On June 14, 1940, the day the German army invaded and occupied Paris, a small group of scientists marched to the White House with grave news for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. U.S. military technology, they said, was utterly unprepared to take on the Axis powers. They urged the president to create a new agency—a dream team of techies and scientists—to help win the war.
In response, Roosevelt assembled an agency that became known as the Office of Scientific Research and Development, or OSRD. Led by Vannevar Bush, the former dean of the MIT School of Engineering, the office ultimately employed more than 1,500 people and directed thousands of projects around the country. By the end of the war, it had spawned military inventions such as the proximity fuse, radar, and—after one of its programs spun off to become the Manhattan Project—the atomic bomb.
OSRD’s breakthroughs went far beyond missiles and bombs. It supported the first-ever mass production of penicillin in part by contracting with the chemical manufacturer Pfizer (yep, that one) to produce key antibiotic materials. The agency invested in malaria treatments and developed an early influenza vaccine. It invested in microwave communications and built the foundations for early computing. Not many people today have ever heard of OSRD—which was dissolved in 1947 and whose peacetime responsibilities were strewn across a range of government agencies—but its fingerprints are all over some of the most important breakthroughs of the 20th century.
And then, 80 years later, a new crisis struck.
COVID-19 posed another global challenge for which the United States was utterly unprepared. This time, too, the country’s initial response was staggered and delayed, but when the U.S. finally trained its scientific ingenuity toward a clear problem—the development of COVID-19 vaccines—Americans did extraordinary things with breathtaking speed. Once more, the U.S. government contracted with U.S. companies—hello again, Pfizer—to save American lives. And with the darkness of this global crisis fading (at least in the U.S.), some commentators predict a new era of optimism in science and technology
Maybe. To understand how the United States can turn a crisis into a golden age of science and discovery, compare and contrast the country’s responses to World War II and COVID-19. Fortunately, a new paper, by Daniel Gross at Duke University and Bhaven Sampat at Columbia University, does just that. “‘Why are crises so fertile for innovation?’ is a question I’ve been asking throughout my research,” Gross told me. “And I think we’re starting to get a clearer idea.”