---
title: "History of science policy"
chunk: 3/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_policy"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:12:21.965426+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== 1900–1945 ==
In the twentieth century, scientific and technological research became increasingly systematised, as corporations developed, and discovered that continuous investment in research and development could be a key element of success in a competitive strategy. It remained the case, however, that imitation by competitors—circumventing or simply flouting patents, especially those registered abroad—was often just as successful a strategy for companies focused on innovation in matters of organisation and production technique, or even in marketing. A classic example is that of Wilkinson Sword and Gillette in the disposable razor market, where the former has typically had the technological edge, and the latter the commercial one.
Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel's will directed that his vast fortune be utilized to establish prizes in the scientific fields of medicine, physics and chemistry as well as literature and peace. The Nobel Prize served to provide financial incentives for scientists, elevated leading scientists to unprecedented visibility, and provided an example for other philanthropists of the industrial era to provide private sources of funding for scientific research and education. Ironically, it was not an era of peace that followed, but rather wars fought on unprecedented international scale that led to expanded state interest in the funding of science.

=== War research ===
The desire for more advanced weapons during World War I inspired significant investments in scientific research and applied engineering in both Germany and allied countries. World War II spawned even more widespread scientific research and engineering development in such fields as nuclear chemistry and nuclear physics as scientists raced to contribute to the development of radar, the proximity fuse, and the atomic bomb. In Germany, scientists such as Werner Heisenberg were being pushed by the leaders of the German war effort, including Adolf Hitler to evaluate the feasibility of developing atomic weapons in time for them to have an effect on the outcome of the war. Meanwhile, allied countries in the late 1930s and 1940s committed monumental resources to wartime scientific research. In the United States, these efforts were initially led by the National Defense Research Committee. Later, the Office of Scientific Research and Development, organized and administered by the MIT engineer Vannevar Bush, took up the effort of coordinating government efforts in support of science.
Following the United States entry into the second world war, the Manhattan Project emerged as a massive coordinated program to pursue development of nuclear weapons. Leading scientists such as Robert Oppenheimer, Glenn T. Seaborg, Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller were among the thousands of civilian scientists and engineers employed in the unprecedented wartime efforts. Entire communities were created to support the scientific and industrial aspects of the nuclear efforts in Los Alamos, New Mexico; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; the Hanford site in Washington and elsewhere.  The Manhattan Project cost $1,889,604,000 of which $69,681,000 was dedicated to research and development. The Manhattan Project is regarded as a major milestone in the trend towards government funding of big science.

== 1945–2000 ==

=== Cold War science policy ===
In the United States, the foundation for post-WWII science policy was laid out in Vannevar Bush's Science – the Endless Frontier, submitted to President Truman in 1945. Vannevar Bush was President Roosevelt's science advisor and became one of the most influential science advisors as in his essay, he pioneered how we decide on science policy today. Vannevar Bush, director of the office of scientific research and development for the U.S. government, wrote in July 1945 that "science is a proper concern of government"   This report led to the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950 to support civilian scientific research.
During the Cold War era, the former Soviet Union invested heavily in science, attempting to match American achievements in nuclear science and its military and industrial applications. At the same time, the United States invested heavily in advancing its own nuclear research and development activities through a system of National laboratories managed by the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This era of competition in science and weapons development was known as the arms race. In October 1957, the Soviet Union's successful launch of Sputnik spurred a strong reaction in the United States and a period of competition between the two new world superpowers in a space race. In reaction to Sputnik, President Eisenhower formed the President's Science Advisory Commission (PSAC).  Its November 1960 report, "Scientific Progress, the Universities, and the Federal Government," was also known as the "Seaborg Report" after University of California, Berkeley Chancellor Glenn T. Seaborg, the 1951 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. The Seaborg Report, which emphasized federal funding for science and pure research, is credited with influencing the federal policy towards academic science for the next eight years. PSAC member John Bardeen observed: "There was a time not long ago when science was so starved for funds that one could say almost any increase was desirable, but this is no longer true. We shall have to review our science budgets with particular care to [maintaining] a healthy rate of growth on a broad base and not see our efforts diverted into unprofitable channels."
President John F. Kennedy's appointment of Seaborg as Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1961, put a respected scientist in a prominent government post where he could influence science policy for the next 11 years. In an address at Rice University in 1962, President Kennedy escalated the American commitment to the space program by identifying an important objective in the space race: "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." [1]. Federal funding for both pure and applied research reached unprecedented levels as the era of Big Science continued throughout the Cold War, largely due to desires to win the arms race and space race, but also because of American desires to make advances in medicine.