Vannevar Bush was at the forefront of American research policy during World War II, but he suffered a steep fall after the war, and by 1948 had left government service altogether. What motivated such a significant loss of influence? Drawing on previously unexamined sources, this article traces the causes of Bush’s decline in authority to his loss of powerful allies, particularly with the death of Franklin Roosevelt and the retirement of Henry Stimson; to his long-standing feuds with military leaders; and to several political missteps on Bush’s part that alienated figures in Congress and elsewhere. Continued examples of personal conflict in the postwar period not only impacted Bush’s career, but also shaped the structure of the resulting institutions that emerged to fund Cold War–era science. Rather than an abrupt change occurring immediately after the war, the postwar transition to public institutions was both gradual and influenced by the personal networks that preceded it. Bush’s quiet departure from government was tied to the emergence of military dominance in American research, largely at the expense of civilian scientific leaders. Such a shift in control of research policy had a dramatic effect on resulting postwar initiatives, closely connecting scientific advancements to national security.

In 1940, Linus Pauling proposed his template theory of antibody formation, one of many such theories that rejected Paul Ehrlich’s selective theory of preformed “receptors” (antibodies), assuming instead a direct molding of antibody shapes onto that of the antigen. Pauling believed that protein shapes—independently of amino acid sequences—determined antibody specificity and biological specificity in general. His theory was informed by his pioneering work on protein structure, and it was inspired by the intuitive “rule of parsimony” and simplicity. In 1942, Pauling published his alleged success in producing specific artificial antibodies through experiments based on his 1940 theory. However, his experiments could not be reproduced by prominent immunochemists at the time, and, later, it became generally accepted that antibody specificity was not generated according to Pauling’s and others’ “instruction” template theories. A citation analysis shows that Pauling’s papers on antibody generation continue to be cited as, among other things, pioneering studies of a chemical technology called “molecular imprinting.” The examples of Pauling and other protein chemists are used in this paper to demonstrate that scientific belief, philosophical concepts, and subjective theory preferences facilitated the occurrence of irreproducibility in immunochemistry and beyond. The article points to long-term consequences for the scientific community if irreproducible results are not acknowledged. It concludes by arguing that despite the risks, e.g., for the occurrence and perpetuation of irreproducible results that they entail, subjectivity and a commitment to scientific convictions have often been pre-requisites for the generation, and holding on to, scientific innovation in the face of doubt and rejection from the scientific community.

Music and seismology merged in the daily work of the Caltech professor Hugo Benioff, who united the avant-garde technology of the 1920s with a nineteenth-century Helmholtzian aesthetic, cultural, and scientific understanding of music. The transducer facilitated this merger, mediating between science and music and allowing for new ways of listening to waves outside the audible range. Benioff had the capacity to listen —“listening” understood here not as passive perception, but as an active search to distinguish and separate signal from noise, whether from in- or outside of the instrument. For more than forty years, Benioff worked as a sonic expert, perfecting the recording and reproduction of waves and vibrations of all types and frequencies. After tracing elements of Benioff’s biography, I examine how he incorporated the technology of the transducer in his workshop into his seismological and musical instruments, notable not only for the control, austerity, and clarity of lines of their modernist design, but also for a new kind of poetic technology. Benioff’s seismological instruments made it possible to listen to a large variety of previously undetectable phenomena such as the free oscillations of the earth, and his work with the pianist Rosalyn Tureck on electric musical instruments aimed to reproduce the pure sound of traditional instruments. I argue that Benioff’s search for an aesthetic reconciliation of the scientific modern with an enchanted view of the world is very much a product of the social, cultural, technical, and scientific conditions of the interwar period.

Under what conditions have people in the past come to arrange their domestic lives more intentionally, and what role have the sciences played in this process? To address this question, this essay examines the transformation of human homes into experimental sites for the study of animal behavior. Between 1880 and 1920, the “insectarium” became both a popular toy and a key tool for the scientific study of the social insects. At the same time, social change and feminist politics were calling into question bourgeois norms of domesticity. In this context, the enterprise of domestic entomology took the rigid, seemingly timeless idea of a “natural home” and transformed it into a research question: how malleable were insects’ home-making instincts? The essay argues that the idea of behavioral plasticity as it emerged in entomology circa 1900 reflected and informed an experimental, multispecies approach to human homemaking. In this way, the essay demonstrates the value of studying the history of science together with the history of private life.

There probably has never been such a controversial programming language as Algol. In the early 1960s the disciplinary success of the so-called Algol project in helping to forge the discipline of computer science was not matched by a significant adoption of the Algol language, in any of its three versions. This contrast is even more striking when considering the contemporary success of IBM’s Fortran, a language that, like Algol, was also conceived for scientific computation, but unlike Algol, initially only available for IBM computers. Through extensive archival research, this article shows how the relentless pursuit of a still better language that came to dominate the agenda of the Algol project brought to the fore the tension between the research-driven dimension of the project and the goal of developing a reliable programming language. Such a strong research-oriented agenda increased IBM’s doubts about a project that the firm already felt little urge to support. Yet IBM did not want to appear as obstructing the development of either Algol or Cobol, even if these “common languages” posed a clear risk to the firm’s marketing model. The US Department of Defense’s endorsement of Cobol and the rising popularity of Algol in Europe convinced IBM to push for the use of Fortran in Western Europe in order to protect the domestic market. IBM’s action in support of Fortran reminds us of the power imbalances that have shaped computer science.

