Interdisciplinary Research Centers

Philanthropy, Industry, Military

Worries that the academic disciplines would present artificial barriers to research date back to at least the turn of the 20th century. In the United States, three organizational models emerged as solutions to this problem, all of which continue to inflect policy for nanotechnology.

The first was the corporate research laboratory, a model borrowed from the German chemical and electrical industries. Corporate labs at firms like General Electric and Westinghouse grew out of older workshops staffed by skilled artisans. However, by the early 20th century, high-tech firms began recruiting Ph.D.s in chemistry, physics, and other academic disciplines to conduct both basic and applied research. During the Cold War, some corporate research organizations (e.g., Bell Laboratories or IBM Research) grew very large and very focused on basic research. After the Cold War, this style of corporate research largely collapsed; policy makers at the National Nanotechnology Initiative have remarked that they see the current crop of interdisciplinary academic research centers as a way to fill the gap left when Bell Labs disappeared and IBM Research downsized.

The second model was the academic institute funded by a philanthropic foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation, in particular, specialized in building campus institutes in the interwar period, especially in basic research areas tied to biomedicine. Indeed, Rockefeller was so successful that some of the interdisciplinary fields it sponsored grew into their own disciplines, such as molecular biology. The ability of foundations to directly fund institutes waned during the Depression, and their role was largely taken over by the government during and after World War II. However, foundations remained extraordinarily influential in setting American and European science policy during the Cold War, not least because many foundation grant officers moved into government posts. Foundation influence declined during the 1960s, but may be making a comeback. In nanotechnology, nonprofits such as the Kavli Foundation currently operate on a model not much different from the prewar Rockefeller Foundation.

Supported by a National Science Foundation grant, a team simulated the smallest and strongest carbon nanotubes.

The third model is the military crash program of World War II, such as the efforts to develop radar, the proximity fuse, penicillin, and most famously, the atomic bomb. In these projects, scientists and engineers from many disciplines came together in what Peter Galison has called “trading zones,” where they learned just enough of each other's conceptual and practical “languages” to accomplish concrete tasks. After the war, the Manhattan Project, in particular, was seen both as having been crucial to victory and as having been largely the work of physicists (because the nonphysics parts of the project were still classified). Thus, policy makers began to see physicist-directed, mission-oriented, interdisciplinary programs as an integral part of national security.

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