The train that carried me in 1938 across the country to Pasadena for doctoral studies at the California Institute of Technology took me into a terrain of science familiar yet remote. Growing up in Corning, New York, I had my first glimmerings of science in seeing and hearing the great men of Cal Tech as they visited to check on the casting of the mirror for the Mount Palomar telescope. Those beginnings amplified by my years of Colgate drew for me a picture of the world of science that I thought I knew, a familiar world.

But it was a limited knowledge, and I knew little of the wider world of science I was to enter. Looking back on that time from a new millennium, I’m stunned by the transformation of what was then for me a remote enterprise to one that is now central to our lives. The American scientific enterprise in the late 1930s was not only smaller but also different in character. Government research was dominantly intramural, the work done by agencies and bureaus in their own laboratories—those of the Food and Drug Administration, the Bureau of Standards, the Bureau of Ships, and many others. Most important to my own future was the National Advisory Committee for Astronautics, which in the face of low funding managed to keep the country current in aeronautics and to launch critical facilities, including the world’s first full-scale wind tunnel at the start of the 1930s and the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory at the end of the decade.¹ Nevertheless, physics, the field I was entering,

depended heavily until 1940 on money from state legislatures, industrial corporations, individual donors, and, not least, philanthropic foundations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation.

Cal Tech had its hands in two of the most fundamental—and expensive—fields of physics: (1) astronomy, from the solar system to the galaxies, and (2) the fundamental structure of matter beset by a growing array of fundamental particles and the forces among them. Throughout the twentieth century, ever more costly, complex, and clever telescopes and atom smashers were paid for by private foundations and increasingly by the federal government, notably the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy or its eponymous predecessors, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Equally remote to me as I settled into my quarters at Cal Tech— including bunking on a cot as did fellow graduate students in the open loggia of the Athenaeum, the faculty club—was the remarkable history of the place. It had transformed itself within a generation. In 1920 it was the one-building Throop College of Technology graduating about 10 engineers each year. When I arrived, it was one of the premier universities in the country and the “only institution able to break into the ranks of the major research universities in the interwar years.”² It did that with the time-tested recipe of brilliant leadership, wise and timely philanthropy, and a bedrock principle. The leadership was first that of George Ellery Hale, an astronomer, who wanted a center of scientific research to support his observatory on Mount Wilson and to help him do it succeeded in persuading two national leaders in science to join him: Alfred Noyes, a chemist, and, of course, the physicist Robert Millikan (whose visit to Corning to look at the Mount Palomar glass started my journey to Cal Tech). The philanthropy was mainly local, as leaders in Southern California in banking, oil, electric power, and the like signed on to Hale’s vision that a strong center of science was essential to the growth of the Southern California economy. Most remarkable, I think, was the third part of Cal Tech’s emergence in the 1930s, the principle that Cal Tech was not to be, as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was in the 1930s, primarily a school of applied science. Rather, its strength was to be in fundamental science that would in time seed new technology, innovation, and economic growth. It took as a guiding principle that “ba-

sic research and scientific training would yield discoveries in practical matters as well as pure science; and these discoveries would prove to have tangible benefits.”³

What was becoming less remote to me than the history of Cal Tech and how it got to be was that the world was getting very dark. Germany invaded Poland a year after I started my graduate studies. The coming of war and then the war itself radically reshaped the landscape of American science and technology. Until the onset of war, the federal government funded university research at a low level and often restrictively. President Roosevelt authorized the Works Progress Administration to give grants for research but stipulated that 90 percent of those getting money had to be on relief, not as laughable as it now seems, because a lot of scientists and engineers were out of work and dependent on the government for shelter and food. However tentative these efforts, they became the pilot tests for how to move money to universities when the sums exploded in size. The lessons learned were soon to be applied.