In 1958, Bruno Balke, a former German Luftwaffe doctor working for the United States Air Force (USAF), led a team of airmen up Colorado’s Mount Evans. Could acclimatization to the thin mountain air boost the oxygen efficiency of future astronauts living in artificial low-pressure spacecraft environments? To judge their improvement, Balke, an expert in the nascent field of space medicine, compared their performance not with military test-pilots, but with high-altitude Indigenous people he had studied in the Peruvian Andes. This article expands discussions of race in space history beyond Black scientists, mathematicians, and pilots in the Civil Rights era to this earlier case of the permanent residents of Morococha, Peru, who participated in efforts to define an ideal spacefaring body. More than recovering the story of a nearly forgotten group of astronaut-adjacent test-subjects, this article shows how racial discrimination in space medicine functioned by inclusion . Balke studied and even celebrated the bodies of Morocochans, but never considered them potential astronauts. This article begins with Balke’s participation in the 1938 Nazi-funded expedition to summit Nanga Parbat in the Himalayas, and his follow-on work acclimatizing Luftwaffe pilots during World War Two. Then it focuses on his USAF work in the 1950s studying miners living and working in Morococha, Peru, and his attempt to replicate their altitude tolerance in American airmen on Mount Evans. Recovering Balke’s work places the high-altitude Indigenous person and the mountaineer alongside the familiar figure of the pilot in the genealogy of the early American astronaut.

In the 1950s, American public universities began training a vast new cadre of nuclear engineers, technicians, and scientists in specially designed and built “teaching reactors.” As this article describes, a generation of nuclear engineering undergraduates and graduate students were exposed to an open, accessible, and above all, visible demonstration of nuclear energy through educational “swimming pool”–style reactors. Distinct from reactors for either weapons or power production, the swimming pool reactor was specifically configured to be a pedagogical tool. Educational programs were created around federally and industrially sponsored reactors for training, part of the massive Cold War era transformations of Midwestern, Western, and Southern public colleges and universities. This article offers the Ford Nuclear Reactor at the University of Michigan as an example of how the peaceful pedagogical atom developed after the 1950s. As I argue, teaching reactors were one product of the conservative compact made between government, public universities, and private industry in the early 1950s that underpinned the famed Atoms for Peace movement, with its technology and information sharing and international training priorities. Indeed, teaching reactors resolved for Eisenhower’s administration the tension between a desire for centralized control of the atom and the powerful vision of a future of prosperity brought about by open education and use of nuclear materials. This paper is part of a special issue entitled “Revealing the Michigan Memorial–Phoenix Project.”

Most countries met the promotion of the peaceful uses of atomic energy as a tool for social and economic development with skepticism. In countries where it took hold, its acceptance was driven by a few elite actors. In Mexico the most salient included the Rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Nabor Carrillo, and William Draper Jr., President of the Canadian-based Mexican Light and Power Company. Nuclear technologies for so-called less-developed countries became a key niche for non-governmental actors such as the Michigan Memorial–Phoenix Project, the Atomic Industrial Forum, and the Fund for Peaceful Atomic Development, Inc., which played a relevant role in the implementation of the new foreign atomic policy after 1954 in close consonance with US governmental offices like the Foreign Operations Administration, which was superseded by the International Cooperation Administration in 1955. Without signing a manifest government-to-government agreement, Mexican officials were able to overcome domestic obstacles and historical distrust with her northern neighbor to get nuclear expertise and commodities. Apparently restricted to universities and private industries, this negotiation justified and backed the education and training of the first generation of Mexican nuclear engineers as part of the Phoenix Project at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. At the same time, the Mexican Program provided a learning experience in nuclear and technical assistance diplomacy for industrialists and private interests in the implementation of the Atoms for Peace initiative abroad. This paper is part of a special issue entitled “Revealing the Michigan Memorial–Phoenix Project.”

The Michigan Memorial–Phoenix Project at the University of Michigan was an unusual specimen of the post–World War II nuclear research initiative. Its origins were modest; it sprang from a student-led effort to construct a living war memorial—a mission it maintained even as it grew into a peaceful-atom program. Rather than taking advantage of the copious government support for scientific research available after World War II, it drew funds from Michigan alumni and from industry, based on the conviction that these routes offered greater possibility of academic freedom. And its architects conceived of nuclear research unusually broadly, including not just the physical sciences and engineering, but also the biological, social, and human sciences, law, education, medicine, and other areas. These ways in which the Phoenix Project was exceptional nevertheless tell us much about how it was exemplary. The optimism that animated the project contrasts with widespread and well-documented currents of nuclear fear, but indicates a stable vein of nuclear optimism in the early post–World War II era. The suspicion of government secrecy regimes harbored by its founders led them to pursue unorthodox patronage relationships for a nuclear research initiative, which nevertheless reveals the flexibility of the contemporary funding context. And the project’s unusually broad notion of nuclear research indicates the local flexibility of nuclearity in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This paper is part of a special issue entitled “Revealing the Michigan Memorial–Phoenix Project.”