C HAPTER 12
GUNS, DRUGS, AND EUGENICS
WHI L E N A ZI SCI E NCE WA S BROUGH T TO A ME R IC A A F TE R WORLD War II, so were attendant Nazi restrictions on scientific liberty. βMany of the standards of scientific freedom and exchange of knowledge were suspended by all the belligerents,β noted John Cornwell, author of Hitlerβs Scientists. Since 1940, Americaβs scientists have become faceless members of teams working under the auspices of the military-industrial complex or the corporate world. Addressing the Nazi-connected men in control of Americaβs scientific establishment after the war, Cornwell explained: βThe most dramatic alteration was in the West. The Office of Scientific Research and Development under the government science chief Vannevar Bush commissioned more than 2,000 research programs in the course of World War II. The projects involved industrial research and development units employing tens of thousands of scientists and technicians in companies such as Du Pont and General Electric, as well as major university laboratories like MIT and Caltech. . . . [A] proposal for a barrier between government and military funding and civilian control of the choice and direction of basic research would prove, however, a vain hope.β Such tight inner control over scientific advances was reminiscent of the late-war Nazi SS control over technology in the Third Reich.