0.4 Science for the public good: natural science perspectives on  (Page 4/8)

1. conduct scientific activities required for government to exercise its explicit, Constitutionally conferred authority and responsibility;

2. provide services, including generic information, to essential non-government sectors whose sub-units lacked the individual means to support those services by themselves; and

3. offer a locus to support and facilitate research and related activities underlying new technologies of demonstrable importance to the national welfare.

The origins of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) provide a good example of the first rationale. National defense was (and is) the most clear-cut area of federal responsibility requiring input from science, and a wide variety of programs initiated under the defense umbrella were later consolidated under new bureaus within non-defense departments. Foremost among these were the extensive scientific surveys of the western lands for which the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1803-05 became the gold standard.

As to the second rationale, the Department of Agriculture, whose progenitor was established in 1862, was the federal government's first and for almost a century its foremost cabinet department, existing primarily on the rationale that government has the responsibility and authority to provide expert information and services to an essential non-governmental sector. Ibid., 149 In 1863, Congress (abetted by the absence during the Civil War of southern legislators) enacted two additional pieces of science-friendly legislation: the Morrill Act, deeding federal land to states on the condition that they build colleges of agriculture and mechanics; and a charter granted to the National Academy of Sciences to create a non-federal institution providing scientific assistance to the government. Finally, the 1902 establishment of the National Bureau of Standards signaled growing acceptance by Congress of the proposition that U.S. industrial needs for standardized, baseline information from government justified a broad interpretation of the constitutionally conferred federal responsibility for maintaining standards of weights and measures. Ibid., 281

The third rationale came into play near the end of nineteenth century, when Congress took its first tentative steps into the public health arena. In 1891, it moved a Marine Hospital Service medical research laboratory from Staten Island to Washington, DC, and renamed it the Hygienic Laboratory. Ibid., 257-58 Subsequently, Congress incorporated the Marine Hospital Service into a broadened Public Health and Marine Hospital Service, which became the Public Health Service in 1912. The same Act of Congress authorized the service to “study and investigate the diseases of men and conditions influencing the spread thereof,” thereby sanctioning the broad involvement of government in the field of public health research. The Hygienic Laboratory expanded slowly within the Public Health Service, and in 1930 became the National Institute of Health.

In 1915, Congress also established the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) with authority to “supervise and direct the problems of flight, with a view toward their practical solution, and to determine the problems which should be experimentally attacked. . . .” Ibid., 291 Composed of five non-government experts and (at the insistence of Roosevelt, who was then Assistant Secretary of the Navy) seven government members, the NACA provided an essential precedent for the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during World War II, and eventually for NASA, into which it would be subsumed in 1958.