Scientific Expertise in Millennial Society
Overview of Institutions
America’s scientific institutions encompass the various modes of organization involved in scientific discourse and endeavor. Criteria for entry into this category may change with the times, as research priorities shifted from industrial to military to medical to environmental to digital, but the structure of norms, peers, and mandates are common to all of them. Generally speaking, their rise, evolution, and/or prominence were marked by four technological advents:
- Mass production of the early 20th century,
- Military research efforts proximal to and between the wars,
- Post-War “big science,” and
- The Internet at the end of the century.
Technological Advancement Facilitates the Growth of Scientific Institutions
Mass Production Promotes Innovation in Industrial Labs and the Rise of Private Research Institutes, Standards and Measures, Professional Scientific and Engineering Professions and Societies, Professional and Popular Science Literature
Mass production, a system more or less on par with the industrial ideal of Fordism, laid the groundwork for American industrial production in the definitive century that would set the US apart from all other nations, all other cultures, all other eras. But Henry Ford cannot claim credit for inventing the assembly line, nor can he claim credit for instigating the engineering zeitgeist that provided him with the technical inspiration and supremely skilled staff that allowed him to pursue his vision. Hounshell documents the highly innovative workplace of mechanics and engineers that had no preconceived notions of factory production, but this account takes for granted the populist role that engineering and scientific efficiency played in every day American life. Indeed, according to Nye, Taylorism — a scientific approach to management oriented toward economies of scale — was the result of twin innovations in electrical engineering and large corporate entities. This historical footnote in itself demonstrates how a technological advancement facilitated the evolution of a scientific institution (i.e., corporate industrial labs involved in chemical, energy, mass transit, communication, pharmaceutical, and agricultural research and development). Meanwhile, some industrialists, in a sweep of national pride, funded eponymous research institutes staffed and equipped to hold their own against prestigious British and European establishments. X-ray technologies, new surgical instruments and techniques, and advances in microscopy and microbial theory begat disease research at new the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (1901), while the Carnegie Institution of Washington boasted a research portfolio that outshone the best academic and industrial labs within a half decade of its 1902 dedication.
Professional engineering societies, which had begun to form in the last decades of the 19th century, found cross-disciplinary projects in the technological fairs and exhibitions of the early 20th century, and their disciplinary ideal of consistent, streamlined productivity spilled over into the popular culture through books and journals, like Scientific American, National Geographic, and The Man of Tomorrow. The obsession with efficiency extended into the home, with advice, guidelines, textbooks, journals, and classes for home economics influencing every budgetary, dietary, and resource management decision of the American housewife’s daily routine. Along with this trend toward streamlining and scientific management was strong support from the scientific and industrial interests for the national adoption of the metric system. Despite the establishment of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) within the Department of the Treasury in 1901, two decades of debate and petition could not persuade the Congress to go metric; however, NBS/NIST continues to grow and play a vital role in industrial, construction, materials, information science, applied math, environmental, and various other areas of American research.
To lay this out in a more linear and overly-simplified way, electricity facilitated new manufacturing possibilities, which resulted in a boom in industrial production, which required large corporate structures to handle complex logistics and expensive capital investments, which led to rapid corporate growth, which created a need for highly organized management styles (such as Taylorism), which influenced Henry Ford and his pioneering staff of highly skilled mechanics, who applied a somewhat scientific approach to the production of the Model T (they employed an empirical method, but not necessarily a “scientific method”), which resulted in the Ford style of mass production, which was quickly adopted across all industrial manufacturing sectors, which in turn transformed society into a consumption economy within a decade, which both required and inspired the promotion and growth of scientific institutions, such as professional societies of scientists and engineers — whose numbers swelled from roughly 8,000 across all engineering disciplines in the 1880s to over 200,000 practicing engineers by the 1920s; the National Bureau of Standards; popular and professional science literature; and applied and medical research labs and institutes.
Military Research Leads to a Rise in International Cooperative Research Partnerships, Private-Public Research Labs, National Research Council, Modern Universities, Technocracy
At the beginning of the 20th century, American science could roughly be divided to two categories — descriptive and exploratory research, and applied science. The former was generally of an academic nature and sponsored by societies and universities, while the latter was generally a commercial endeavor and viewed as something akin to a business tool. At that time, vast areas of the Pacific, the Polar Regions, and the tropics were still unmapped, and societies like the Smithsonian, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the National Geographic Society, and the Explorer’s Club entered into partnerships with foreign sponsors to advance the basic knowledge of anthropology, botany, zoology/ornithology, entomology, geology, seismology, and polar research. These projects laid the groundwork for cooperative research relationships that would later prove instrumental to the war efforts in WWI and WWII.