The military was also struggling with how to mesh academic science with its needs. It wasn’t easy. Military bureaus were notoriously ingrown, each service doing its own research no matter whether it duplicated or could learn from work in other services. Often they had no idea what the other services were up to for they kept their research secret not only from the taxpayers and possible foreign enemies but also from each other. “Thick walls of secrecy separated the technical bureaus of one service from their counterparts in the other. And while the army and navy technical bureaus employed civilian scientists and engineers, the armed services did not have the money to pay for much outside civilian technical help, either industrial or academic, and as prerogative conscious as ever, they did not like to rely upon it.”⁴

There was no joint research among the services, no overarching organization, no ceding of research direction to outsiders, such as university scientists. That was so even when military leaders came to understand in the 1930s that the country was lagging badly in military research and technology. As Robert Millikan observed in 1934, defense research ought to be “a peacetime . . . and not a wartime thing. . . . It moves too slowly after you get into trouble.”⁵

Millikan was right in 1934 but was proven wrong when the war

came. That a predictable disaster became a triumph was due to the rise to power of military leaders who realized that their research system was disastrously insular; the emergence of acute technological needs, especially for locating military aircraft and directing fire at them; and the work of one very astute and politically adept engineer named Vannevar Bush. That mix established that first-rate research rapidly done and deployed to the military was possible in wartime. The means for doing it were straightforward though revolutionary: the military set the goals and the scientists figured out how to get there with new contracting mechanisms to move money to the universities without compromising fiscal control and oversight and a willingness to have the problem shape the institution that would attack it, not the other way around. Thus, the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachsetts Institute of Technology was set up in response to and within a few months after the British delivered the cavity magnetron that enabled microwave radar.

Wartime research became a cascade of creation, and the Rad Lab and many other places became “universities in a pressure cooker.”⁶ And I fell right into it. I was 24 and fresh out of graduate school, but there was no hesitancy putting me to work within the inner sanctum of a desperate technological race to turn the breakthrough of the cavity magnetron into devices to fight the enemy. While they seemed graybeards to me, the Rad Lab “faculty” was in fact young, their average age in the mid-thirties and I. I. Rabi, later a Nobelist, the elder statesman at 43. Contrast that with the Germans, who didn’t trust their university scientists, never mind the rigid hierarchy that kept promising students from rising quickly to serious tasks and real responsibilities. German research was done within strict military controls, in military establishments, and a strong military culture. A senior German scientist complained just before the war in Europe ended that “Germany lost the war because of incomplete mobilization and utilization of scientific brains.”⁷ Except of course for rockets, airplanes, and torpedoes. Thank God they didn’t figure out how to build nuclear bombs!

The most powerful lesson of wartime research in the United States was that it worked, spectacularly so. And while radar, the proximity fuze, penicillin, the atomic bomb, and antimalarials were all terribly important products, the most powerful one in transforming American science and

technology was the generation of people in the universities, industry, and the military that set up the institutions, ran them, and did the work. Their battle-tested belief in the productivity of university science when managed right shaped the structure and style of postwar research in the United States. It seeded new agencies for supporting research in the universities, from the Office of Naval Research to the National Science Foundation. It established new research laboratories with particular if broad missions managed by the universities, such as MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and many others. It solidified new mechanisms for investing money from the public treasury in the very best science. And, certainly not least, it set the course for my own career as I determined to continue to serve the national security of the country but from the vantage point of a university post.

It is now commonplace to comment on the seemingly chaotic federal structure that settled into place after World War II. And it is undeniably a jumble, a dizzying mix of agencies with differing goals—from simply supporting the best basic research as does the National Science Foundation to furthering the health of Americans as does the National Institutes of Health to assuring technological currency in national security as do the research agencies of the Department of Defense and the military programs of the Department of Energy. That the aims, structures, and cultures of these and other agencies are not unitary is not a weakness but a strength. The history of postwar research is well seeded with stories of young researchers denied support by one agency finding support at another and going on to win national and international awards for their work. Governmental scientific officers have often catalyzed openings in new fields because they had the insight to recognize an emergent research frontier and the funds to support the best in exploiting it. Finally, and most fundamental, the postwar partnership of government and academia in some agencies, particularly NSF and NIH, had as its goal that of supporting graduate education built on blending teaching and research. That was the kind of education I got at Cal Tech before the war and what I returned to when I had my own graduate students and when at the National Science Foundation I had a national opportunity to strengthen that system.

