The writer is a science commentatorIn 1944, Franklin D Roosevelt asked Vannevar Bush, then director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development, how the extraordinary ingenuity shown in the war effort could be mobilised in peacetime. In answering that request, Bush, an accomplished engineer and organiser of the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, became the leading postwar architect of the US scientific landscape.
Perhaps his crowning achievement was establishing the National Science Foundation in 1950. Its rotating cadre of advisers, the National Science Board, has set the long-term strategic direction of American research ever since. On Friday, the White House abruptly fired all its 22 members.
The purge comes after the nomination last year of Jim O’Neill, a close associate of Peter Thiel, as the agency’s new head (the tech investor is yet to be confirmed). Separately, Donald Trump has remoulded the usual presidential circle of science advisers to include 12 technology or business figures, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and just one academic.