“We live in danger,” warned the principal speaker at a 1952 assembly in Cousens Gymnasium for the anniversary of Tufts’ founding 100 years before. “There is a crisis in our affairs, and the issue will determine whether freedom of thought—whether freedom of any kind—can endure.”

The gathering at Tufts of academics and dignitaries from universities around the world seemed anything but in crisis. But the speaker, Vannevar Bush, E1913, AG1913, H1932, reminded them of the tanks and soldiers building up in the Soviet Union that threatened to disrupt the recently hard-won peace with new war.

More than anyone else alive, Bush had been responsible for the mobilization of scientific research that enabled the Allies to win World War II (the “wizard war,” as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called it), rapidly turning scientific know-how into military advantages.

But arguably Bush’s most enduring legacy came not in war, but in peace. And it grew from a request from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

A former vice president of MIT, Bush was lionized after his death in 1974 by MIT President Jerome Weisner, who said, “No American has had greater influence in the growth of science and technology.” Biographer G. Pascal Zachary dubbed Bush the “patron saint of American science” and celebrated him as “one of the nation’s leading prophets of technological change and the most influential proponent of government funding of science and engineering.” 

A Tufts Origin Story 

A minister’s son who grew up north of Boston, Bush was a precocious child, with an early aptitude for math and a love of tinkering. In those days, the world was exploding with new technologies, including the telephone, radio, movies, and automobiles. His father, Richard Perry Bush, was an 1879 graduate of the Tufts College Divinity School (later the Crane Theological School) and a progressive reformer of education, who named his son after his Tufts classmate John Vannevar. 

In 1909, Vannevar Bush followed his father to Tufts, and he quickly rose to the top of his class in mathematics. Upon graduating with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees, Bush taught math at Tufts before enrolling in a joint Harvard/MIT Ph.D. program in electrical engineering, completing his dissertation in a year. After returning to Tufts, he taught while leading a laboratory for a radio technology company, in an early exploration of the potential of university/business collaborations. 

All the while, Bush explored computing machines, notably a new machine called the differential analyzer, a collection of rotating disks, gears, pulleys, and shafts that has been recognized as the first modern computer. Able to solve equations with up to 18 variables, the machine was ultimately used during World War II to calculate trajectories of ballistics. 

As technology became more complex, inventions became the work of teams of engineers at industrial laboratories such as AT&T, Bell, and General Electric. With an aversion to risk, they mostly refined technology incrementally, rather than pursuing game-changing breakthroughs. 

Bush criticized the approach, championing the spark of innovation by the “lone researcher,” who could “produce out of thin air a striking new device or combination” that “might be lost were it not for his keenness.” 

He also encouraged MIT professors to consult for business. “He had the concept of the consulting engineer as a ministry,” said biographer Zachary in an interview, “promoting a kind of social good like a doctor or lawyer.” 

In 1938, Bush went to Washington, D.C., to become president of the Carnegie Institution, an organization that provided funding so scientists could investigate questions they deemed important. When World War II broke out the following year, Bush was concerned about the nation’s lack of technological savvy and proposed the creation of a national research organization. Roosevelt approved it after a 15-minute meeting, placing Bush in charge of what became the Office of Scientific Research and Development. 

As an alternative to hiring government scientists, Bush pioneered research contracts with university scientists, who could stay at their own academic institutions. Projects were born and approved in record speed, launched with a flourish from Bush’s pen. 

Crucially, contracts were signed based on effort, not on specific deliverables, giving university researchers the independence and autonomy to pursue science as they saw fit. “This freedom to try new things and take risks transformed relations among government, business, and academia,” Zachary said. 

Bush ultimately oversaw the work of 30,000 scientists, creating technologies including advancements in shipboard and airborne radar that were crucial in winning the war, advanced fire-control systems to better target guns and torpedoes, proximity fuzes for detonating bombs, and amphibious Army vehicles.  

