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In 1928, the Rockefeller Foundation and other Rockefeller charities underwent changes to reflect the growing importance of scientific research. In 1923, Wycliffe Rose, head of the General Education Board, had said: “All important fields of activity, from the breeding of bees to the administration of an empire, call for an understanding of the spirit and technique of modern science.

. . . Science is the method of knowledge. It is the key to such dominion as man may ever exercise over his physical environment. Appreciation of its spirit and technique, moreover, determines the mental attitude of a people, affects the entire system of education, and carries with it the shaping of a civilization” (Fosdick 1952, p. 141).

All programs in various Rockefeller charities “relating to the advance of human knowledge” were shifted to the Rockefeller Foundation, which was organized into five divisions: international health, medical sciences, natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities (Fosdick 1952, pp. 137–138). Each division was run by a highly competent academic and technical staff, who advised the trustees of the Foundation where to give their money. Raymond D. Fosdick, president of the Foundation at the time, said (1952, p. 140) that the year of 1928 marked “the end of an era in philanthropy.” And the beginning of a new one.

The change reached right to the top, with Dr. Max Mason, a scientist himself, taking over as president. Mason, a mathematical physicist, was formerly president of the University of Chicago. According to Fosdick (1952, p. 142), Mason “emphasized the structural unity involved in the new orientation of program. It was not to be five programs, each represented by a division of the Foundation; it was to be essentially one program, directed to the general problem of human behavior, with the aim of control through understanding.”

The Foundation also saw itself engaged in a kind of thought control. Fosdick (1952, p. 143) said: “The possession of funds carries with it power to establish trends and styles of intellectual endeavor.”

The theme of control was echoed in 1933 by Warren Weaver, who headed the Rockefeller Foundation’s natural sciences division, which funded the Cenozoic Research Laboratory in Peking. In a report to the trustees, Weaver, a mathematician from the University of Wisconsin, said: “The welfare of mankind depends in a vital way on man’s understanding of himself and his physical environment. Science has made magnificent progress in the analysis and control of inanimate forces, but it has not made equal advances in the more delicate, more difficult, and more important problem of the analysis and control of animate forces” (Fosdick 1952, p. 157). The Rockefeller Foundation’s annual report for the year 1933 (p. 199) asked: “Can we develop so sound and extensive a genetics that we can hope to breed in the future superior men? . . . In short, can we rationalize human behavior and create a new science of man?”

The Foundation scientists outlined a coordinated program, approved by the Foundation trustees, to attain this goal. Fosdick (1952, p. 158) stated: “the trustees, in the spring of 1933, voted to make experimental biology the field of primary interest. . . . It was conceived, moreover, as being closely linked with other aspects of the Foundation’s program, notably the program in psychiatry of the Medical Sciences division and the social-science program in human relations. Biology is important because it has the potentiality of contributing to the problem of understanding ourselves, and the three programs—in widely separated fields— could be thought of as a unified endeavor to stimulate research in the sciences underlying the behavior of man.”

Some commentators make light of research into the reproductive habits of earthworms and other apparently obscure research projects. But these have their purpose. According to Weaver: “Before we can be wise about so complex a subject as the behavior of a man, we obviously have to