Science and the Growth of the American Republic

Abstract

Just a few years ago, it was estimated that 90 percent of all the scientists and engineers who had ever lived were still alive; and that more than half of them were resident in the United States. These numbers show the status of America as a major scientific nation, and the reason why this is a fact of critical importance for the historical analyst in 1976 is that only 40 years ago America could probably still be classed as an “undeveloped” (or “developing”) country on the highest scale of the international scientific community. Before addressing myself to the causes of this change and its consequences for American political and social thought and action, for the American conscience and for America's public image and self-image, let me indicate the kind of evidence that supports my assertion that America might be considered “underdeveloped” with respect to the sciences, prior to 1935. First of all, there was an almost wholly one-way direction of movement of graduate and postdoctoral students: eastward over the Atlantic to the great European centers of scientific teaching and research. Although there were some fields in which Americans had been making outstanding contributions, such as experimental and theoretical genetics, by and large the great overarching theories that either introduced order into one of the sciences, or brought diverse branches of science into an unexpected relationship, or revolutionized much of science, were produced by Europeans: Rutherford, the Curies, Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac. In 1963, in an address on the occasion of the centenary celebrations of our National Academy of Sciences, John F. Kennedy observed that of the 670 members of the Academy, 163 (or one out of every four) had been born in foreign lands—a figure that differed in order of magnitude from the condition in any other country, and that showed the degree to which the high estate that American science had gained was owing to the infusion of scientists from abroad.