The most consequential research program Bush oversaw was the Manhattan Project, which led to the development of the atomic bomb and helped end World War II. Time magazine honored Bush on its cover in 1944 as the “General of Physics.” 

The Tripartite Compact 

But Bush had bigger plans, advocating for continued government funding in science and technology. He ultimately commissioned the report Science—The Endless Frontier, writing the introduction himself. 

It was “clear beyond all doubt,” Bush wrote in that introduction, that basic science was “absolutely essential to national security” as much as it was to economic progress. “New products and principles do not appear full-grown,” he wrote, but “are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science. A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade.” 

Bush proposed the creation of a new funding agency that would carry on scientific research along the lines he’d pursued in wartime, giving scientists autonomy to pursue “subjects of their own choice,” without a requirement for immediate payoff. In contrast to the scientists working under the Nazis or the Soviets, researchers in American universities would be insulated from state control dictating how science was to be conducted. 

Just as importantly, the new entity would train a generation of new academic researchers on the cutting edge of scientific inquiry, so that “there be no ceilings, other than ability itself, to intellectual ambition,” he wrote. 

The new agency didn’t come easily. Bush sparred with lawmakers over its scope and had a falling out with Truman, who vetoed a bill to create the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1947. Eventually, Bush convinced Truman to sign a modified version, and the NSF was officially launched in 1950. 

The agency didn’t quite live up to Bush’s vision. Scientific research remained fractured, with much of it consolidated in the Office of Naval Research instead of the NSF. Other agencies, including the National Institutes for Health and the Atomic Energy Commission, pursued their own agendas. 

However, the principles created much of the government research infrastructure that still exists today, launching the modern research university and partnerships with industry that have given the United States its decades-long educational and technological superiority. With a current budget of $9 billion, NSF funds some 12,000 research projects a year, one-quarter of all federally funded basic science research, as well as 90% of postdoctoral researchers, and dozens of research centers, ocean vessels, aircraft, and observatories. 

“We created a system of social supports and economic supports that produced the greatest collection of scientists and intellectuals the world has ever seen,” said biographer Zachary, of Bush’s vision. “Our entire lives are underpinned by this.” 

Assessing Bush’s Vision, 80 Years Later 

The government/university/industry research compact has had its challenges. Most recently, in a June 2025 State of the Science address, National Academies of Sciences President Marcia McNutt warned “the elephant in the room right now is whether the drastic reductions in research budgets and new research policies across the federal agencies will allow us to remain a research and development powerhouse.” 

The U.S. has already been losing ground to countries such as China, McNutt said, which have followed Bush’s playbook to fund their own research; cuts to federal funding could further erode American dominance, leading to less “high-risk, high-reward” research. 

“Science offers hope for cures for what ails people, and the message we need to give is that funding science is funding hope—hope for the future,” she concluded. 

Despite its challenges, the tripartite model of government, industry, and higher education that Bush put forth in Science—The Endless Frontier is as critical as ever, according to Tufts University President Sunil Kumar. “In order to keep expanding our scientific capital, we have to keep exploring new and promising areas of scientific opportunity and training generations of scientists,” he said. “To accomplish these two objectives, we must rely on our colleges, universities, and research institutes.” 

Kumar also notes that it is wise to review periodically the specific means and mechanisms that enable this compact, to ensure transparency and efficiency in the use of government funds. “We must always make certain that public funding continues to benefit society broadly and effectively, while also expanding the scientific frontier,” he said. 

However, in terms of the goals of the tripartite model, Kumar notes, language from the letter with which Bush sent his report to the president is as compelling and relevant as if it were written yesterday: “The rewards of [pioneering scientific] exploration both for the nation and the individual are great. Scientific progress is one essential key to our security as a nation, to our better health, to more jobs, to a higher standard of living, and to our cultural progress.” 

Bush remained a Tufts trustee emeritus until the end of his life. When he died in 1974, his fellow trustees issued a resolution calling Bush “a great scientist, scholar, statesman, and humanitarian.”