Science has always been political

Abstract

This month marks the 75th anniversary of Vannevar Bush's paper, “Science—The Endless Frontier.” The report set out the rationale and structure of a system to fund science in the United States; it is the Magna Carta of American science. Science published a summary of Bush's paper on the same day it was submitted to President Harry Truman, and Bush's close relationship with the magazine is evident by the number of times he wrote and was quoted in Science during the 1940s.