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as his plan's most important elements: commitments to guide science for the common good and to patent the products of federally funded research on the public's behalf. Bush responded, however, with an astute administrative maneuver. He engineered an invitation from Roosevelt to propose his own suggestions for sustaining the successes of science and technology in the coming peace. Bush's report dusted off all the rhetoric that he had employed before the patent panels of the 193os, rededicating it to the cause of asocial science. The public should get at most a free license to use the results of research, it insisted, not a patent, and the public should have almost no role in deciding research priorities. Science -The Endless Frontier became the foundational covenant of postwar American science. 18

Bush's scheme was not immediately successful, however. Truman was inclined to favor a more social model along Kilgore's lines. Commerce Secretary and ex Vice President Henry Wallace too pushed for this. Wallace mattered because he was responsible for the assets of what was then the largest patent holder in the United States: the Alien Property Custodian. The APC held rights seized from German concerns, comprising in total some 5 percent of all America's active patents. Wallace's idea was to take these and make them the basis for a revived commons, jump-starting the culture of public science that the old New Dealers had envisaged when fighting AT&T. He wanted to grant royalty-free licenses to all who requested them, and even to mount special advertising tours around the country to draw the attention of small businesses to the possibilities. The assets involved were considerable, especially as at the same time large quantities of material were being requisitioned from Germany itself. Boeing, for example, benefited, the design of a new jet bomber being heavily indebted to German wind-tunnel data. Dye and chemical patents were given to a new Chemical Foundation, while German imports were banned as infringing these patents. But the Republican Congress cut Wallace's funding. His scheme stalled, and he left the administration in frustration.19 In i95o Congress and the White House finally settled on a National Science Foundation that would be based on Bush's design, not Kilgore's or Wallace's. Pure science, expert appraisal, and a patent-based structure of public and private research prevailed as policy. The scientific commons shrank into an ideal.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY VERSUS INFORMATION ECONOMY

The years of these conflicts saw the inauguration of a series of disciplines dedicated to understanding the sciences and their place in society. Between 1920 and 1945 one can see the beginnings of, for example, sociologies of invention (in S. C. Gilfillan's Sociology of Invention), science (in R. K. Merton's classic papers), and technology (in W. G. Ogburn's work). There also appeared a psychology of creativity (with patent officer Joseph Rossman's Industrial Creativity), and a grand theory of technology and society (with Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization). In some cases these initiatives were closely related to each other. Gilfillan, for instance, dedicated his Sociology of Invention - originally a Columbia Ph.D. thesis - to, among eight friends, Ogburn, Rossman, and Merton; another dedicatee was Kaempffert. The questions they conceived-about the role of the researcher, the nature of invention, the relations between creativity and society, and the responsibilities of science-were to alarge degree shared, and took shape in the context of this crisis. Ogburn actually chaired Roosevelt's Committee on Technological Trends and National Policy, which focused on invention and was eventually subsumed into the National Patent Planning Commission. Kaempffert for his part authored a sweeping historical argument condemning industrial and military secrecy as inimical to technicalprogress.20 The contests over patents were both spur and foil not only to a new science policy, therefore, but to an array of new approaches to the nature of science.

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