Government support for science

There is nothing new about State support for science. From the seventeenth century onwards, scientists have been directly employed as government officials to chart the land, the seas and the skies, to check weights, measures and coins, to supervise the manufacture of dangerous chemicals and explosives and many other technical jobs. The industrialization of society as a whole has merely enlarged the responsibilities of every government for the welfare and security of its citizens, and correspondingly increased the scale and sophistication of the scientific work that has to be done by the government apparatus (§10.6).

Government patronage of ‘pure’ science also goes back a long way into history. In Britain, the Royal Society and other learned societies were institutionally independent of the State, but were sufficiently close to the centres of authority to extract occasional subsidies for major scientific projects (§10.5). The absolute monarchies of France, Prussia and Russia went much further, by setting up national academies whose members were paid a personal stipend to do full-time research (§10.3). Whatever the level of financial patronage it received, pure science was valued by the State as a cultural ornament, a sign of national superiority, and as a potential source of economic and military benefit.