“But when you come right down to it the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values.”— J. Robert Oppenheimer, in a 1945 speech to Los Alamos scientists1Every year, the United States spends over $100 billion on funding research and development, funding everything from satellites to wind farms to the F35 fighter jet. But once upon a time, government subsidies for science were virtually unheard of, as researchers were forced to rely on the goodwill of wealthy donors and corporate sponsors.2 As FDR moved America away from Laissez-Faire and into WWII, his administration realized that scientific development would be critical to an Allied victory. The necessities of war would lead to unprecedented scientific breakthroughs that shape today’s world.Spurred by a letter from physicists Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard that warned of the possibility of a German atomic bomb, in 1940 the National Defense Committee on Research (NDRC) was born.3 The NDRC was headed by Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Institution and former dean of engineering at MIT. A close confidant of Roosevelt, Bush led the NDRC with unquestioned authority. Once, when some of his staff went to Bush to resign, Bush told them:“One does not resign in time of war. You chaps get the hell out of here and get back to work, and I'll look into it.”4They got the hell out of there and got back to work.In June 1941, Roosevelt further emphasized federal funding for science with Executive Order 8807, establishing the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) with Bush at its head. By the end of the war, the OSRD would have spent $450 million on technology for American and Allied troops.5One major NDRC/OSRD breakthrough was the creation of portable airborne radar. Soon after the fall of France and in the midst of Luftwaffe air raids, British scientists brought a small briefcase to America. Known as the Tizard Mission, the scientists brought to America some of Britain’s greatest technological secrets, among them the designs for the cavity magnetron, a vacuum tube that generates radar microwaves that was small enough to fit on aircraft. MIT’s Radiation Laboratory, created by the NDRC, perfected the technology, and allowed its implementation in allied aircraft.6Soon after the Tizard Mission, British scientists made another critical breakthrough. The MAUD Committee, set up by the British to study the possibility of developing a nuclear weapon, found in spring 1940 that sufficient amounts of uranium-235 could be used to create a nuclear weapon.7 Fearing that the Nazis would create an atomic weapon first, the MAUD Committee forwarded their findings to the Americans. In reality, Hitler’s quest for a bomb was doomed from the start by an exodus of scientists from Nazi Germany and Hitler’s scorn for “Jewish physics.”8 Nontheless, American development of a nuclear weapon was placed under the OSRD in December 1941. When control was given to General Leslie Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1942, the Manhattan Project was born.9 The rest is history.Scientific research did not end with the war. Far from it. In 1950, President Truman created the National Science Foundation, sustaining science through both peace and war. Today, nearly a quarter of funding for research conducted by universities comes from the NSF, funding the heart of American science as we know it.10
Thursday, January 28, 2016
For Science
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