But the best counter to the messiness of the multiple agencies composing the federal research system is the same as for the methods of wartime research: it works. By any measure you care to look at, American science and technology equal and often lead competing work in other countries. And they have survived and thrived in the face of severe stress— budgetary declines in the late 1940s and early 1970s. The potpourri of programs in the 1970s and 1980s intended, with mixed success, to link science more directly with applications, “relevancy,” or “strategic goals;” the intense questioning if not disbelief in the value of fundamental research occasioned by a loss in the 1980s of the nation’s faith in its ability to compete economically. Yet closing onto 60 years after the end of the war, the American research system in Faulkner’s phrase has not “only endured, but prevailed.”

How it happened is foretold in many ways—by Cal Tech and other research universities betting on fundamental science, by the military entrusting the nation’s security to people in the universities hardly trained to military ways, by the virtual destruction of the prewar system of insular and often stifling government-run scientific agencies that largely did their research internally without the freshening currents of external work and criticism. The war shattered that and what emerged afterwards was a fertile partnership of government support for university and industry research performance. No longer heavily if not exclusively dependent on state and private support and with a growing federal purse now open to them, universities could expand research faculties and facilities. Research that was broader, deeper, more ambitious, and costly was now within reach. The American public and its political leaders carried over into peacetime their war-proven faith in the value of research to national aspirations, and that faith shaped the centrality of the universities to American science and technology.

I can’t pretend I thought about all that in August 1945. I simply needed to get on with my life. But how to do that? Still, the Zeitgeist was about, and I and many of my equally young colleagues wanted to be at a university. I determined to return to MIT and as the first chills of the Cold War were felt to contribute what I could to the nation’s security. Strong and immensely capable university scientists enriched if not dominated postwar military research—Theodore von Kármán of Cal Tech and

his seminal work on the technical future of the Air Force; George Valley and his conception of the SAGE (semiautomated ground environment) defense system that saved Project Whirlwind, which in turn became a seedbed for the U.S. computer industry; Louis Ridenour and his work on missile development and defenses; John von Neumann and his seminal work with Oskar Morgenstern on game theory that was fundamental to planning U.S. strategy in the Cold War. They were giants and set the tone for me: stay rooted in the university, take on the toughest military issues, ask hard questions, get the job done quickly, tell the truth even when—especially when—it’s hard. What made it work was that the military listened—and acted. It developed officers who were technically educated and trained at advanced levels and who could understand and apply within the military framework the advice we gave. Witness General Jimmy Doolittle and his unsurpassed standing as someone with enormous and daring military achievements and a very strong technical education. Witness General Bernard Schriever, who led the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. That dialogue with the military— whether working on new missile systems, leading the first hard look at the feasibility of defending against incoming missiles, thinking about the implications of wedding missiles with nuclear warheads, taking an honest look at the notion of a nuclear-powered airplane—was a refrain in my life as I moved up the academic ladder at MIT. That dialogue played out on a much larger stage as a set of university and industry scientists and leaders—James Killian, I. I. Rabi, George Kistiakowsky, Jerome Wiesner, William Baker, Edwin Land, Simon Ramo, and others—provided the nation with the very best technical guidance for its national security. And it was not only what these enormously capable people guided into use but also the bad ideas they stopped that rendered the country extraordinary service. And that set the tone for the role of science at the presidential level: provide the very best technical advice you can and trust the political system.

From the time I returned to the United States in 1945 until 1965 when I became president of the Carnegie Institute of Technology,⁸ I led a double life as a member of the MIT faculty and as an advisor to the military and industry. It was a symbiotic link: we applied our best technical and scientific thinking to formidable military and industrial problems

and in turn were tutored in the hard practicalities of such matters as missile guidance, design, and production. This infusion of actual practice into pedagogy gave our teaching the currency to enable us to prepare a new generation of scientists and engineers who could enter the defense and industrial worlds as new but hardly naive recruits.

