1. There is a large literature that details the origins and effects of Weaver's program. The Rockefeller Foundation's own perspective has been given in WarrenWeaver,Scene of Change (New York: Scribners, 1970), and Raymond D. Fosdick,The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation (New York: Harper, 1952). Analyses of the Foundation's policies have been provided by scholars: On the role of technology transfer from the physical sciences to biology, see Pnina Abir-Am, “The Discourse of Physical Power and Biological Knowledge in the 1930s: A Reappraisal of the Rockefeller Foundation's ‘Policy’ in Molecular Biology,”Soc. Stud. Sci., 12 (1982), 341–382; E. J. Yoxen, “Scepticism about the Centrality of Technology Transfer in the Rockefeller Foundation Programme in Molecular Biology,”Soc. Stud. Sci., 14 (1984), 248–252; Lily Kay, “The Tiselius Electrophoresis Apparatus and the Life Sciences 1930–1945,”Hist. Phil. Life Sci., 10 (1988), 51–72. On the relationship of the Natural Sciences program to the development of the field of molecular biology, see Abir-Am, “Discourse;” Robert Olby,The Path to the Double Helix (London: Macmillan, 1974); John A. Fuerst, “The Definition of Molecular Biology and the Definition of Policy: The Role of the Rockefeller Foundation's Policy for Molecular Biology,”Soc. Stud. Sci., 14 (1984), 225–237; Ditta Bartels, “The Rockefeller Foundation's Funding Policy for Molecular Biology: Success or Failure?” ibid., pp. 238–243; Pnina Abir-Am, “Beyond Deterministic Sociology and Apologetic History: Reassessing the Impact of Research Policy upon New Scientific Disciplines (Reply to Fuerst, Bartels, Olby, and Yoxen),” ibid., pp. 252–263. On the philosophical bases of the Foundation's program, see John A. Fuerst, “The Role of Reductionism in the Development of Molecular Biology: Peripheral or Central?”Soc. Stud. Sci., 12 (1982), 241–278; E. J. Yoxen, “Giving Life a New Meaning,” inScientific Establishments and Hierarchies, Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, vol. VI, ed. N. Elias, H. Martins, and R. Whitley (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1982), pp. 123–143. On the style of research patronage developed within the Foundation, see Robert Kohler, “The Management of Science: The Experience of Warren Weaver and the Rockefeller Foundation Programme in Molecular Biology,”Minerva, 14 (1976), 279–306; idem,Partners in Science: Foundations and Natural Scientists 1900–1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
2. When the Foundation was reorganized in 1928, it had four separate division to support different types of research — natural sciences, medical sciences, social sciences, and humanities — each with its own division head and staff. There was also an operating division for international health, which carried out public health projects around the world.
3. The term “mixed marriage” appears in a Natural Sciences division review of the Utrecht project in 1949, Rockefeller Foundation Archives (hereafter cited as RFA), Arch. 2, Series 650D, Subseries 1957, Rockefeller Archive Center, New York, N.Y.
4. “Mitogenetic radiation” is the term that was applied to the release of a portion of the chemical energy produced in metabolism as ultraviolet light in dividing cells. This phenomenon was reported by Alexander Gurwitch in 1923. The actual occurrence of such radiation was the object of considerable controversy in the 1920s and 1930s. Though some scientists strongly believed in its existence, a large number of investigations, some of them employing spectroscopic analysis of a variety of dividing cells, could produce no firm evidence in support of mitogenetic radiation. The idea was abandoned by the end of the 1930s. See AlexanderKohn,False Prophets (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 22–26.
5. Hollaender, a physical chemist educated at the University of Wisconsin, had just completed a National Research Council fellowship during which he had studied the relationship between radiant energy and biological systems. He was awarded a S1500 stipend by the Foundation in February 1934 to carry out this project using the library resources of the Rockefeller Institute, the New York Academy of Medicine, and Columbia University. When the bibliography was completed seven months later, it contained more than three thousand entries; it was felt to be so useful that the Foundation made copies of it available to interested scientists in the United States and Europe.