The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee Page B

designed, as the
Times
scoffingly put it, not by tweedy “prima-donna” university professors wandering about in search of obscure truths (driven by the “mere desire to satisfy curiosity”), but by a focused SWAT team of researchers sent off to accomplish a concrete mission. Anew model of scientific governance emerged from the project—research driven by specific mandates, timelines, and goals (“frontal attack” science, to use one scientist’s description)—which had produced the remarkable technological boom during the war.
    But Vannevar Bush was not convinced. In a deeply influential report to President Truman entitled
Science the Endless Frontier
, first published in 1945, Bush had laid out a view of postwar research that had turned his own model of wartime research on its head: “Basic research,” Bush wrote, “is performed without thought of practical ends. It results in general knowledge and an understanding of nature and its laws. This general knowledge provides the means of answering a large number of important practical problems, though it may not give a complete specific answer to any one of them. . . .
    “Basic research leads to new knowledge. It provides scientific capital. It creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn. . . . Basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress. In the nineteenth century, Yankee mechanical ingenuity, building largely upon the basic discoveries of European scientists, could greatly advance the technical arts. Now the situation is different. A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade, regardless of its mechanical skill.”
    Directed, targeted research—“programmatic” science—the cause célèbre during the war years, Bush argued, was not a sustainable model for the future of American science. As Bush perceived it, even the widely lauded Manhattan Project epitomized the virtues of basic inquiry. True, the bomb was the product of Yankee “mechanical ingenuity.” But that mechanical ingenuity stood on the shoulders of scientific discoveries about the fundamental nature of the atom and the energy locked inside it—research performed, notably, with no driving mandate to produce anything resembling the atomic bomb. While the bomb might have come to life physically in Los Alamos, intellectually speaking it was the product of prewar physics and chemistry rooted deeply in Europe. The iconic homegrown product of wartime American science was, at least philosophically speaking, an import.
    A lesson Bush had learned from all of this was that goal-directed strategies, so useful in wartime, would be of limited use during periods of peace. “Frontal attacks” were useful on the war front, but postwar science could not be produced by fiat. So Bush had pushed for a radically invertedmodel of scientific development, in which researchers were allowed full autonomy over their explorations and open-ended inquiry was prioritized.
    The plan had a deep and lasting influence in Washington. The National Science Foundation (NSF), founded in 1950, was explicitly created to encourage scientific autonomy, turning in time, as one historian put it, into a veritable “embodiment [of Bush’s] grand design for reconciling government money and scientific independence.” A new culture of research—“long-term, basic scientific research rather than sharply focused quests for treatment and disease prevention”—rapidly proliferated at the NSF and subsequently at the NIH.

    For the Laskerites, this augured a profound conflict. A War on Cancer, they felt, demanded precisely the sort of focus and undiluted commitment that had been achieved so effectively at Los Alamos. World War II had clearly surcharged medical research with new problems and new solutions; it had prompted the development of novel resuscitation techniques,