SUPPORT FROM PRIVATE PHILANTHROPY 



of personal prestige. The founders of the Royal Society were 

 for the most part gentlemen of independent means more in- 

 terested in the fun of the thing than in practical application or 

 personal profit. Those without private means might find a place 

 in a university or the church, which allowed time for private 

 investigation, hut did not require a regular flow of publications 

 as a requisite for promotion. Thus Stephen I Iales, the dis- 

 coverer of the blood pressure, was a Church of England curate, 

 and everybody knows that the founder of genetics was an ob- 

 scure Austrian monk. 



As will be shown later, the great advances of the nineteenth 

 century upon which so much twentieth century application is 

 based came for the most part from university professors. Basic 

 research had in a sense become institutionalized, but the uni- 

 versities of the day still held consciously aloof from the practical 

 everyday world, and their professors were free to follow wher- 

 ever their fancy led them. The money they needed was not 

 much greater than that provided for teachers in the arts and 

 humanities, and it came in the same way from ancient endow- 

 ments and block appropriations from government. There ap- 

 pears to have been little tendency to link such support closely 

 to practical applications, and academic freedom to choose indi- 

 vidual lines of study was widely respected. 



The point in all this is that by the time private philan- 

 thropy developed an interest in basic research because of its 

 probable contribution to practical welfare, basic research in the 

 natural sciences was well established as an independent digni- 

 fied pursuit with its own well-recognized rights and methods. 

 Furthermore, it had built up a large backlog of fundamental 

 knowledge which could be turned almost at once into the 

 practical applications so much sought after by the philan- 

 thropists. Large amounts of money could be absorbed by the 

 necessary applied researches with a modest amount left over to 



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