Quote from Vannevar Bush's 1945 Report to Harry S. Truman on Basic Research.

[NNadir]

My lighter bed time reading these past few weeks has been Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies, A Biography of Cancer.

A quote in it from Vannevar Bush, one of the great minds of the 20th century struck me. It was written just after World War II, when American enthusiasm for science was at a peak, owing to the Manhattan Project, which in the minds of the people of that time, ended World War II and saved many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of American and Japanese lives that would have been lost in an attempt to invade the Japanese Home Islands.

Whether you agree with this interpretation as history, the subject of much controversy, this was the prevailing popular view in 1945.

Mukherjee quotes a 1945 New York Times Editorial praising the triumph of Hiroshima and Nakasaki.

"University Professors who are opposed to organizing, planning and directing research after the manner of industrial laboratories...have something to think about now. An important piece of research was conducted on behalf of the Army in precisely the means adopted in industrial laboratories. End result: an invention was given to the world in three years which would have perhaps half-a-century to develop if we had to rely on prima donna research scientists who work alone...[driven] by the mere desire to satisfy curiosity..."

Bush responded in his report to President Harry Truman:

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..."

Presidents and both political parties in the latter half of the 20th century largely endorsed this view, building the great national laboratories and producing some of the best science ever seen. The computers on which we write and read, our communication devices, our general health, all derive from basic research.

We may contrast this with the troglodyte in the White House, who celebrates ignorance, and his enablers in the United States Senate, who are destroying the future.

As for The Emperor of All Maladies...

It's an interesting work, tracing the history of human understanding of cancer, from the earliest understanding of the disease to modern times. An interesting point is that at the time that it was beginning to be recognized, cancer was less important for overall human health since, in general, people didn't live long enough to actually get it - a major cause of cancer is not dying young from something else.

(I do understand, regrettably children do get cancer, something I saw when regularly visiting Children's Hospital in Philadelphia for treatments for my son for something far more trivial than cancer and in correspondence with an online friend who lost a beloved grandniece to the disease. However, before the 20th century, children and adults were more likely to die from infections now addressed by antibiotics or diseases for which vaccines have now been developed, polio, smallpox, etc. The triumph of ignorance is pushing back against this success.)

Well worth a read, Mukherjee's book.

[lastlib]

1. Wish I had time to read it--sounds fascinating!

But it's more than just tRump. Ignorance is a fundamental repuglikan policy. Reagan cancelled the Superconducting Supercollider and took the country off the path to adopting the metric system. Dubya killed embryonic stem-cell research. tRump, the "stable genius" (Show us the Mensa card!) who knows so much about "nuclear",--well, res ipsa loquitor. They cut education, they cut funding for research, they cut the space programs that inspire greater drive to learn. They try to force-feed children their "creation science" in the name of their religious dogma, and they deny climate change. And their minions just go along, knowing that educated people are able to think independently rather than just swallow what they're fed--thus harder to control, thus, a greater threat to their brand of tyranny.

[Jim__]

3. Actually Clinton reluctantly signed the bill cancelling the SSC.

This is from wikipedia:

During the design and the first construction stage, a heated debate ensued about the high cost of the project. In 1987, Congress was told the project could be completed for $4.4 billion, and it gained the enthusiastic support of Speaker Jim Wright of nearby Fort Worth, Texas.[3][10] A recurring argument was the contrast with NASA's contribution to the International Space Station (ISS), a similar dollar amount.[3] Critics of the project (Congressmen representing other US states and scientists working in non-SSC fields who felt the money would be better spent on their own fields)[3] argued that the US could not afford both of them. Early in 1993 a group supported by funds from project contractors organized a public relations campaign to lobby Congress directly, but in June, the non-profit Project on Government Oversight released a draft audit report by the Department of Energy's Inspector General heavily criticizing the Super Collider for its high costs and poor management by officials in charge of it.[11][12]


Congress officially cancelled the project October 21, 1993 after $2 billion had been spent.[13] Many factors contributed to the cancellation:[3] rising cost estimates (to $12bn);[14] poor management by physicists and Department of Energy officials; the end of the need to prove the supremacy of American science with the collapse of the Soviet Union; belief that many smaller scientific experiments of equal merit could be funded for the same cost; Congress's desire to generally reduce spending (the USA was running a $255bn budget deficit); the reluctance of Texas Governor Ann Richards;[15] and President Bill Clinton's initial lack of support for a project begun during the administrations of Richards's predecessor, Bill Clements, and Clinton's predecessors, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.[16] The project's cancellation was also eased by opposition from within the scientific community. Prominent condensed matter physicists, such as Philip W. Anderson and Nicolaas Bloembergen, testified before Congress opposing the project. They argued that, although the SSC would certainly conduct high-quality research, it was not the only way to acquire new fundamental knowledge, as some of its supporters claimed, and so was unreasonably expensive. Scientific critics of the SSC pointed out that basic research in other areas, such as condensed matter physics and materials science, was underfunded compared to high energy physics, despite the fact that those fields were more likely to produce applications with technological and economic benefits.[17] However, in 1993, Clinton tried to prevent the cancellation by asking Congress to continue "to support this important and challenging effort" through completion because "abandoning the SSC at this point would signal that the United States is compromising its position of leadership in basic science".[18]

Following Rep. Jim Slattery's successful orchestration in the House,[13] President Clinton signed the bill which finally cancelled the project on October 1, 1993, stating regret at the "serious loss" for science.[19]

[NNadir]

5. I agree that the Republican Party is as anti-science as there...

...is in this country, but we should not exclude our end of the political spectrum entirely from poor thinking and appeals to ignorance.

