Toby A. Appel. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. A nyone who has ever had a federal research grant will want to read this book, and that means all practicing U.S. scientists, since to practice science nowadays is to engage in a never-ending cycle of application, reporting and renewal.
Government grants are a way of life.
It was not always thus. Toby Appel s history of the biology program of the National Science Foundation in its first 30 years is a small chapter in this larger history, but it is an exemplary tale, based on a decade of painstaking research in the agency s huge and rich archives. It is thoughtfully analyzed and straightforwardly presented in a clear, readable prose style leavened by a sly, dry humor. Chapters move chronologically from the debates of the late 1940s over public funding of basic science to the founding of the NSF in 1950, the fashioning of programs and procedures in the early 1950s, the rapid expansion following the launch of Sputnik in 1957, and the struggles of the NSF a pygmy among giants to keep up with the National Institutes of Health. The book concludes with accounts of the big biology projects of the 1960s and the political crises of the late 1960s that resulted in 1975 in a radical overturn of the NSF s procedures, personnel and granting philosophy.