Bonds That Tie: Chemical Heritage and the Rise of Cannabis Research by J. N. Campbell

Author:J. N. Campbell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030600235
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

3.1.1 Government Chemistry Incarnate

In 1938, Joseph Ames was poised to become one of the most important scientists in the America. Then he became ill. In the process, he had to stepdown as chairman of what was at the time a new scientific war-making mechanism for the United States. In that moment, the person who assumed his position was an ambitious and forward-thinking engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the private sector named, Vannevar Bush (Fig. 3.1).1 It is not too strong to argue that his influence on government science would change the world. The organization he now led, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), was the forerunner to NASA, but at the time it would attempt to harness the most important technological possibility—airpower. Bush understood that science had the greatest potential for human change. In the past, America had a poor track record of getting civilian thinking to merge with government funding. Afterall, during the First World War, America barely arrived on the Western Front with any supplies. Herbert Hoover’s Food Administration stateside was a lone bright spot. Most of the American fight came from hand-me-downs or did not exist at all. The engineer inside Bush wanted to fix that, especially since the size of New Deal expansion had grown federal assistance tenfold. His solution was not to stop with the NACA, but rather to think bigger—he needed a lever [2].2

Fig. 3.1Vannevar Bush, c. 1935 (Photo courtesy of Getty Images)

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