BookDonald J. McGraw.
Springer Nature eBook.
Summary: National Science Foundation (NSF) is a unique federal agency because it supports scientific research financially, but does not engage in scientific work itself. Its history is known only in part because the NSF is a vibrant, expanding, and living entity that makes the final telling of its story impossible. Much can be learned from its beginning as well as its component parts. If the founding of the NSF in 1950 was couched in an era of physics, especially atomic physics, certainly by the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, biology was, and remains, the queen of sciences for the predictable future. This book highlights the elite status of America's biological sciences as they were funded, affected, and, to a very real degree, interactively guided by the NSF. It examines important events in the earlier history of the Foundation because they play strongly upon the development of the various biology directorates. Issues such as education, applied research, medical science, the National Institutes of Health, the beginnings of biotechnology, and other matters are also discussed.
Contents:
Chapter 1. The Year 1975
Chapter 2. The Effects of the Social and Behavioral Sciences
Chapter 3. Little Biology and Biology of the Little
Chapter 4. The Big End of the Spectrum
Chapter 5. A Second "Time of Tumult" and A New Home for Biology
Chapter 6. Technology and the "Fearless Biologists"
Chapter 7. Genes and Beyond
Chapter 8. Integrating Biology
Chapter 9. Expanding Big Bio
Epilogue
Index.