Governance of Science Before 1945

Novossiolova, Tatyana

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-51004-0_2

Tatyana Novossiolova³

Part of the book series: Global Issues ((GLOISS))

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Abstract

The chapter explores the history of the governance of science and technology up to 1945. It focuses on the evolution of science as a professional sphere of activity and the ways in which it has been shaped by cultural, historical, political, and socio-economic contingencies. It further looks into the ways in which the Second World War redefined the relationship between science and the state.

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Notes

1.
See John Schuster, ‘The Scientific Revolution’, in Robert Olby et al. (ed.), Companion to the History of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 217–242.
2.
Ibid., p. 217.
3.
See Roger Emerson, ‘The Organisation of Science and Its Pursuit in Early Modern Europe’, in Robert Olby et al. (ed.), Companion to the History of Modern Science, op cit., p. 965.
4.
Ibid.
5.
Dominick Jenkins, The Final Frontier: America, Science, and Terror (London: Verso, 2002), p. 234.
6.
Roger Emerson, ‘The Organisation of Science and Its Pursuit in Early Modern Europe’, op cit., p. 962.
7.
Ibid.
8.
Mario Biagioli, ‘The Social Status of Italian Mathematicians, 1450–1600’, History of Science, Vol. 27:1 (1989), p. 45.
9.
Ibid.
10.
See Baldassarre Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier: Translated and with an Introduction by George Bull (London: Penguin, 2003).
11.
See Bruce Martin, ‘German Prince-Practitioners: Aspects in the Development of Courtly Science, Technology, and Procedures in the Renaissance’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 22:2 (1981), pp. 253–274.
12.
Ibid.
13.
See Anna Maerker, ‘Political Order and the Ambivalence of Expertise: Count Rumford and Welfare Reform in Late Eighteenth-Century Munich’, Osiris, Vol. 25 (2010), pp. 213–230.
14.
See Eric Ash, ‘Introduction: Expertise and the Early Modern State’, Osiris, Vol. 25 (2010), p. 23.
15.
Ibid.
16.
Ibid., p. 16.
17.
Roger Emerson, ‘The Organisation of Science and Its Pursuit in Early Modern Europe’, op cit., p. 972.
18.
See Simon Werrett, ‘The Schumacher Affair: Reconfiguring Academic Expertise across Dynasties in Eighteenth-Century Russia’, Osiris, Vol. 25 (2010), p. 104.
19.
See Mario Biagioli, ‘The Social Status of Italian Mathematicians, 1450–1600’, op cit., pp. 61–62.
20.
A case in point is the establishment of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783, which arose ‘not of necessary organisational demands of science but of the particular position that scientific culture came to occupy in the local context’. See Steven Shapin, ‘Property, Patronage, and the Politics of Science: The Founding of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’, The British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 7 (1974), pp. 1–41.
21.
See Roger Emerson, ‘The Organisation of Science and Its Pursuit in Early Modern Europe’, op cit., p. 973; Derek de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 4.
22.
Rene Taton, ‘Emergence and Development of Some National Scientific Communities in the Nineteenth Century’, International Social Science Journal, Vol. 22:1 (1970), p. 95. See also Rainald von Gizycki, ‘Centre and Periphery in the International Scientific Community: Germany, France, and Great Britain in the 19th Century’, Minerva, Vol. 11:4 (1973), pp. 474–494.
23.
John Pickstone, Ways of Knowing: A History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 167. See also John Pickstone, ‘Sketching Together the Modern Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine’, Isis, Vol. 102 (2011), pp. 123–133.
24.
See W.H. Brock, ‘The Spectrum of Science Patronage’, in G. L’E. Turner (ed.), The Patronage of Science in the Nineteenth Century (Leyden: Noordhoff International Publishing, 1976), p. 173. Thomas H. Huxley is famous for saying that, ‘science in England does anything but pay. You may earn praise but not pudding!’.
25.
See John Pickstone, Ways of Knowing, op cit., p. 168; Sydney Ross, ‘Scientist: The Story of a Word’, Annals of Science, Vol. 18:2 (1962), p. 66.
