Sputnik I
The announcement that the Tevatron particle accelerator will be closed by the Department of Energy (DOE) in September of this year, prompted the following:
At the close of WWII, when American science had produced the first atomic weapon, it seemed as if we had an insurmountable and unchallenged lead in nuclear science and technology. But that lead quickly faded into an armaments race, once the Soviets developed their own atomic device as the Cold War began in earnest. Two other prominent developments in America at that time included the dawn of nuclear energy, developed under the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and basic science research into the structure of the atom, carried out largely within our research universities. Some of the latter had already begun when Robert Oppenheimer took a position at Berkeley and began to acquire scientific visibility in nuclear physics. Until that time, nuclear physics was an almost exclusively European enterprise. But after the war, nuclear physics rapidly acquired a new identity: Made in America. Some universities suddenly emerged as major science research institutions through the acquisition of a linear accelerator, like that developed at Stanford University in 1962. Within the American research university, the dominance of nuclear physics in the early days after the war, it the most visible scientific discipline on the American campus: in the 1950s it was common to judge the quality of an entire research university by knowing where its Physics department was nationally ranked. Though national laboratories continued to develop nuclear technology, largely expressed through improvements in military hardware, research university nuclear physics pursued the structure of the atom and a field known as “particle physics” emerged as physicists bombarded atoms with increasingly higher energy particles and watched for the appearance of subatomic particles released by the atomic scale collisions. It still challenges the imagination to realize that a single atom with its electrons flowing in orbit is mostly a vast empty space and once that is grasped, then try to understand that, if this is true, why don’t we fall through the floor rather than being supported by it? The reason that we don’t fall through the floor is the same reason that splitting the atom unleashes enormous energy.
In the era of the physicist, it seemed like a permanent pecking order had been established in American research universities that would go on in perpetuity, with nuclear physics permanently installed as the head honcho: Federal funding guaranteed it. Of course, along the way, many nuclear physicists evolved into astrophysicists, but that is a different story. In a fairly dramatic way, the pecking order of science in America, with physics at the top, began to change soon after the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957 (a month later the Russians launched Sputnik II). This Russian achievement created such a shock during the Eisenhower administration such that there was a kind of mass hysteria to think that the Russians could beat us at anything–but they did. Physicist Edward Teller, the patron saint of the hydrogen bomb, said, in response to Sputnik, that the United States had lost “a battle more important and greater than Pearl Harbor“ (you can recognize Teller’s attitude as that of someone with a personal investment in continuing with the arms race). In response to Sputnik, Eisenhower did what every self-respecting President does in a pinch–he turned to a committee charged with making recommendations and assessments on what to do. One of the major reports to come out of that period was the Seaborg report, which substantiated what many Americans had concluded already, that America had fallen behind the Russians in science and math education and a national consensus developed that not enough Americans had an opportunity to get their education at a major research university. The Seaborg report recommended a doubling of research universities in America. At the time of Sputnik, based on the percentage of Ph.Ds generated in the prewar days (the basic university structure did not change significantly from the 1930s until Sputnik arrived), there were only sixteen research universities, most of which were in the Midwest or East Coast, with three on the West Coast; this “sweet sixteen” included (not ranked in order; * are public/state universities) (1) University of Minnesota*; 2) Stanford; 3) University of Chicago; 4) Columbia University; 5) University of Illinois*; 6) University of Michigan*; 7) University of California (Berkeley)*; 
Harvard; 9) Penn; 10) Princeton; 11) Cornell; 12) Johns Hopkins; 13) Yale; 14) MIT; 15) California Institute technology; 16) University of Wisconsin*. Collectively, these institutions generated the majority of doctorates (PhDs) in the 1930s.
