Science and the Navy : The History of the Office of Naval Research

Addressing all those interested in the history of American science and concerned with its future, a leading scholar of public policy explains how and why the Office of Naval Research become the first federal agency to support a wide range of scientific work in universities. Harvey Sapolsky shows that the ONR functioned as a 'surrogate national science foundation' between 1946 and 1950 and argues that its activities emerged not from any particularly enlightened position but largely from a bureaucratic accident.