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By Root 1880 0

media of the day. Radio and telephony supposedly required its virtues of standardization and "efficiency" (The local and amateur radio practitioners left outside the "radio trust" might disagree, but they were increasingly defined as pirates.) But the Depression impugned the credibility of such claims. It threw rule by experts into doubt. As it lingered on into the late thirties, it was scarcely necessary to endorse Nazi or Soviet claims about the "decadence" of liberal democracy to fear that, with so many unemployed amid such plenty, something was not working right. Perhaps monopolistic trusts were to blame-and intellectual property was their foundation. If so, then their stifling of inventions must be fixed if democracy were to survive.

The Depression also sparked a crisis in the public renown of science itself. It seemed both too powerful and not powerful enough-or else both too responsible and too irresponsible. On the one hand, unemployment was blamed on reckless and unaccountable science, which created new technologies with no regard for consequences; on the other, scientists were condemned for cleaving to an ideal of "pure" research, and refusing to conform their questions to public needs. The British railway magnate and Bank of England director Sir Josiah Stamp came to be particularly associated with the former charge when he reportedly advocated at the BAAS a moratorium on scientific research in order to give society and ethics a chance to catchup. Stamp himself denied proposing any such thing, saying that what he really wanted was a reallocation of resources from the physical sciences to the social-including eugenics-and an "inventions clearing house" where the impact of technology could be managed by scientists, industrialists, and bankers. Like many Britons, he thought the BBC an excellent model to follow. But it was the cruder point that was widely taken.4 The socialist group around J. D. Bernal was the loudest advocate of the second claim, although the opinion was in fact widely shared, and had affinities with industry's own advocacy of entrepreneurial science. The problems of society had never called out so clearly for scientific attention, and to assert the prerogatives of pure science looked awfully presumptuous when so many were destitute. Influential scientists themselves called for an end to the "ivory tower." In 1933 the sociologist Read Bain issued a particularly outspoken demand that scientists accept their responsibilities as citizens, arguing that society's future depended on it. "Racketeers are running sores on the social body," Bain pronounced, "but unsocialized scientists are a foul corruption in the very heart's blood of society." The "pure" scientist was "a moral eunuch."5

In fact, the ivory tower was something of a myth. University research was a far smaller affair in the 192os-193os than it was later to become. What there was of it was in any case tempted to follow the lead of the industrial research laboratories. The conviction that science and property were antithetical, too, was far from universal. In 1923 the League of Nations seriously proposed instituting a property right in scientific discoveries, arguing that this would attract a new generation of young citizens into the sciences to replace that lost in the trenches.6 By the 193os American academia had taken several steps in that direction-steps that today we often wrongly assume were not taken until the 198os. Several institutions created initiatives to encourage faculty to produce patentable work, the benefits of which would be channeled back into their facilities; others garnered patents, in a practice approved formally by the AAAS in 1934. Ernest Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley depended on patent royalties administered via the University of California's Research Corporation, which was essentially a patent pool (the arrangement encouraged the marketing of ever-larger instruments as medical devices). At Stanford, the university's patent attorney barred radio pioneer Lee De Forest from visiting a research group for fear