Contents - IADR/AADR

CHAPTER ONE: THE SCIENCES AND THE PUBLIC IN
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
ALLEN G. DEBUS, PH.D.
PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND DIRECTOR OF THE MORRIS FISHBEIN CENTER FOR THE
STUDY OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND MEDICINE, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.
All are aware that the twentieth century has been characterized by a previously unforeseen growth of the
sciences; moreover, there has been, in effect, a new revolution in the attitude toward science. Yet, while this
revolution has occurred within scientific laboratories throughout the world, it has also been a revolution that has
touched the consciousness of the general public as well. If the former process has been a lengthy one, the latter
has not. Indeed, it has only been within the last generation that the common man has really been aware that his
was a "scientific" age. Prior to the Second World War, the schoolboy in the United States was exposed to little
science. Mathematics, yes, and perhaps a little of the geological history of the earth, but for him "science" took
on a meaning that had a special relation to the American dream. We were told of the telephone, the electric
light, motion pictures, and the automobile. The "scientists" we knew were Luther Burbank, Alexander Graham
Bell, and Thomas Alva Edison. This was an attitude reflected by the government, for, when the Post Office
chose to issue a series of stamps honoring great American scientists in 1940, it did not turn to Josiah Willard
Gibbs, Albert A. Michelson, or even Benjamin Franklin. Rather, the stamps portrayed John James Audubon,
Crawford W. Long, Luther Burbank, Walter Reed, and Jane Addams. A second set, issued the same year,
honored American inventors, singling out Eli Whitney, Samuel F. B. Morse, Cyrus H. McCormick, Elias Howe,
and Alexander Graham Bell.
THE APPLIED VERSUS THE PURE SCIENTIST
In short, for the average American living before the Second World War, the "scientist" was an inventor,
a physician, or a naturalist who made the world better for mankind while simultaneously assuring his own
future. In contrast, the scientist who worked in a university research laboratory was little known or considered.
This was the impractical and forgetful professor who puttered away at projects which were hardly likely to
benefit him or anyone else. How much better it seemed to devote one's life to the emulation of Ford, Marconi,
or De Forest. When we were told of the effects of the Industrial Revolution and other nineteenth-century
developments on society, we heard of the hard-working practical men, the inventors, whose ideas seemed to
have little connection with the universities. These "heroes" were men who had not gone to college. Rather, they
had worked with their hands and had seen their ideas through to fruition even though they had suffered
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