols and Cultural Meanings in American Life, 1996.
Gregg Mitman , Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Film, 1999.

Marcel C. LaFollette