Abstract

The National Science Foundation has special significance for historians of science. A large literature has identified the creation and evolution of NSF as an important part of the dramatic story of transformation and growth in American science and the national science establishment since World War II. Created in 1950 after several years of national debate, the foundation also became a major patron of the history and philosophy of science in the United States, providing support for numerous studies, including Toby Appel's Shaping Biology. The central themes and controversies in the foundation's history—like the relationship between basic and applied research, the role of politics and other social factors in shaping scientific inquiry, the tension between elitist and democratic ideals in science, the existence of competing visions of science as a unified or a pluralistic intellectual enterprise, the virtues of big versus little science—have been central matters for historians of science.By focusing on public patronage for biology, Shaping Biology makes an important contribution. In the last dozen years or so, a minor scholarly industry has substantially enlarged our understanding of American science during World War II and the Cold War, in the process raising troubling questions about the extent to which national politics and federal patronage shaped scientific inquiry, careers, expertise, and institutions. Overwhelmingly, this scholarship has concentrated on military patronage of the physical sciences. Yet the evolution of the biological sciences since the middle of the twentieth century is surely among the most important stories we need to tell. By focusing on NSF, Appel illuminates an interesting piece of that larger story, as she shows how developments within the foundation reflected and contributed to broader trends in American biology and national science policy.Appel pays special attention to the problem of unity in biology. Those responsible for biology at NSF during its early years assumed that there was “one biology,” that biology was a unified, integrated scientific enterprise. Support for this view came from biologists who found the notion of “one biology” appealing intellectually, but it also had strategic importance when explaining the value of the foundation's Division for Biological and Medical Sciences to nonbiologists. Within the division, the emphasis on unity was accompanied by an innovative organizational structure, with programs devoted to functional lines of inquiry like regulatory biology or systematics rather than to disciplinary programs like botany or zoology. Over time, however, support for “one biology” eroded. Within biology, the wide variety of topics and levels of analysis, from the molecule to the ecosystem, and the many methods of study, from laboratory experiments to field research, helped to undermine any assumed unity. So did the drive within NSF for political support, which often meant singling out specific lines of study as especially relevant to changing national concerns—for example, the contaminated environment or inadequate energy resources.In other ways as well, Appel explains, NSF's leaders struggled to define and redefine its biology program as the American political and intellectual setting itself changed. For example, the foundation was continually under pressure to define and defend a special mission for itself in relation to other federal patrons for biology, including the Atomic Energy Commission, the Office of Naval Research, and, most important, the National Institutes of Health. NSF was also constantly explaining the value of basic research in biology to national leaders who were often more interested in practical payoffs. By the 1960s, national pressures led the foundation for the first time into the arena of applied research, a venture followed by a period of soul searching and sometimes bitter controversy within the foundation as some worried that support for applied studies would drive out support for basic studies.Shaping Biology ends with a major reorganization at NSF in the mid 1970s that closed the biology division. Subsequently, support for biological studies was divided among multiple new organizational structures, thus bringing to an unhappy end the notion of “one biology.” Appel's timely and important study is clearly written and well researched. It should be of interest to historians, biologists, science journalists, and national science policy makers