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Dr. Bush Fathers a Foundation

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Abstract

World War I, with its poison gases, had been the chemists’ war; World War II, with its radar and atom bombs, would become known as the physicists’ war. And as Paul Forman of the Smithsonian Institution has quoted physicist Jerrold Zacharias, “World War II was in many ways a watershed for American science and scientists. It changed the nature of what it means to do science and radically altered the relationship between science and government.”1

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Notes

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  93. Quoted in Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940–1960,” p. 186. Eventually, some scholars dared to peer into the science pork barrel. James D. Savage, who had studied academic earmarking for the Congressional Research Service in the early 1990s, wrote in 1999, “Sixty percent of academic research is funded by the federal government,” and while peer or merit review, the preferred methods for allocating such dollars, have their own problems — namely, favoritism and a tendency to support those with conventional views over scientific rebels — academic earmarking by members of Congress brings to science all the elegance and subtlety of the political pork barrel. Yet peer review does indeed favor elite institutions and can be just as ridden with good old boy networks as a Chicago road-building appropriation. As Savage explains the critique, “Peer review, it is claimed, is an old boys’ network that helps the rich get richer. It rewards the same old schools, the same old scientists, and the same old science, and thereby denies funding for new and innovative research efforts for scientists other than the privileged few.” Savage, Funding Science in America: Congress, Universities, and the Politics of the Academic Pork Barrel, pp. 5–7.

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  101. Ibid., p. 88. In the early 1980s, a lawsuit by California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) shed an interesting light on the question of how government-subsidized research advantages some and disadvantages others. The CRLA, acting on behalf of nineteen farm workers, filed suit against the University of California, charging that the UC had subsidized agricultural research with a “basic policy goal” of developing “machines and other related technology in order to reduce to the greatest extent possible, the use of labor as a means of agricultural production.” In other words, the activists alleged that the state was subsidizing mechanization and the consequent elimination of manual labor farm jobs, especially for those who aided in the planting and harvesting of tomatoes, grapes, oranges, peaches, and lettuce. Not being of a particularly libertarian bent, the CRLA did not merely demand that the state refrain from subsidizing mechanized agriculture; instead, it requested that the University of California set up a retraining fund for such workers, to be paid out of a fund which would be capitalized by licensing and royalty payments from the inventions of its researchers. Whether or not this mechanization was a good or bad thing is not the point here. Philip L. Martin and Alan L. Olmstead, professors of agriculture at the University of California-Davis, argued in Science that “Mechanization reduces the arduous nature of harvest work and permits remaining farm workers to operate equipment and sort commodities for longer periods,” while critics claim that it pushes farm workers out of productive outdoor employment and onto the unemployment or welfare rolls. Wherever the truth lies, it is unarguable that publicly funded — as distinguished, crucially, from privately funded — mechanization research is a putatively “neutral” state intervention in applied science whose consequences are anything but neutral. In fact, these interventions privilege certain actors and harm others. Even in a relatively uncontroversial field such as agricultural research, state-subsidized science has broad ramifications. Whether or not one thinks that the applied research is a boon to the agricultural economy, it is anything but “neutral.” See Philip L. Martin and Alan L. Olmstead, ‘The Agricultural Mechanization Controversy,” Science, Vol. 227, No. 1687 (February 8, 1985), pp. 601–606.

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Bennett, J.T. (2010). Dr. Bush Fathers a Foundation. In: The Doomsday Lobby. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6685-8_3

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