As America’s involvement in the First World War escalated, the trial-and-error model of industrial research proved too slow and unreliable for urgent innovation in military technology, and was replaced by methods that operated on a more structured underlayment of theoretical work, and which provided quicker results with more accuracy. Science was now viewed as a public asset, a patriotic tool for the war effort, and its institutions evolved, as well. President Wilson mobilized America’s scientific community through the National Research Council (NRC), under the aegis of NAS. The NRC was tasked with taking an inventory of scientists and their instruments, “establish committees to survey important problems for research, and promote cooperation between investigators within government bureaus, universities, research institutions, and industrial laboratories.” The NRC originally comprised lead researchers from a variety of institutions, military scientists, and Smithsonian investigators; its organization under NAS provided the Academy with the opportunity and rationale for a federal funding mechanism to pay for research, administrative staff, and an expanded portfolio of S&T program work. Although it was this arrangement that opened the door for big science programs, early efforts involved reorganization of federal bureaucracies, notably the operations at the patent office, co-administration with the President’s Council of National Defense of the science department of the Signal Corps. Later work provided genuine R&D products to improve military capability and national security. Of course, the NRC was just one piece of America’s military science machine, but it is illustrative of the new cooperative structures and funding mechanisms that were required to arm and deploy two million soldiers, and win the war through superior military instruments, munitions, and communications.
Between the wars, new disciplines arose, as did urgency for large-scale international cooperative research and a new class of researchers: the scientist-administrator. The so-called “Age of the Machine” facilitated the technocracy movement; an evolution of scientific management that embraced science as the solution to scarcity, waste, and disorder, and scientists as the best judges of the nation’s technological goals and policies. Emigration improved America’s talent pool, and funding from the government and philanthropies facilitated large research teams to run large research projects in large labs. This demand required an educational system to produce scientists and researchers with specialized knowledge of theory, methods, and instrumentation, which prompted modernization of the American university system.
Big Science Leads to the Rise in the National Research Foundation, the Contractor Class, and Military-Industrial Complex
By mid-century, most of the scientific institutions we have today were established and busy playing their respective role in the development of American science and technology. But the expansion of scope and resources that earned post-War research the moniker of Big Science demanded new organizations and operational arms to handle it. By the time President Eisenhower admonished the American people against the rampant growth and spending of the contractor class, the military-industrial complex was already ensconced in federal politics, policies, research mandates, and funding mechanisms. Vannevar Bush explicitly advocated for the creation of the National Research Foundation (NSF), and its mandate to “contract and otherwise support long-range research on military matters.” Less than 20 years later, John McCarthy’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory at Stanford University was awarded a carte blanche Advanced Research Projects Activity (ARPA, Department of Defense) contract by J.C.R. Licklider, which spawned ARPANET, which is now the Internet. This account is particularly germane to the topic as I have framed it, but it is illustrative of the dynamics between the government, the contractors, the military-industrial complex, and big science.
The Internet Leads to a Rise in the World Wide Web, the Post-Modern University, Wikis
The popularization of the Internet that led to the World Wide Web provides a case study in the interplay of technology and institutions. As ARPA contractors increasingly used ARPANET for communications with research partners, they improved local area network (LAN) processes and technology. Civilian researchers began to join their university networks, and Internet access quickly grew through the 1980s. Industry responded to the tech demand by inventing the personal computer, and NSF responded by drastically expanding connectivity at the university level. In order to continue to expand and offer universal access, NSF changed its norm from an “open research and education” Acceptable Use Policy to commercial use and administration. By the mid-90s, the Internet “backbone” was fully privatized, and was quickly adapted for recreational, commercial, and social use.
As other networks joined, the World Wide Web opened the Internet up to global participation, and introduced a twist to the technology-institution narrative: the Web is both a technology and an institution. It is the interactive piece that allows users to create content and network with other users, and which has created new spaces for knowledge production and sharing, such as the online university and the Wiki. This type of bottom-up information exchange is new, and it is changing the way that society views legitimate scholarship, expertise, and credentialing. It is a post-modern university of untamed categories, competing educational regimes, and democratic access to knowledge.
Technological Advancements Inhibited by Scientific Institutions
Institutional Norms Can Discourage Innovation and Novel Approaches
On the other side of the issue is the normative pressure that institutions bear on modes of knowledge and invention. Novel approaches and methods that vary from the norm may be dismissed as illegitimate, or simply overlooked because the stakeholders, investors, and peers within any given institution do not understand them. In this way, the institutions that provide the means for big science research and cutting edge technology paradoxically diminish the possibilities for innovative thinking.
Although counterfactual accounts are difficult to evince, there is some important scholarship in this area, and it is fundamental to the STS approach of science historiography. Drawing on the previous example of the Internet’s evolution into the World Wide Web, it was only the deliberate, thoughtful plan to transition away from the original, traditional, limited, and regulated use of the Internet that allowed the World Wide Web to come into being as an open source technology. It could not have been anticipated 20 years ago how thoroughly it would impact our society’s relationship with technology, or how deeply it would impact our personal lives.
Nor should it have. Noble explores how choosing one technology (numerical control) over another (record playback) can lead to standardization — the ultimate institutional norm — and how the rejection of alternate solutions can lead to a perception that the alternate is flawed or inferior, thus diminishing innovation.
Conclusion
Although it is not possible (and certainly not wise) to limit linkages between specific technologies with specific scientific institutions, it is clear that advances in one promoted the growth and development of the other, and it is safe to say that all of the 20th century’s technologies were made possible by the science institutions that provided an environment amenable to technological innovation — education, communications, cooperation, facilities, funding mechanisms, popular and peer support, patent rights, and dissemination of knowledge.
