American Scientist

Shaping Biology: The National Science Foundation and American Biological Research, 1945?1975. Toby A. Appel. xiv + 393 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. $42.50.

Anyone who has ever had a federal research grant will want to read this book, and that means all practicing U.S. scientists, since to practice science nowadays is to engage in a never-ending cycle of application, reporting and renewal. The half-life of a scientist without a grant is said to be a year or two; I'd guess less. Government grants are a way of life.

It was not always thus. In fact, the system of federal grants is quite young, essentially a by-product of our 40-year Cold War, and how it was invented is one of the great stories of modern science, which surprisingly remains largely untold. Toby Appel's history of the biology program of the National Science Foundation in its first 30 years is a small chapter in this larger history, but it is an exemplary tale, based on a decade of painstaking research in the agency's huge and rich archives. It is thoughtfully analyzed and straightforwardly presented in a clear, readable prose style leavened by a sly, dry humor.

Chapters move chronologically from the debates of the late 1940s over public funding of basic science to the founding of the NSF in 1950, the fashioning of programs and procedures in the early 1950s, the rapid expansion following the launch of Sputnik in 1957, and the struggles of the NSF?a pygmy among giants?to keep up with the National Institutes of Health. The book concludes with accounts of the "big biology" projects of the 1960s and the political crises of the late 1960s that resulted in 1975 in a radical overturn of the NSF's procedures, personnel and granting philosophy. Appel's account is full of new facts and insights. She takes us behind the scenes for an inside view of how science policy and science politics really work. No one has done it better.

At the center of the story is what one might call (Appel does not) the culture of the NSF and its Biological and Medical Sciences (BMS) Division. It was an unusual culture, more like that of the Rockefeller Foundation in its prewar heyday than that of a government agency. It operated informally as a working partnership between NSF officers?most of whom were not career administrators but scientists on administrative assignments—and grantees and scientists serving on advisory panels. Its mission was to fund basic science for its own value, rather than as part of applied missions. It cautiously steered clear of politics, although that meant slow growth of NSF budgets.

The NSF culture worked on trust and personal knowledge. The chief instrument was the unsolicited small project grant, and officers played an active role in formulating projects and deciding what to fund, while priding themselves on their flexibility and freedom from administrative red tape?and on their loyalty to the ideals of scientific freedom: When in the McCarthy years the NIH summarily canceled grants to scientists suspected of disloyalty (for example, Linus Pauling), the NSF to its credit publicly picked up the grants.

Oddly, this idealistic culture had its origin in a military funding agency: namely, the Office of Naval Research (ONR), which functioned as a surrogate NSF in the late 1940s as Congress remained deadlocked over the political principles of the public funding of science. The ONR provided the NSF with its first director, the scholarly Alan T. Waterman (the ONR's chief scientist since 1946), as well as its institutional customs (which the ONR had borrowed from the Rockefeller Foundation), including the custom of giving program officers the power to decide what projects to fund. (In the NIH, officers deferred to scientists' study sections but proved weak reeds when political winds blew a storm.) It is odd but true that a system of funding that to us may smack of benevolent paternalism proved a bulwark of scientific idealism. Readers will find much to ponder in this story.

In the course of describing how this culture of patronage arose and declined, Appel also offers fascinating insights into biologists' culture and social relations. For example, no scientific discipline was more balkanized into disciplinary factions or more devoted to individualistic values. NSF officers simply could not get biologists to pull together to back large communal projects like the national centers that did so much for physics and astronomy. Self-interest ruled: Projects that did not directly benefit one's own group were denounced as a misuse of public funds. The lab-field boundary was especially contentious. Biochemists?who managed to capture the lion's share of BMS funding?fought the large ecology field projects in the 1960s (stamp collecting, they called it). The ecologists won, but the BMS stayed small as other agencies grew. No wonder.

BMS officers had also to contend with the multipolar power structure of biology, especially its medical side. They successfully blew up an effort by the National Research Council's Biology and Agriculture Division to control funding priorities, but fought one losing battle after another with the NIH, which dominated the funding of basic biology as an overhead on its "wars" on various diseases. Pure biology was always a hard sell, and biologists could never unite to form the kind of political lobby that worked so effectively for biology in medicine and agriculture.

NSF officers scrambled to keep up with the ever-expanding NIH, lest it entirely monopolize the funding of basic biology. (They were right to worry: In 1972 Senator William Proxmire, chairing the subcommittee that oversaw NSF appropriations, wondered publicly whether the NSF wasn't just duplicating NIH programs at taxpayers' expense.) To protect their turf, BMS officers adopted the NIH's big-budget projects approach?fellowships for manpower development, block grants to laboratories, payment of faculty salaries and university overheads?and ultimately it was these departures from the individual research grant-in-aid that led to the demise of the NSF's distinctive culture.

The collapse of the NSF culture in the mid-1970s was the result partly of rapid expansion, partly of political change. First-generation scientist-officers were elbowed aside by a second generation, of professional administrators, and a moral economy of trust was replaced by one of accountability. Officer-adviser networks and peer-review panels were dismantled or opened up by a politics of interest-group representation and sunshine rules, and the machinery of grants became more formal and bureaucratic as grants began to include institutional overheads and salaries. (Scientists can be trusted; universities, never.) As Appel observes, the concept of grants-in-aid as gifts to universities gave way to "the notion of a carefully monitored 'purchase' of research from university vendors," or so it seemed to many veteran NSF officers. Thus the one federal agency devoted to the ideals of science as a cultural good in itself became another agency selling science as a means of addressing complex problems of current concern to senators and congressmen. Budgets grew, but growth was purchased at the cost of flexibility and idealism.

This is not a simple story of a golden age in decline. As Appel shrewdly notes, a decade of headlong growth had made NSF biology an incoherent jumble of disciplinary programs, and there was some truth to complaints about old-boy networks. Appel largely accepts the view that the early NSF's meritocratic, best-science culture was "elitist" and unfair to minority interests, and she sees the benefits of the new culture of access and accountability. I'm not so sure. Is it really wise to assume that a meritocratic best-science system must be pejoratively "elitist"? The alternative system, as it evolves, may prove to be considerably worse.

But each age has its particular culture and institutions to suit it, and looking back on a smaller and more innocent world than ours, the best-science culture of the early NSF and its Biological and Medical Sciences Division seems remarkably effective and humane.