Practical Pressures and Scientific Payoffs

Practical Pressures and Scientific Payoffs:A Long View of Knowledge and Utility in Federal Research Daniel J. Kevles (bio) the equivalents in the scientific community for "accountability" and "autonomy" are "practical payoffs" and "untrammeled basic research." From the perspective of the humanities, the sciences may appear far better off these days, but in recent years, a number of leaders in American science have lamented that federal research programs have been giving far too much emphasis to practical payoffs, at a high cost to basic research. They argue that the problem has been compounded by the fact that the private sector has been gaining an increasing proportional foothold in the patronage of research, skewing it in a near-term payoff direction. Some observers even speak of a "War on Science" (Krauss 2016). The worriers are not without legitimate apprehensions, but they are shortsighted. Nothing better throws the present and future, if we can speak of such, into bold relief than knowledge of the past. In the United States, the current reign of pressure for practical payoffs was the norm in federal science from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of World War II, and it was manifest in key areas of federally supported research and development (R&D) even in the seemingly ivory-tower era during the quarter century after 1945. This was [End Page 561] not an unalloyed golden era devoted overwhelmingly to the support of basic scientific research, and, to the degree that it appeared so, it was an anomaly in the overall history of federal R&D. That said, the pursuit of utilitarian results went hand in hand with explorations in the basic sciences related to them, yielding rich returns in fundamental knowledge not only during that golden era but also in the century that preceded it and in the half century since its frequently lamented demise. Federal science grew enormously from the 1840s through the late nineteenth century, with the establishment of scientific agencies that advanced the national agenda of settlement, commerce, and resource development. The military pioneered the enterprise through the Naval Observatory, the Naval Hydrographic Office, and the Nautical Almanac Office, and with several army-sponsored surveys of the Trans-Mississippi West. On the civilian side, there was the US Coast (after 1878 the Coast and Geodetic) Survey, the US Geological Survey, and the US Weather Bureau. All these agencies were compelled to show that they were pursuing "practical work for practical purposes," as the head of one of them said in the first congressional investigation of federal science, which was held from 1884 to 1886, and yet all produced and published at government expense important basic research in geology, paleontology, geodesy, astronomy, meteorology, and hydrography (Kevles 2013). Through much of the nineteenth century, before graduate work was well established in American universities, federal scientific activities also provided a good deal of advanced scientific training for Americans interested in scientific careers. These features of nineteenth-century federal science were amply illustrated before the Civil War in the civilian US Coast Survey and in the navy's Nautical Almanac. The Coast Survey and the Nautical Almanac together developed what in a sense amounted to the nation's first GPS system. They allowed Americans to know where they were with greater precision in latitude and longitude, both at sea and on land, in a nation that after 1848 spanned the continent, and in so doing they produced, self-consciously and with intention, valuable knowledge and methods for enlarging it. [End Page 562] The Coast Survey, a part of the Treasury Department, was headed by Alexander Dallas Bache. Politics and science, sagacity and self-confidence, ambition and devotion to the advancement and uses of knowledge for national improvement—all were Bache's by birthright. A native of Philadelphia, he was a great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin, a grandson of James Madison's secretary of the treasury, and a graduate of West Point (Jansen 2011; Slotten 1994). At the time of Bache's appointment in 1843, the Survey was in trouble. Since its establishment in 1807, the Survey had spent some $100,000; had measured only some 11,000 square miles, almost all in the region from Chesapeake

Epistemology · Ivory tower · Nothing · Political science · Law · Philosophy · Research, Science, and Academia · The Impact of Diversity and Innovation on Society · Twentieth Century Scientific Developments

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography

  Diana D Menkes•Isis•1974

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• The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846-1876

  A Hunter Dupree, Robert V Bruce•The New England Quarterly•1988

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