We have a lot of "antis" on our end. Antivaxxers are not unknown on the left. We also have a large contingent of anti-GMO types. The worst in my personal view, given the severity of climate change and the experimental results of the weak efforts to address it, is anti-nukism, the irrational insistence that nuclear energy is "too dangerous" without asking "compared to what?"

I certainly wish that I could lay blame for all appeals to ignorance solely at the feet of Repukes, but I can't.

[friendly_iconoclast]

6. I certainly wish that I could disagree w/ your assessment here- but I can't, sadly...

[eppur_se_muova]

2. One of these days -- when I have time --- ;)

I'm going to have to take the trouble to look up a biography of V. Bush. He also had some interesting things to say about the future of work in the age of computers, as excerpted in Alan Turing: The Enigma. (People wearing cameras on their foreheads to automatically store documents digitally ? What poppycock ! )

Ditto the rec on the Mukherjee book; I'll have to search for a Web site to see if he's offering addenda -- continuing progress in this field is amazing.

[NNadir]

4. I certainly agree on Vannevar Bush. I see...

...him peripherally mentioned in so many places when I read about those amazing times, in which the public intellectual was a major cultural player in American life.

Yet I don't know the details.

I had the privilege of spending a few hours with another giant of that type from that era, Freeman Dyson, and it was simply unforgettable.

Of course, today our culture is dominated by the public ignoramus, which is depressing, which makes it all the more important to recall better times..

I live in the world of drug development, and stuff about cancer treatment technologies are a part of my day job, but I was unaware of the history, so the current reading, while written for the lay reader is definitely fascinating.

[eppur_se_muova]

7. The "public ignoramus" -- what a perfectly apt expression !

NNadir, you have outdone yourself.

[NNadir]

8. Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it...

I've ordered a quasi-biography of V. Bush.

It looks like I'll have to scan it.



Straight-thinking : Vannevar Bush and the culture of American engineering / Larry Owens.
AuthorOwens, Larry [Browse] FormatBook LanguageEnglish Published/​Created1987. Descriptionxiii, 345 leaves : ill. ; 29 cm.

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ReCAP PRIN 685 1987.6921 Browse related items  Available Request
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https://catalog.princeton.edu/catalog/375133

I certainly want my son to get who this guy was, and what his culture was. It was a golden age of American Engineering. We are so far away from that time...so far away...

My son got his lowest grade in his university career, B+, which I consider an F, in "Engineering Ethics." He needs some straightening out.

Of course he never reads the books I give him; I have better luck with papers.

I see these young engineers, and it gives me hope. My sons spent those two hours with me in Freeman Dyson's office, and the hope of returning to something like those times lies with them.

To get the best of the past, we have to remember it, just as it is that to get the worst of the past we have to forget it.

[NNadir]

11. So I scanned a "biography" that is not a "biography" of Vannevar Bush...

...at Princeton, which turns out to be the doctoral thesis of this guy: Professor Larry Owens

Straight-thinking : Vannevar Bush and the culture of American engineering.

It's pretty cute, from 1987, and has all these hand drawn mathematical symbols drawn it. I'm old enough to remember when one had to draw by hand, something at which I was never actually great.

Owens seems like a pretty good writer, and my initial scan of the parts I've read give interesting insights into the history of engineering in the United States and MIT in particular. (My youngest son is already thinking about graduate school, and MIT is at the top of his list. I do hope I can convince him to read this book; but it's a long shot.)

Here's some text that caught my eye:

During his physics oral, presided over by Professor Cross, Bush was asked the question "What is the nature of White Light'?" He proceeded to deliver a lecture on the classical theory of light, concluding "'Now gentlemen, that is the classic theory. I'll now proceed with an outline of the present quantum theory.' And somebody said, 'Well I guess that's enough....'"

Bush did suffer a momentary loss of confidence during his major examination on electrical engineering. Jackson opened up with a question on the theory of long lines, "And 1..flubbed it! I couldn't think. I was completely off my trolley. Jackson said, “Now wait a minute here. I know perfectly well that you know all about that subject.” Then he paused for a minute and he said, "Look, you go take a walk around the block for an hour and we'll reconvene then. I did exactly that and when l came back my head was clear and I went through the examination all right."44

This was in 1915.

Drop me a line if you're interested in it and I'll send it over.

[eppur_se_muova]

9. An interesting follow-up to "Emperor": "Breakthrough"

THE BREAKTHROUGH
Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer
By Charles Graeber

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/books/review/breakthrough-charles-graeber.html

This author gave an interview on Open Mind that was pretty much the first I had heard of this.
https://www.thirteen.org/openmind/science/the-race-to-cure-cancer/6132/

[NNadir]

10. Immunotherapy, Car-T cell based therapy and targeting...

...gene insertion, SiRNA, macroRNA, and other molecular biology technologies are exploding right now.

Following this stuff is my day job. It's difficult to keep on top of it all, but fascinating.

Like all highly advanced technologies, it has ethical and access implications.

I should post on the sorts of things from time to time, but I like to expand my thinking by doing something other than what I do for work.

It does seem to me that some of our environmental sacred cows will end up with more implications than cancer for human survival.