research to economic stabilization and gnnvth is now almost universally recog- 

 nized. In 1958 the National Science Foundation sponsored a conference on 

 research and development and its impact on the economy. The impact of 

 the conference itself was such that industrial officials who attended confessed 

 afterwards that the conference had convinced them that they should not 

 reduce research and development expenditures in the face of the 1958 re- 

 cession. It is hoped that industry will continue to accord full support to basic 

 research, both in its own laboratories, and, to the extent possible, through 

 extramural support of basic research in the universities. 



Organized labor is also developing an increasing awareness of the relation 

 of research to the health and growth of the economy. In 1959 the AFL-CIO 

 sponsored a conference on "Labor and Science in a Changing World." The 

 conference acknowledged the inevitability of the technological progress and 

 explored ways in which organized labor could meet the challenges and 

 demands of the new technology. 



Medical Research 



Medical research is a point of major emphasis in Science, the Endless Fron- 

 tier. An entire chapter, "The War Against Disease," is devoted to it and 

 it was studied in great detail by one of the four advisory committees. Upper- 

 most in the minds of Dr. Bush and his consultants were the impressive ac- 

 complishments of the military medical research and development effort and 

 the absence of a specific agency for their continued support following the 

 close of the war. Here again the emphasis was on basic studies. The Report 

 observes : 



It is wholly probable that progress in the treatment of cardiovascular disease, renal 

 disease, cancer, and similar refractory diseases will be made as the result of funda- 

 mental discoveries in subjects unrelated to those diseases and perhaps entirely un- 

 expected by the investigator. Further progress requires that the entire front of medicine 

 and the underlying sciences of chemistry, physics, anatomy, biochemistry, physiology, 

 pharmacolog>', bacteriology, pathology, parasitology, etc, be broadly developed. 



Both Dr. Bush and his Medical Advisory Committee recommended action 

 on ihe part of the Federal Government to initiate a support program for basic 

 medical research in the medical schools and in the universities through grants 

 for research and through fellowships. Dr. Bush recommended that the pro- 

 posed program be administered by a "Division of Medical Research" of the 

 "National Research Foundation"; the committee recommended that a second 

 organization be established, to be called the National Foundation for Medical 

 Research. Actually, both recommendations have been met by subsequent 

 events, which resulted in both a division within the National Science Foun- 

 dation that supports basic medical science (Division of Biological and Medical 

 Sciences) and in a completely independent organization, the National In- 

 stitutes of Health, which has far surpassed in its support programs anything 

 that the Committee envisioned in the recommended Medical Research 

 Foundation. 



The two sets of recommendations did not differ greatly as to the amount of 

 support that should be established at the initiation of the program — Bush 



xi 



