Introduction

In Chapter 2, I located the social contract for science in the broad consensus among Vannevar Bush, his political allies, and his political opponents that although funding science was a public responsibility, maintaining the integrity and the productivity of the enterprise was to be left to the scientists alone. Contrary to the epigraph from physicist and science policy scholar Harvey Brooks, the outline of the social contract for science was not limited to Bush's report. Neither were all the major tenets of Science: The Endless Frontier part of that outline. But the social contract for science can serve, as Brooks suggests, as the basis for assessing change in the relationship between the political and scientific communities over time.