For the past 80 years, the pace of technological development has been set by researchers working closely with their governments. This system has become so ubiquitous as to be taken for granted in the modern day. Only in recent years—as political upheavals and sluggish economic growth coincide with record cuts to science funding across much of the West—have we been forced to consider a world in which governments cannot or will not uphold the financial burden of supporting science, the engine of the global economy.
Luckily, we are not left guessing as to what such a world might look like. This summer, with support from the Murray Speight Research Fund, I looked back in time to the interwar period, 1918-1941, a time in which the United States government gave hardly a penny to science, and private foundations (think Carnegies and Rockefellers) largely footed the bill. I carried out this research at the archives of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where I will begin my PhD in astrophysics in fall 2027. For now, though, this research will form the basis of my MPhil thesis in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology.
Caltech grew immensely during the interwar period, catapulting it from an obscure vocational school in the outskirts of Los Angeles (called the Throop College of Technology until 1920) into national acclaim as a formidable research center in the fundamental sciences. I am interested in how scientists pitched their projects to funding bodies, what personal and scientific qualities were most highly prized, and what were the priorities of funding bodies in deciding who to support. I am also interested in the reasons why this philanthropy-funded system existed when it did, i.e., why it did not fall into place before World War I or persist after the start of World War II.
I found that the system for allocating philanthropic funds, particularly from established foundations, centered around personal relationships between scientists and grant administrators. Some individuals cycled between these positions in a kind of “revolving door” similar to politicians passing between public and private sectors. In this sense, the success of an institution like Caltech was highly dependent on its promoters, most notably the astronomer George Ellery Hale and the physicist Robert Millikan, whose personalities and connections opened doors to high places and deep pockets.
Left: Architectural drawing of Palomar Observatory, with the 200-inch Hale Telescope inside. From a series of architectural drawings by Russell Porter. Palomar was funded by a $6 million grant (~$100m today) given in 1928 by the Rockefeller Foundation after years of petitioning by Hale. Largely due to the onset of the Great Depression and the Second World War, however, it did not see first light until 1949, long after Hale’s death. Credit: Caltech Archives.
Right: George Ellery Hale, c. 1913. Credit: The World's Work: A History of Our Time, Volume XXV.
Success also relied on demonstrating to potential donors not just that exciting work was happening at a given university, but that its institutions were organized and run in a familiar and efficient way. Caltech, with its focus on maintaining a small student body, strong research programme, horizontal leadership structure, and streamlined bureaucracy, was well-positioned to appeal to the business-oriented mindset of its core donors. Interestingly—and contrary to my initial inituition—donors often did not care as much about the immediate humanitarian, societal, or industrial benefits of the research they agreed to fund, but rather its fundamental scientific importance and the confidence they had in the people who would carry it out.
I also discovered that there were, in fact, attempts to establish government-run national research funding schemes before and during the interwar period. The most promising of these was the 1916 Newlands Bill, which would have created research institutes in each state with annual budgets of $15,000 (~$20 million total today), paid by the national government. It ultimately collapsed, however, after immense controversy erupted between scientists like Hale and Millikan, who championed fundamental scientific research (and proposed a peer-review system strikingly similar to that currently employed by the National Science Foundation) and the representatives of land-grant colleges, who were partial to the “applied,” typically agricultural, sciences.
There was a deeper tension, however, which held back any attempt to establish a federal funding scheme for science in the interwar period. Prominent scientists like Millikan and Hale rightly suspected that national funding bodies could give governments undue influence over research in the sciences. Millikan himself, in the twilight years of his life, wrote in 1945: “Neither the Kilgore nor the Magnusson bill [which eventually combined into the National Science Foundation Act of 1950] as drawn can possibly keep the distribution of funds out of politics and hence involve the catastrophic danger of the ultimate control of education by the party in power. I could not, therefore, conscientiously support either of them.”
This letter was written to Vannevar Bush, widely considered the founding father of the large, government-appropriated science funding bodies, like the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, that we know today. Bush himself was the president of the Carnegie Institution, with deep links to private foundations; the vanguard of the old system was to be the architect of the new. At the same time, change was in the air; World War II had demonstrated to the US government that science was something that was too important—to the economy, to the military, and to its new global struggle against the Soviet Union—to keep outside of its oversight.
We, of course, live in the world that rejected Millikan’s ominous prophecy, none the least because of the efforts of Bush, who believed that the potential risks of soliciting the government for science funding must be outweighed by the benefits. Looking at the pace of technological development and the unprecedented economic prosperity that we have enjoyed over the past 80 years, perhaps he was right. Only in recent years, however, have we come to heed the warnings of our scientific forebears, as the fault lines of federal science infrastructure the world over begin to shift, threatening the very existence of a system which has driven global innovation for almost a century.
Time will tell if the US will return to a science funding system driven by private, rather than public, investment. The recent July 2026 report from the Office of Science and Technology Policy, “Science: a New Golden Age”—which mirrors, in its title, its structure, and even its font, Vannevar Bush’s landmark 1945 report “Science: the Endless Frontier”—certainly leans in that direction, albeit with a distinct focus on corporate investment. As a discipline built on change and discovery, it is only natural that the institutions surrounding science should change as paradigms shift. It is still, however, the task of every scientist, lawmaker, and constituent to ensure that science continues to uplift and serve the interests of a common humanity, a living monument to our innate curiosity and our drive to learn more about the world around us.