But I got much more from this double life than the symbiosis of teaching and science and technology advice to the military. I was and remain proud that I could contribute to the country’s national security during the Cold War as I did during World War II. Bunny and I were just starting our family when the Soviet Union set off in succession an atomic bomb and then a hydrogen bomb and when both superpowers were furiously building intercontinental airplanes and ballistic missiles to deliver them. With other Americans, we thought about surviving a nuclear war. We were scared. Early on, I had witnessed two nuclear tests set off above ground. Feeling the heat course through my body as the high-energy radiation hit, seeing the fireball through colored glasses and then the mushroom cloud, being buffeted by the blast wave, and all the while knowing how many would die if a hydrogen bomb hit a city hardened my determination to do what I could during the Cold War.

At Cal Tech I had learned to do fundamental science at the highest level. At MIT I infused that understanding of what first-class science meant with lessons learned in the war of how in the midst of terrible pressures to turn knowledge into applications. And those lessons gained an even more cosmopolitan flavor when I moved to ever-larger stages, first to what became the Carnegie Mellon University and then to Washington as director of the National Science Foundation and science advisor to Presidents Nixon and Ford. My time at Carnegie Mellon reinforced for me that the world was a messy place and that it certainly wasn’t going to change for me. I learned that getting things done when people were in intense intellectual, political, and emotional conflict was a special art form, that I had to work hard to understand why people acted the way they did even if, on rare occasions, I thought their ideas were nuts. I learned to listen hard.

The legacy Carnegie Mellon gave me of a world view attuned and even sympathetic to clashing ideologies served me extraordinarily well when I went to Washington in 1972. I was hardly a political innocent

with service as chief scientist of the Air Force and as member, vice chairman, and chairman of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. But in those positions I was within essentially a closed military environment. This time it would be quite different and very public. In going from consulting for the government to running an agency, I was moving from life in the rear to front-line combat. But while the stage got bigger, the stakes higher, and the players more powerful and sometimes nastier, I held fast to two principles. The first was the love of my family, my wife and children, and the wonderful life we had living in Georgetown and enjoying the city and the frequent visits of our children, grandchildren, and many friends. At the end of the day, no matter how brutal the politics, there was my family and its devoted constancy to put things right, to help me regain balance and get ready for the next day.

The second belief that helped me survive Washington politics was never to get on the other guy’s territory. I couldn’t be a better politician than those who made a profession of it, and, thankfully, I wasn’t stupid enough to try. Rather, I knew that for me the path to survival was to stake my positions and arguments on the best science and technology, expressed as forcefully as possible and fitted honestly to the audience. That served me well whether I was arguing for new facilities at our research station in Antarctica, proposing new initiatives such as the biome research program, arguing each year for more money for the National Science Foundation, defending the foundation (and myself) against attacks on its curriculum development programs, or building the analytical base for knowledgeable responses to the energy crisis of the 1970s.

My time in Washington closed the circle for me. I had as a very junior player seen the forcing function of World War II carve a new arrangement between government and science. And now in the 1970s I was in the thick of that legacy envisioned by Vannevar Bush but given political durability by President Truman. From the exigent beginnings of wartime, the U.S. scientific endeavor became an enormous public enterprise; rather than a relatively minor and internal enterprise of government, it was now large and external, with fundamental research dominantly, though not exclusively, in the universities, now the “home of science.”

In those phenomenal decades my activities and contributions were

part of the larger issues of war and peace and the opportunities that opened up. But they were also influenced by some of my personal character and strong predilections. First, all my life I have been almost an incurable optimist, with a confidence and determination about my work. Second, I like people of all kinds and am reasonably tolerant, seeking the positive in people. Third, I like to organize things and run things, many simultaneously. This predilection showed early when I was in high school. Throughout most of my professional life there were many other opportunities to satisfy that urge. They were all quite different but all depended on selecting and getting the best available people for the job, supporting them, making sure they knew they had the responsibility and freedom to act. Few failed me. It always helped if I remained well informed, was enthusiastic about their work, and was in effect the chief cheerleader. And as the organizations I led got more complex (and bureaucratic), I made sure that all the leaders of the different parts had a say in major decisions. Chairing those overview meetings taxed my abilities, especially when we were dividing the budget pie, but that is what I was paid for.

