0.4 Science for the public good: natural science perspectives on

We might as well command the sun to stand still as to say that science should take a holiday.... Merely because it has served us well is no reason why we should charge science with our failure to apportion production to need and to distribute the fruits of plenty equitably .

—Henry A. Wallace, 1934

In a 1934 address entitled, “Research and Adjustment March Together,” Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace took exception to the prevailing view that the New Deal should be exclusively concerned with short-term expedients aimed at the Great Depression. A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957), 350. Although he oversaw what was then the federal government's most extensive research system, Wallace’s vision of science as a key to national prosperity was considerably broader. Acting largely on his advice, Roosevelt issued an executive order in July 1933, establishing a Science Advisory Board “with authority…to appoint committees to deal with specific problems in the various Departments and thus to carry out ‘to the fullest extent’ the Order of May 11, 1918, requesting the National Academy of Sciences to perpetuate the National Research Council.” Report of the Science Advisory Board: July 31, 1933 to September 1, 1934 , 11.

Chaired by MIT President Karl Compton and housed within the National Research Council (NRC), the Science Advisory Board consisted of nine members during its first year and was expanded to sixteen in May 1934. Among its more notable members were Simon Flexner, Director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research; Frank B. Jewett, Vice-President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (and later President of the National Academy of Sciences); Charles Kettering, Vice-President, General Motors Research Corporation; John C. Merriam (the elder brother of Charles Merriam), President, Carnegie Institution of Washington; and Robert A. Millikan, Director, Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics, California Institute of Technology.

The board was initially supported by a small grant from Louis Brownlow's Public Administration Clearing House, and subsequently by a more substantial grant from the Rockefeller Foundation's Social Science Division, whose research agenda owed a great deal to Charles Merriam.

The Science Advisory Board established committees to inquire into the organization, objectives, and programs of various government scientific bureaus, most often in response to direct requests from the Secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, and Interior. In so doing, it followed the established procedures of the National Research Council in responding to requests for advice from the federal government, albeit on a considerably more extensive scale. For example, the board’s first report, issued on September 1, 1934, lists summary reports of the activities of the Department of Agriculture, the Bureau of the Budget, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of the Interior, with several appendices including proposed draft legislation “to authorize appropriations to pay the annual share of the United States as an adhering member of the International Council of Scientific Unions and other associated unions.”