ABSTRACT
As the armed forces of Nazi Germany were overrunning Western Europe in June 1940, James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard, was tapped by Vannevar Bush, recently appointed president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW), to assist in the task of mobilizing American science for national defense. The basic relationship between the federal government and universities for conducting wartime research was governed by contracts negotiated according to the principle of no-loss and no-gain. Universities were reimbursed for the direct costs they incurred and also given some allowance for overhead. Universities in general were slow to realize the possibilities inherent in the federal research economy, but this was not the case among the atomic scientists. The newly created National Science Foundation joined a federal research economy of great size and diversity. The dominant characteristic of that economy, although few commentators were ready to acknowledge the fact, was pluralism of supporters.
