Science and War

[Doug Millison]

interesting, perhaps, to readers of GR and other Pynchon works:

"The state of American science and its relation to the American state are a
product of war. The first official recognition of science as an institution
was the creation of the National Academy of Sciences by Lincoln to provide
technological advice during the Civil War. In World War I President Wilson,
finding that an honorary academy of ancients was ill-suited for providing
the technical advice that modern war required, added a new operating arm to
the NAS, the National Research Council, which could draw on the
up-to-the-minute knowledge of the active core of American science. But the
peacetime support of scientific research by the state was essentially nil,
with the exception of a large federal and state commitment to agriculture.
Then, between 1940 and 1945, there were radar and atomic fission, but even
these wonders did not prevent a major decrease in state expenditure on
science soon after the Japanese surrendered. In 1946 Truman was unable to
convince a skeptical Congress to create what was eventually established as
the National Science Foundation. The Korean War, and, most important, the
cold war changed all that.[5] Since 1948, federal expenditures on R&D have
been continually increasing from an immediate postwar low. In the absence
of wars against political enemies, metaphorical wars are declared- the war
on cancer, the war on drugs. In the name of fighting these wars the federal
budget for academic research and development grew, in constant dollars,
from $730 million in 1953 to $14 billion in 1998, over half of which went
to the National Institutes of Health. "

from:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15366
The New York Review of Books
May 9, 2002
Review
The Politics of Science
By Richard C. Lewontin

[...]

Richard C. Lewontin is Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor
of Biology at Harvard University. He is the author of The Genetic Basis of
Evolutionary Change and Biology as Ideology, and the co-author of The
Dialectical Biologist (with Richard Levins) and Not in Our Genes (with
Steven Rose and Leon Kamin).