United States | Political science

Congress is set to make a down-payment on innovation in America

Federal spending on research is about to get a boost

|LOS ANGELES

SENATOR HARLEY KILGORE, a West Virginia oil prospector’s son who carried around a horse chestnut for good luck, had a vision for American science. It was too dominated, he thought, by big business and by the university system: the country’s practical needs were an afterthought. In 1942 Kilgore proposed creating a federal bureaucracy, responsive to the public, that would guide scientific research for the good of the country and distribute its benefits geographically.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “Political science”

The new geopolitics of big business

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