The United States, for much of its history, was less an engine of scientific progress than a beneficiary of it. Pasteur, Koch, Lister, Mendel, Curie, Fleming—the giants who midwifed modern medicine were not Americans but Europeans. During the Second World War, the balance shifted. President Franklin Roosevelt created the Office of Scientific Research and Development and tapped Vannevar Bush, a former dean of M.I.T., to lead it. In the span of a few years, the agency spurred development of an antimalarial drug, a flu vaccine, techniques to produce penicillin at scale, and, less salubriously, the atomic bomb. Bush became a champion of state-sponsored research, helping to establish the National Science Foundation and to modernize the National Institutes of Health. As he wrote, “Without scientific progress, no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation.
The Undermining of American Science