And how productive that “home” and the work of industry and governmental laboratories have been in my time. A major textbook in biochemistry in the 1960s did not even have a separate chapter on the nucleic acids, the first glimmerings of a profound revolution in our understanding of genetics at the level of molecules still uncertain and tentative. There was more excitement and seemingly more importance in decoding slowly and with enormous effort the three-dimensional structure of proteins. When I returned to MIT after the war, the arrangements of the components of atoms—protons, electrons, neutrons, various antimatter forms— seemed sensible. The universe seemed a simple place, a mosaic of understandable pieces—stars, planets, debris between the stars, lots of space. We were just on the piedmont of exploring the ramifications of what we had learned in solid-state physics in the 1930s; and during and immediately after the war, work had begun on using solid materials to control the flow of electrons. And our own planet, its land and oceans, seemed a stable place posing mostly uninteresting questions. Chemistry in many ways was still chemistry in the large: statistical examinations of the interactions of many molecules, the tools simply not available to “watch” their behavior as individuals.

That all this changed, sometimes at a dizzying rate, is obvious. But what happened? I suppose at one level the war happened. It was not so much the particular science and technology created in the hothouse atmosphere of wartime but the means for doing science and technology that carried over with extraordinary vigor into peacetime. What we learned about microwave technology through work on radar in turn when combined with other work led to tools that created new fields, from more robust radio telescopes to masers and then lasers. The intense effort in wartime to create new antibiotics such as penicillin left as its legacy an enormously fertile organic chemistry, becoming a cornucopia of new materials, techniques, and ideas. A nexus of work during and immediately after the war—from Project Whirlwind to investigation of the properties of materials such as silicon supported by the armed forces to new mathematical tools—formed the seedbed for the stunning arrival of universally available and very powerful computing power. The organizational skills learned by scientists and engineers in wartime for driving large cosmopolitan endeavors involving a range of research and technologies were in peacetime mapped onto global programs such as the International Geophysical Year that put nations, first the Soviets and then us, into space and into other extremes, such as the Antarctic continent. Scientists who served in these programs, often as military officers, came home determined to pursue suggestive clues that our home planet was not quite that uninteresting.

Everything changed since I first had a balky mule carry my instruments up the High Sierras and then almost drowned in Lake Tulainyo. Our earth is now seen as a quilt of plates that move. Individual atoms and molecules are probed and their behavior monitored and controlled to a degree by an immense array of tools, yielding new materials and new technological possibilities. The science of the ever smaller has gotten even smaller, and the notion of nanotechnology, devices on the scale of 10^-9 cm is becoming familiar, with scientists creating, for example, a “camera in a pill” that can be swallowed for examining the gastrointestinal tract. We have explored in detail the chemistry and topography of our neighboring planets in the solar system. Astronomy and particle physics, the two extreme ends of matter, have cycled through chaos to hints of order. Astronomy found an incredible array of strange objects in the universe—

black holes, quasars, pulsars—and evidence of extrasolar planets. Particle physics enormously expanded its bestiary of particles but gained some control through models that gave them some sense and pointed the way not only to explaining them but also to the source and energetics of what astronomers found.

Another lesson for science from the World War II—that different sciences working together can be remarkably fruitful—has endured. As one of many examples, the sharp and historic line between the physical and biological sciences is ever more porous. Researchers are trying to apply the ways that biological molecules “recognize” each other to creating useful nanomechanical devices. Geoscientists are exploring the contemporary science of genetics for useful clues to solving problems in the evolution of our planet. Cooperative efforts by biologists and engineers seek to create new robots. It is possible that how cells “talk” to each other will be applied in computer science. Not least, some wonder whether the emerging discoveries of brain science will revolutionize information technology.

Although the substance of contemporary science and technology has changed, how it is done largely has not. The universities, industry, government laboratories, and more recently specialized nonprofits are still the performers of research. There remains great cooperation among these institutions leavened by independent counsel on problems, promise, and performance, with the National Academies⁹ a leading example.

