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  • Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation *
  • David F. Channell (bio)
Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation. By Donald E. Stokes. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997. Pp. xiv+180; notes, index. $38.95 (cloth); $14.95 (paper).

Donald Stokes, who was dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University before his death in 1997, has written a book aimed at science policymakers, but it should also be read by historians of technology because it provides a provocative new way to look at the relationship between science and technology. The main purpose of the book is to analyze, critique, and eventually rethink the linear model of the relationship between science and technology that was put forward by Vannevar Bush in his report Science, the Endless Frontier, which became a major influence on science policy in the post-World War II period. Near the end of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt asked Bush, then head of wartime research as the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, to prepare a report on the role of science in peacetime. While the Truman administration rejected and delayed some of the organizational aspects of Bush’s plan, the basic ideology of the report served as the foundation for science policy throughout the cold war era.

Bush’s linear model was based on two fundamental postulates: first, “basic research is performed without thought of practical ends,” and second, “basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress” (p. 3). The resulting model of the relationship between science and technology was linear in both its static and dynamic forms. In its static form, the fundamental relationship between basic and applied research could be visualized in terms of a spectrum or line with basic research at one end and applied research on the other. Such a model implied an essential tension [End Page 390] between basic and applied research. The closer some activity is to one end, the further it must be from the other. This distinction between basic and applied research was also the basis of the dynamic form of Bush’s model, in which basic research led to applied research and development and then to production.

Stokes argues that the rationale behind Bush’s linear model arose from the classical ideal of knowledge for its own sake, which had been institutionalized in American and European universities. Even the Baconian ideal of knowledge as power or utility, which had such a great influence in America, became recast into a linear model by rejecting the notion that a fusion of science and technology would have an immediate benefit and instead arguing that the improvements that arose from technology would take place at some time after the advances of science took place. As such, the model justified continuing federal support of basic science while preserving the autonomy which scientists valued so highly.

Although Bush’s linear model has influenced the way people have viewed the relationship between science and technology for fifty years, Stokes believes that it is time to rethink the model, especially in light of the end of the cold war and the fact that Bush’s model does not reflect the actual practice of science and technology. The book provides several examples of research that does not conform to the distinction between basic and applied, but Stokes pays particular attention to the work of Pasteur, whose work in microbiology was both basic and applied at the same time. In terms of Bush’s linear model, with basic research at one end and applied at the other, Pasteur’s work would not fall at the midpoint, rather it would have to be represented by two locations on the line—one close to the basic end and one close to the applied end.

Stokes concludes that the problem of dealing with Pasteur can be overcome if one transforms Bush’s one-dimensional model into a two-dimensional model in which the half of the line representing basic research is rotated ninety degrees so that it is perpendicular to the half of the line representing applied research. The resulting square can then be divided into...

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