26.
George Daniels, ‘The Process of Professionalisation in American Science: The Emergent Period, 1820–1860’, Isis, Vol. 192 (1967), pp. 151–167.
27.
See John Pickstone, Ways of Knowing, op cit., p. 166.
28.
Rene Taton, ‘Emergence and Development of Some National Scientific Communities in the Nineteenth Century’, op cit., p. 98. See also Terry Shinn, ‘Science, Tocqueville, and the State: The Organisation of Knowledge in Modern France’, Social Research, Vol. 59:3 (1992), pp. 533–566.
29.
W.H. Brock, ‘The Spectrum of Science Patronage’, op cit., p. 192.
30.
J.B. Morrell, ‘Professionalisation’, in Robert Olby et al. (ed.), Companion to the History of Modern Science, op cit., p. 983.
31.
Rene Taton, ‘Emergence and Development of Some National Scientific Communities in the Nineteenth Century’, op cit., p. 101.
32.
Ibid., p. 102.
33.
George Daniels, ‘The Process of Professionalisation in American Science’, op cit., pp. 159–160. See also Roy Porter, ‘Gentlemen and Geology: The Emergence of a Scientific Career’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 21:4 (1978), pp. 809–836.
34.
See Robert Fox, ‘Scientific Enterprise and the Patronage of Research in France, 1800–70’, Minerva, Vol. 11 (1973), pp. 442–473.
35.
Ibid., p. 457; see also Rene Taton, ‘Emergence and Development of Some National Scientific Communities in the Nineteenth Century’, op cit., p. 99; J.B. Morrell, ‘Professionalisation’ in Robert Olby et al. (ed.), Companion to the History of Modern Science, op cit., p. 986.
36.
See Robert Fox, ‘Science, the Universit, and the State in Nineteenth-Century France’ in G.L. Geison (ed.), Professions and the French State, 1700–1900 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), pp. 66–145.
37.
See W.H. Brock, ‘The Spectrum of Science Patronage’, op cit., pp. 188–189.
38.
Rene Taton, ‘Emergence and Development of Some National Scientific Communities in the Nineteenth Century’, op cit., p. 97.
39.
Sydney Ross, ‘Scientist: The Story of a Word’, op cit., p. 65.
40.
Ibid.
41.
Robert MacIver, ‘The Social Significance of Professional Ethics’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 297 (1955), pp. 118–124.
42.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Cambridge: Verso, 1991), p. 6.
43.
Roger Geiger, ‘Science and the University: Patterns from the US Experience in the Twentieth Century’ in John Krige and Dominique Pestre (ed.), Science in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997), p. 159.
44.
Diarmuid Jeffreys, Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), p. 18. See also Georg Mayer-Thurow, ‘The Industrialisation of Invention: A Case Study from the German Chemical Industry’, Isis, Vol. 73:3 (1982), pp. 363–381; Robert Baptista and Anthony Travis, ‘I.G. Farben in America: The Technologies of General Aniline & Film’, History and Technology, Vol. 22:2 (2006), pp. 187–224. On the links between German university and industry in other fields, see Wolfgang Konig, ‘Science-Based Industry or Industry-Based Science: Electrical Engineering in Germany before World War I’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 37:1 (1996), pp. 70–101.
45.
See Jeffrey Johnson, ‘Academic Chemistry in Imperial Germany’, Isis, Vol. 76 (1985), pp. 500–524. On academic physics training during the same period, see Lewis Pyenson and Douglas Skopp, ‘Educating Physicists in Germany circa 1900’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 7 (1977), pp. 329–366.
46.
See Jeffrey Johnson, ‘Academic Self-Regulation and the Chemical Profession in Imperial Germany’, Minerva, Vol. 23:2 (1985), pp. 241–271.
47.
Ibid.
48.
John Pickstone, Ways of Knowing, op cit., p. 169.
49.
Ibid.
50.
John Beer, ‘Coal Tar Dye Manufacture and the Origins of the Modern Industrial Research Laboratory’, Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, Vol. 44 (1959), p. 127.
51.
John Pickstone, Ways of Knowing, op cit., pp. 171, 173.
52.
Jeffrey Johnson, ‘The Academic-Industrial Symbiosis in German Chemical Research, 1905–1939’, in John Lesch (ed.), The German Chemical Industry in the Twentieth Century (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), p. 19.
