Shaping Biology: The National Science Foundation and American Biological Research, 1945-1975 (review)

Toby A. Appel. Shaping Biology: The National Science Foundation and American Biological Research, 1945-1975. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xii + 393 pp. $42.50 (0-8018-6321-X).

Federal support of postwar American biological research is not a familiar theme in the history of science; indeed, scholars have devoted much more attention to the patronage relationships that made possible the extraordinary growth of the physical sciences after World War II. The publication of Shaping Biology is thus welcome news to historians of biology and science, as well as to historians of medicine, higher education, and the postwar United States.

In telling the story of postwar federal patronage of biology, Toby Appel focuses on the National Science Foundation's Division of Biological and Medical Sciences, which lasted from 1952 to 1975. She argues that even though it was "never the dominant player among federal agencies supporting science, NSF is a good focal point for looking at biology and the federal patron because it was the one federal agency that funded all of biology for its own sake" (p. 2). Not only did NSF support basic research in all the biological sciences, its program officers maintained extensive records, which the author has skillfully tapped.

Rather than evaluating the scientific results of NSF support of biology, Appel argues that her book "can contribute to the framework for such studies by comparing NSF's funding strategies and relations with the leadership of selected areas of biology" (p. 7)—namely, molecular biology, plant biology, systematic biology, and ecology. She supports her assertions about NSF's role in funding biological research by including numerous tables that demonstrate the distribution of federal grants and contracts through the fiscal years. For the most part, she does an effective job incorporating such dry material into the narrative.

Historians of medicine will appreciate the depth with which Appel discusses the competition between NSF and the National Institutes of Health over funding basic biological research. Biologists succeeded in preventing biology from being subsumed under medicine within the proposed Foundation in the late 1940s, and rather than being excluded from NSF, basic medical research soon became subordinated to biology. However, efforts to prevent NIH from expanding into general biology were futile. By 1960 NIH dominated the funding of biology both in medical schools and in university life science departments, to which the NSF Division of Biological and Medical Sciences responded "by not allowing NIH to monopolize any type of grant to biologists outside medical schools" (p. 152).

Other tensions faced by NSF program directors that animate the book include: supporting the best science, versus expanding the nation's science infrastructure by making grants with regard to nonscientific characteristics such as geographical distribution and type of institution; funding individual project grants, versus large multidisciplinary projects; and providing grants-in-aid to individuals, versus federal purchasing of research from universities.

Shaping Biology makes a nice sequel to Philip Pauly's recent book Biologists and the Promise of American Life: From Meriwether Lewis to Alfred Kinsey (2000), since both works discuss the long-standing goal among American biologists of unifying biology. Whereas Pauly examines efforts by academic biologists to organize university life sciences around biology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Appel analyzes the much later struggles of the Division of Biological and Medical Sciences staff "to promote the ideal of one biology" (p. 3). Such endeavors became increasingly elusive and controversial in the 1960s, as traditional departments and disciplinary boundaries in the life sciences collapsed.

Appel closes her study by asserting that "biology is once more at the forefront at NSF" (p. 276) now that the agency is under the supervision of Rita Colwell, the second biologist to serve as head. Historians can only hope that Colwell's program officers are as diligent at keeping records as their predecessors were, since Shaping Biology should inspire...