1. 1Proposed by Vannevar Bush in his classic report issued at war's end, legislation creating the NSF was vetoed by President Truman in 1947. The key issue, executive control over the organization, delayed the NSF's emergence until 1950. Bush, V. 1960. Science, The Endless Frontier. National Science Foundation. Washington, DC. The early history of the NSF is treated in a number of historical summaries. See, for example, Kevles, D. 1979. The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in America. Vintage Books. New York. pp. 342-366; also Mazuzan, G. 1988. The National Science Foundation: A Brief History. NSF Publication 8816, http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/stis1994/nsf8816/nsf8816.txt.
2. 2Expressions of this logic can be found in Hershberg, J.G. 1993. James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age. Alfred A. Knopf. New York. pp. 407-412; Nash, L.K. An historical approach to the teaching of the history of science. J. Chem. Educ. 28: 145-151; de Milt, C. 1952. The value of the history and philosophy of science in the training of graduate students in chemistry. J. Chem. Educ. 29: 340-344; and Edge, D. 1995. Reinventing the wheel. In Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. S. Jasanoff et al., Eds.: 7-8. Sage Publications. Thousand Oaks, CA.
3. 3The History of Science Society had taken shape in 1924, following by twelve years the formation of what became its journal-Isis. Both were very much a product of their founder, George Sarton, but a strong professional structure was a product of the postwar period. See Thackray, A. & R.K. Merton. 1972. On discipline building: the paradoxes of George Sarton. Isis 63: 473-495; Clagett, M. 1951. Teaching the history of science at the University of Wisconsin. Isis 43: 51.
4. 4Engineering was initially deemed too much an applied science, so research in engineering was not at first supported by the NSF. See Belanger, D.O. 1998. Enabling American Innovation: Engineering and the National Science Foundation. Purdue University Press. West Lafayette, IN.
5. 5Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press. Chicago, IL; Merton, R.K. 1938. Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth England.Bruges. See also Kuhn, T.S. 2000. The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993 [with an autobiographical interview]. University of Chicago Press. Chicago, IL; and Edge, D. Reinventing the wheel. In Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. S. Jasanoff et al., Eds. Sage Publications. Thousand Oaks, CA. pp. 5-11.