53.
Daniel Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 100. See also Leo Baekeland, ‘Science and Industry’, Science, Vol. 31:805 (1910), pp. 841–852; Willis Whitney, ‘Research as a Financial Asset’, Science, Vol. 33:853 (1911), pp. 673–681.
54.
Jeffrey Johnson, ‘The Academic-Industrial Symbiosis in German Chemical Research, 1905–1939’, op cit., p. 22.
55.
On the relations between science and the state in Imperial Germany, see David Cahan, ‘The “Imperial Chancellor of the Sciences”: Helmholtz Between Science and Politics’, Social Research, Vol. 73:4 (2006), pp. 1093–1128; E.S. Althoff and Max Weber, ‘The Power of the State and the Dignity of the Academic Calling in Imperial Germany: The Writings of Max Weber on University Problems’, Minerva, Vol. 11:4 (1973), pp. 571–632; Frank Pfetsch, ‘Scientific Organisation and Science Policy in Imperial Germany, 1871–1914: The Foundation of the Imperial Institute of Physics and Technology’, Minerva, Vol. 8:1–4 (1970), pp. 557–580.
56.
W.H.Brock, ‘The Spectrum of Science Patronage’, op cit., p. 177. See William Cavendish, ‘The Science Commission on the Advancement of Science’, Nature, Vol. 12:305 (1875), pp. 361–364;
57.
John Pickstone, Ways of Knowing, op cit., p. 170.
58.
Jeffrey Johnson, ‘The Academic-Industrial Symbiosis in German Chemical Research, 1905–1939’, op cit., p. 20.
59.
Ibid., p. 26. On the relationship between science and the state during the Weimar Republic, see Paul Forman, ‘The Financial Support and Political Alignment of Physicists in Weimar Germany’, Minerva, Vol. 12:1 (1974), pp. 39–66; Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus, ‘The Argument for the Self-Government and Public Support of Science in Weimar Germany’, Minerva, Vol. 10:4 (1972), pp. 537–570.
60.
Ibid., p. 45.
61.
Ibid., p. 26. See also W.H. Brock, ‘The Spectrum of Science Patronage’, op cit., p. 186.
62.
See John Servos, ‘The Industrial Relations of Science: Chemical Engineering at MIT, 1900–1939’, ISIS, Vol. 71:259 (1980), pp. 541–542; Jeffrey Johnson, ‘The Academic-Industrial Symbiosis in German Chemical Research, 1905–1939’, op cit., p. 19.
63.
Unlike other leading universities, including Caltech, Princeton, Harvard, and Chicago that enjoyed generous support from private philanthropies, MIT failed to obtain any gift. When the administration tried to seek financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the board of trustees justified their reluctance to approve the MIT application on the grounds that the engineering work conducted there was not fundamental science but applied research that was of interest mainly to industry. See Ibid., p. 542. On the ideal of pure science, see H.A. Rowland, ‘A Plea for Pure Science’, Science, Vol. 2:29 (1883), pp. 242–250.
64.
Daniel Kevles, ‘Foundations, Universities, and Trends in Support for the Physical and Biological Sciences, 1900–1992’, Daedalus, Vol. 121:4 (1992), pp. 195–222.
65.
Ibid., p. 202.
66.
David Hart, Forged Consensus: Science, Technology and Economic Policy in the United States, 1921–1953 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 37.
67.
Daniel Kevles, ‘Foundations, Universities, and Trends in Support for the Physical and Biological Sciences, 1900–1992’, op cit., p. 205.
68.
Michael A. Dennis, ‘“Our First Line of Defense”: Two University Laboratories in the Postwar American State’, ISIS, Vol. 85:3 (1994), pp. 427–455.
69.
On the British and French effort in chemical warfare, see L.F. Haber, The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1986); Danielle M. E. Fauque, ‘French Chemists and the International Reorganisation of Chemistry after World War I’, Ambix, Vol. 58:2 (2011), pp. 116–135. On the Japanese chemical weapons programme in the First World War see, Yoshiyuki Kikuchi, ‘World War I, International Participation, and Reorganisation of the Japanese Chemical Community’, Ambix, Vol. 58:2 (2011), pp. 136–149.
70.
Hugh Slotten, ‘Humane Chemistry or Scientific Barbarism: American Responses to World War I Poison Gas, 1915–1930’, The Journal of American History, Vol. 77:2 (1990), p. 485. It is worth noting that following the First World War the chemical scientific establishment in the USA launched a massive campaign to prevent the ratification of the 1925 Geneva Protocol on the prohibition of chemical warfare. See Daniel Jones, ‘American Chemists and the Geneva Protocol’, Isis, Vol. 71:3 (1980), pp. 426–440.