Our national response to Sputnik was probably the single most intelligent decision we made as a nation during the entire fifty years of the Cold War: we made a conscious decision to embellish research universities and establish new ones such that qualified students could experience a more sophisticated and challenging education and research environment, as we made it easier, through student loans, scholarships and fellowships, to get a college education and enroll in graduate school. Thus, we launched the Golden Age of the American Research University which lasted roughly from 1958 to 1968. As a result of this energetic new enterprise, we hired large numbers of faculty and began to develop more sophisticated funding agencies. Infrastructure support, such as improved laboratory space, training grants and support for scientific meetings all took their modern form during those days of accelerated support. Federal funding for research reached its highest % of GNP (0.25% in 1968) during that era. Today, we have a very large number of research universities. A recent classification system by Carnegie defines a research university as one which has granted at least 50 doctorates in fifteen different disciplines each year. Yours is very likely among them. When Lyndon Johnson was President, he made sure, in the post-Sputnik era, that the Federal funding agencies funded much more broadly than they did initially and his watchdog insistence helped to diffuse Federal research dollars more broadly than that observed initially. Thus, Federal funding has penetrated its way into most higher education institutions and of course, not just through NIH/NSF funding.
Now, you might have thought that accelerated funding for research, induced by the shock of Sputnik, would primarily benefit the mathematicians and physicists, since deficiencies in these areas were supposedly where the problem was. However, the end result of Sputnik was not to reinforce physics and math, though some of that took place, but the real impact was to shift the emphasis of scientific research away from physics into the biological sciences. The largest recipient of Federal research dollars increasingly went to the National Institutes of Health, not the National Science Foundation (which assumed more responsibility for funding the physical sciences, but was delayed in its creation due to an argument between Vannevar Bush and the Truman administration). There were two reasons for this seeming paradox: first and foremost was Mary Lasker, in honor of whom the Lasker prize is given each year–it is America’s most prestigious scientific award. Lasker (a graduate of the University of Wisconsin) was instrumental in convincing congress to fund health-related research and elected officials realized that they could finally return to their districts and tell their constituents that something was now being done about cancer and heart and lung disease. Legislators discovered that they could get re-elected that way. People were far more interested in those issues than hearing whether or not we were winning the Cold War. These two forces–Mary Lasker and re-electability based on emphasizing health-related research–merged to create institutional funding that allowed the biological sciences to begin dominating institutional research, first in molecular biology and later in neuroscience. Today, if you want to rank a university on the basis of its scientific reputation, you are far more likely to pick an area of biological or medical sciences rather than physics.
Though things drifted away from physics as the epicenter of the American research university, American physicists still dominated the fields of astrophysics and particle physics and the opening of the Tevatron accelerator in Illinois (as part of the Fermilab) in 1983, ushered in a three-decade period of creative particle physics, progress and continued American dominance of the field. But the glow of American physics was shattered when Congress ceased to fund the supercollider that was then under construction in Texas in the early 1990s. That failure created a huge wave of unemployment among particle physicists in America, many of whom went to Wall Street and helped design the equations and mathematical models for investment houses that helped bring down the economy and usher in our current deep recession. The lack of a new generation of particle accelerators in America, allowed the Europeans to proceed with their plans for one, without U.S. competition; they constructed the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which opened in 2010. If there exists a Higgs Boson, the particle that is hypothesized to give atomic particles much of their mass, then it will likely be discovered at the CERN accelerator, with Americans serving as participants, advisers and colleagues rather than leaders in the effort. That is why it is with a note of sadness that I personally view the Department of Energy’s decision to close the Tevatron accelerator: accompanying that announcement is the unannounced end of American exceptionalism in particle physics.
America still rules the biological sciences, but the eight years of Bush’s suppression of science and its harsh funding policies, particularly with regard to stem cell research, put American biological sciences on the same trajectory that American particle physics has undergone in the last few decades. Bush’s policies invited other countries to accelerate their own research activities and today we are no longer keeping the most talented scientists that come from other countries to study and obtain their PhD in the United States. I have seen our offers to them go unheeded as they go to South Korea, Europe or back to China. The tide of science has shifted, primarily because Americans are too naive to understand the importance of science in an industrialized society. It’s as if we have retreated back to the 1930s–like de javu all over again! This recession, when it’s over, may be the single most devastating event to American science in its all too brief history.
RFM
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