That compact of government, industry and universities created a world that transformed the science, technology, and economy of the last half of the twentieth century, and set the stage for even more remarkable things to come. The new world shaped after World War II changed everything—in how we communicate with the remarkable transforming power of the Internet the most spectacular example, how we move with the arrival of the jet age, and in how we assure our health through the amelioration of many dread diseases such as smallpox and polio and enormous progress against others, such as cancer and heart disease. There is much more to come. We are, I suspect, only at the beginning of exploiting our understanding of genes. New materials in structure and what they can do are in the offing, as we exploit tools that can shape them at the atomic level.

Of course, the postwar legacy of science and technology has its dark side. We now have terrifying and plentiful weapons of mass destruction in many countries. The imperative for self-preservation imposed by the concept of mutually assured destruction was demonstrably effective when the United States, France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union were the only nations with nuclear weapons capability. But now other nations have them and have a somewhat limited ability to deliver them. And nuclear threats are now joined by the potential for chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. The latter is for me the saddest part of our legacy, to see, for example, our achievements in biology potentially channeled into weapons of death and disease. That is a hard reality, but like the Nazi enemy that faced us across the Atlantic in 1941, it is one we will confront and defeat.

Central to the world’s long-term future is what scientists and engineers did in World War II and its immediate aftermath—namely, help Americans understand the potential power for good and bad of the very rapid advances in contemporary science and technology. We must work hard to assess and control the bad.

There is of course a severe mismatch between political timescales— invariably the interval between elections—and the time needed to understand and solve complex problems. Selecting a longer time scale, Wm. A. Wulf, President of the National Academy of Engineering, suggested that the twenty-first century should be an “engineered century.” I see no reason why science, engineering, and technology cannot reach new heights in the new century as they did in the twentieth century, surprising us continually with what can be done, first with new scientific and technological discoveries and developments, followed by wise applications to societal problems.

Immediate candidates for an engineered century are global warming and in a larger dimension that of sustained global development, balancing energy, environment, and the economy. Over the past three decades, ever since we got the shock of the oil embargo in 1973, we have already made great progress discovering the nature of the problems and starting toward solutions, but there is a long way to go. It will require massive cooperation by our science, engineering, and technology communities, our political leaders, and society generally. We must continue to develop

international organizations, both scientific and diplomatic, and bring scientific and technical deliberations and advice to international diplomatic discussions.

In June 1994, Bunny and I went to D-Day Remembered, the fiftieth anniversary of the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944. Memories flooded me of wartime London, where I had worked with the British on their desperate need for radar to protect themselves and to attack their enemy; the technical intelligence missions following closely on the invasion; my “capture” by the Germans; and coming on the horrific slave-labor missile factory at Nordhausen. I went to my sixtieth reunion at Colgate University, where I was set firmly on the path toward science and toward Cal Tech and physics. Even more poignantly for me, I was elected to the Steuben County, New York, Hall of Fame. My childhood in Corning played out before me, the love my grandparents gave their orphaned grandchildren, my sister and me, and the belief and real help teachers in high school gave me to get to Colgate at all. My time as President of Carnegie Mellon University was replayed in an invitation to a meeting of the Andrew Carnegie Society, the alumni of Carnegie Mellon. And I received the Vannevar Bush Medal of the National Science Foundation, triggering memories of leading the foundation through turbulent times and of Vannevar Bush, who had sent me to London and who understood when I declined his offer to join him in Washington after the war and returned instead to MIT to teach and do research. And I was sharply pulled back to my doctoral days at Cal Tech, climbing mountains, wrestling ornery mules, and publishing my first scientific paper when a surprise guest showed up—Victor Neher, my senior coauthor and Cal Tech mentor who went to the Rad Lab just before I did and helped persuade me to follow him.

A reporter for the Pittsburgh Press in a long story about me when I was president of Carnegie Mellon called me “The Happy Warrior.” That was right, I think, even though there were occasions then and since when I was decidedly unhappy. But time has washed much of that away, and I can look back on my life being “in the game,” taking part and a few times even making a bit of the history of American science and technology in the twentieth century. I’m satisfied.