INTRODUCTION 



Alan T. Waterman 

 Director, National Science Foundation 



On November 17, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed a 

 letter to Vannevar Bush, director of the wartime Office of Scientific Research 

 and Development, asking his advice as to how the lessons that had been 

 learned from that experience could be applied in the days of peace that lay 

 ahead. With the help and recommendations of four committees of dis- 

 tinguished scientists and other scholars, Dr. Bush set forth in clear and 

 specific terms what he felt the relations of government to science should be 

 and how these should be sustained. His report to the President was published 

 in July 1945, under the imaginative title. Science, the Endless Frontier. The 

 major recommendation was that a "National Research Foundation" should 

 be established by the Congress to serve as a focal point for the support and 

 encouragement of basic research and education in the sciences and for the 

 development of national science policy. Five years later, in May^ 1950, the 

 Congress passed the National Science Foundation Act of 1950, bringing the 

 new foundation into being. 



On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Foundation's establishment, 

 it seems appropriate to turn again to Science, the Endless Frontier and to 

 attempt some assessment of the extent to which the objectives it set forth have 

 been met. A re-reading impresses one with the perspicacity with which this 

 remarkable document anticipated the major needs and problems relating to 

 research and development in the postwar period. Although there have been 

 shifts in emphasis since the report was written 15 years ago, its principles 

 and its clear enunciation of the fundamental responsibility of the Federal 

 Government in the area of research and development are as fresh and sound 

 today as when they were written. 



The original edition of Science, the Endless Frontier has long been out 

 of print and the National Science Foundation is happy to make it available 

 once more — not as an historical document, but as a classic expression of 

 desirable relationships between government and science in the United 

 States. Its usefulness and validity today are all the more remarkable when it 

 is remembered that Dr. Bush and his advisers were of course quite unable 

 to anticipate the specific developments that have most profoundly influenced 

 our time, namely, the Korean war and the cold war, the missile and satellite 

 race, the Soviet technological challenge, and the rapid acceleration of space 

 research. Nor could Dr. Bush have estimated, in the final days of World 

 War II, the full growth and direction of the atomic energy effort, including 



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