71.
Diarmuid Jeffreys, Hell’s Cartel, op cit., p. 73.
72.
Fritz Haber, the ‘father of modern chemical warfare’, would counter any accusations of his active involvement in the German use of chlorine during the First World War arguing that to be maimed or killed by gas was no worse than being injured or mutilated by high explosives or shot and killed by a machine gun. In late 1918 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on synthetic ammonia. See Ibid. For further information on the life and political and professional activity of Fritz Haber, see Morris Goran, The Story of Fritz Haber (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967); Dietriech Stoltzenberg, Fritz Haber: Chemist, Nobel Laureate, German, Jew (Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2004). On the involvement of chemists in the First World War, see L.F. Haber, The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1986).
73.
Irvin Stewart, Organising Scientific Research for War: The Administrative History of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (Boston: Little, Brown and Co: 1948), p. 16. Available at http://archive.org/details/organizingscient00stew (accessed 30/11/12). See also National Resources Committee, Research – A National Resource: Relation of the Federal Government to Research (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1939).
74.
Ibid., p. 18.
75.
Ibid.
76.
Alex Wallerstein, ‘Inside the Atomic Patent Office’, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Vol. 64:2 (2008), pp. 26–31. For a detailed account on the development of the US atomic bomb project, see Henry DeWolf Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes: The Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb under the Auspices of the United States Government, 1940–1945 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1945).
77.
See Vannevar Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier: A Report to the President on a Programme for Postwar Science Research (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 1945).
78.
See William Smyth, ‘Technocracy – Ways and Means to Gain Industrial Democracy’, Industrial Management, Vol. 57 (1919), p. 385.
79.
See James Olson (ed.), Historical Dictionary of the Great Depression, 1929–1940 (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2001).
80.
David Holloway, ‘Scientific Truth and Political Authority in the Soviet Union’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 5:3 (1970), pp. 345–367. See also James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1998); Charles Maier, ‘Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 5:2 (1970), pp. 27–61.
81.
On the relations between science and the state during the Nazi regime, see Sandra Harding, ‘After the Neutrality Ideal: Science, Politics, and “Strong Objectivity”’, Social Research, Vol. 59:3 (1992), pp. 567–587; Bernd Gausemeier, ‘Genetics as a Modernisation Programme: Biological Research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes and the Political Economy of the Nazi State’, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 40:4 (2010), pp. 429–456; Alan Beyerchen, ‘What We Now Know about Nazism and Science’, Social Research, Vol. 59:3 (1992), pp. 615–641; Dieter Hoffmann, ‘Between Autonomy and Accommodation: The German Physical Society during the Third Reich’, Physics in Perspective, Vol. 7 (2005), pp. 293–329. On the German nuclear bomb project, see Ruth Lewin Sime, ‘The Politics of Forgetting: Otto Hahn and the German Nuclear-Fission Project in World War II’, Physics in Perspective, Vol. 14 (2012), pp. 59–94; Mark Walker, ‘Heisenberg, Goudsmit and the German Atomic Bomb’, Physics Today, January 1990, pp. 52–60; David Cassidy, ‘Heisenberg, German Science, and the Third Reich’, Social Research, Vol. 59:3 (1992), pp. 643–661.
82.
Edwin Black, War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003).
83.
John Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists: Science, War and the Devil’s Pact (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 350. On the issue of experimentation involving human subjects in Nazi Germany, see Ulf Schmidt, Secret Science: A Century of Poison Warfare and Human Experiments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
84.
Ibid. See also Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, op cit.
85.
Stuart Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 2.
86.
Dwight Eisenhower, Farewell Address (Washington, DC: The White House, 1961), available at http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=90&page=transcript (accessed 3/12/12).
87.
Jeffrey Johnson, The Academic-Industrial Symbiosis in German Chemical Research, 1905–1939’, op cit., p. 24.
88.
Florian Schmaltz, ‘Neurosciences and Research on Chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction in Nazi Germany’, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, Vol. 15 (2006), p. 186.
89.
See John Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists, op cit.; DiarmuidJeffreys, Hell’s Cartel, op cit.
90.
Florian Schmaltz, ‘Neurosciences and Research on Chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction in Nazi Germany’, op cit., p. 205.
91.
Ibid., p. 204.
92.
Daniel Kevles, The Physicists, op cit., p. 112.
93.
Ibid., p. 132.
94.
Stuart Leslie, The Cold War and American Science, p. 9. See also Paul Forman, ‘Behind Quantum Electronics: National security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940–1960’, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, Vol. 18:1 (1978), pp. 149–229. On the issue of social responsibility of scientists, see David Frisch, ‘Scientists and the Decision to Bomb Japan’, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Vol. 26:6 (1970), pp. 107–115; Lawrence Badash, ‘American Physicists, Nuclear Weapons in World War II, and Social Responsibility’, Physics in Perspective, Vol. 7 (2005), pp. 138–149.
95.
Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1978), p. 196.
96.
See Daniel Greenberg, The Politics of Pure Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
97.
David Hart, Forged Consensus, op cit., p. 195.
98.
Ibid.
99.
Louis Ridenour, ‘Military Support of American Science, a Danger?’, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Vol. 3:8 (1947), p. 223.
100.
Ibid.
101.
David Hart, Forged Consensus, op cit., p. 199.
102.
See Timothy Sosnovy, ‘The Soviet Military Budget’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 42:3 (1964), pp. 487–494.
103.
Between 1955 and 1958 the Soviet armed forces were allegedly cut by 2 million men. See Ibid., p. 488.
104.
Daniel Greenberg, The Politics of Pure Science, op cit.
105.
Anton Jachim, Science Policy Making in the United States and the Batavia Accelerator (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975), p. 48. See also Daniel Greenberg, The Politics of Pure Science, op cit.
106.
Ibid., p. 59. See Editorial, ‘Distribution of Research Funds’, Science, Vol. 142:3591 (1963), p. 453.
107.
Ibid., p. 62. See Stuart Leslie, ‘Playing the Education Game to Win: The Military and Interdisciplinary Research at Stanford’, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, Vol. 18:1 (1987), pp. 55–88; Rebecca Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); John Aubrey Douglas, The Cold War, Technology and the American University, Research and Occasional Papers Series: CSHE.2.99, July 1999, University of California, Berkeley.
108.
Don Price, The Scientific Estate (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 97.

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Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Bradford, Bradford, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Tatyana Novossiolova

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Novossiolova, T. (2017). Governance of Science Before 1945. In: Governance of Biotechnology in Post-Soviet Russia . Global Issues. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51004-0_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51004-0_2
Published: 05 August 2017
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