0.4 Science for the public good: natural science perspectives on  (Page 2/8)

The board’s second annual report was considerably more ambitious. Report of the Science Advisory Board: September 1, 1934, to August 31, 1935 , 11. Its first section proposed “A National Program for Putting Science to Work for the National Welfare.” Many scientists regarded it as a proposal “Putting Science to Work for the Welfare of Science”—the beginning of a long argument by scientists and engineers that if science is to serve the public good, the nation had to be concerned with the welfare of science itself.

Compton and his board asked the President to appropriate $5 million annually over a five-year trial period for the support of science and engineering research outside of government—primarily in universities—as a basis for public works programs and a means to provide work for unemployed scientists. The program would use existing university facilities to conduct research regarded as being consistent with national needs, thus linking science with social and economic objectives while providing financial resources for science itself.

Roosevelt turned the proposal over for evaluation by Delano, Charles Merriam, and Wesley Mitchell, all of whom regarded it as too narrowly emphasizing the natural sciences and engineering. Since both Merriam and Mitchell were members of the board’s Committee on the Relations between Fundamental Science and the Study of Human Problems, they very likely had some foreknowledge of its proposed program. Delano wrote bluntly to Compton in December 1935, “I feel, and I think I may safely say that my colleagues feel, that we cannot undertake the program for pure and applied science without considering the merits of similar but doubtless ambitious programs of the social sciences, of economics, and of education in general.” Dupree, op. cit ., 356 Shortly thereafter, the Science Advisory Board was allowed to die a quiet death. The board’s demise was partly due to the failure of Compton and his colleagues to make a convincing argument for special federal treatment of natural science and engineering, and partly due to the New Deal’s priorities in 1934-35, when the focus was still on immediate relief measures. The plight of unemployed scientists did not loom large in this scheme of things. The Works Project Administration (WPA), which employed writers and actors, for example, in addition to civil engineers, architects, and trained craftsmen, was a second term New Deal initiative. Members of the Science Advisory Board also had failed to grasp the realities of the New Deal's intellectual-political environment, in which many of their academic colleagues from the social sciences exerted considerable influence.

The travails of the Compton committee had a long history. Many leading American colonists believed that science was essential to a progressive nation. In 1743, Benjamin Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society for the purpose of “promoting useful knowledge”; (External Link) . the Boston-based American Academy of Arts and Sciences was established along the same lines in 1790, with President John Adams one of the prime movers. Several participants in the 1787 Constitutional Convention, convinced that science was integral to the public good, wanted to write into the Constitution far-reaching authority for the executive branch to engage in and support scientific activities. Faced with strong opposition from delegates concerned with states’ rights, they had to settle for granting authority to the executive branch to grant patents, control standards of weights and measures, and conduct a decennial federal census. Even efforts to foster science with charitable contributions met opposition: When George Washington bestowed land to the federal government for establishing a national university, his gift was turned down by Congress on the grounds that it would have bestowed control of an internal improvement on the federal government. Internal improvements were what we would now call infrastructure developments, including roads, bridges, canals, and institutions of higher education. A few years later, the same argument killed Thomas Jefferson’s attempt to establish a national university.