ABSTRACT
The scientific research community of the 1950s and 1960s was the beneficiary of peacetime prosperity and uninterrupted growth in federal funding. Science’s social contract, fueled by the Cold War, was good for America’s economic growth and for science, but it was too good to last. The research community, which had had fewer researchers and research universities, ample job opportunities, little international competition or doubt about U.S. research performance, and entrusted the judgment of scientific merit to expert peers, became, by the late 1970s, bigger and more diffuse. After 20 years of enormous postwar expansion of academia and the creation of corporate and government research laboratories all around the United States, the federal government could no longer meet scientists’ expectations of sustained funding without sustained evidence of benefit to the nation’s security, productivity, and quality of life.
