Introduction

98 DIRECTED RESEARCH
hire a postdoc and associate chemist. The three of us started working
full-time on HIV chemistry,” he said. “Before that, I was making HIV
inhibitors on the side.” 12
Parroting ideas drawn from Vannevar Bush’s 1946 study, Science, The
Endless Frontier, business leaders and government officials tell a tidy story
about government’s role in technological innovation. It is government’s
job to fund basic research, the pure science conducted by inquisitive investigators
at the nation’s universities that advances the nation’s storehouse
of knowledge. Applied research—taking that science and fashioning it
into products and processes for the marketplace—is industry’s job.
During the war, Bush ran the Office of Scientific Research and Development
(OSRD). The executive-branch agency’s wartime mission had
succeeded in tearing down the walls that separated pure science, conducted
mainly in universities, and applied science, conducted mainly
within private industry. It oversaw the development of a cornucopia of
what science historian Daniel J. Kevles has called “military miracles”:
microwave radar, proximity fuses, solid-fuel rockets, and, in the most
spectacular government-funded science project of all time, the Manhattan
Project, which built the world’s first atomic bomb. 13
Less well known were the achievements of the OSRD’s Committee on
Medical Research, which spent a mere $25 million during the war. Its
federally financed breakthroughs included the mass production of penicillin
and the development of blood plasma, steroids, and cortisone. The
penicillin breakthrough has often been claimed by the private firms that
supplied the “miracle drug” to the troops abroad, but their efforts would
have been impossible without the fermentation techniques developed at
a federal lab in Peoria, Illinois. 14 Similarly, the federal government spent
a half million dollars to turn blood plasma, which had been developed by
the Rockefeller Foundation in 1938, into an industrial commodity so
that it could be purchased from government contractors. 15
With the end of the war in sight, Franklin Delano Roosevelt asked
Bush, a Massachusetts minister’s son whose prewar career was spent on
the electrical engineering faculty at MIT, to draw up a blueprint for government
support of science in the postwar world. Roosevelt wanted to
continue the “unique experiment of team work and cooperation” that
had been developed between academia and industry during the war. His
seminal report was delivered to President Harry S. Truman on July 19,
1945.
Bush turned his back on the wartime experience and came down