America's Cold War Science Experiment

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Science seems under siege like never before. Universities face threats to federal research funding. Scientists stand accused of subverting American values. Some worry about losing ground to China or Europe, or a “brain drain.” Are these fleeting political crises, or do they represent cracks in the foundations of the nation’s science infrastructure?

After World War II, the United States embarked on a commitment to scientific research that has no precedent in history. Yet it was, very much, an experiment—based on Cold War political consensus that science was crucial to the United States and its standing in the world. The infrastructure of today’s science—in federal agencies, research universities, academic journals and meetings, national laboratories, and many corporate enterprises—are legacies of this experiment. Yet now US science operates in a post-Cold War landscape, maintaining many assumptions from that earlier era.

This lecture grapples with the legacy of the Cold War, dispels some myths, and invites discussion of the federal underpinnings of US science.

The George Sarton Memorial Lecture in the History and Philosophy of Science, begun in 1960, is given annually at the AAAS meeting.