Science, The Endless Frontier

Why it’s on the list: Bush’s July 1945 report to Truman is the founding document of American public science — the argument that basic research is the capital from which everything applied is drawn, that the federal government should fund it, and that it should be done in universities rather than in a state laboratory. The NSF exists because of it.

Where I saw it: A link to the NSF’s 75th-anniversary PDF edition (with a foreword by France A. Córdova, the NSF’s 14th director), saved in the note next to the Stripe Press edition of Scientific Freedom. Recommended separately on X by @_tamarawinter (March 28, 2025) in two words — “Required reading:” — over a photograph of the original July 1945 Government Printing Office printing.

Also recommended in the reply thread to Sarah Guo’s March 22, 2025 question on X — “is there a book / essay about environments that best support scientific discovery? Not about specifically bell labs, cavendish, xerox parc, los alamos - but why these places were so productive?” Kyle reconstructed the full reply-thread list on 2026-09-17; it is on Is There a Book… (tweet).

Connections

• Vannevar Bush — author, and the Office of Scientific Research and Development’s director.
• Scientific Freedom — saved next to it in the note; Braben’s book is the critique of what this report built.
• Scientific Research — the subject.
• Bell Labs · The Idea Factory · DARPA — the institutions on either side of the model Bush proposed.
• Technological Innovation · Open Source Knowledge — the portfolio ideas this sits across.

Local copy

The 75th-anniversary edition PDF that Kyle linked is archived in the repo at wiki/attachments/science-the-endless-frontier/EndlessFrontier75th_w.pdf (15.9 MB), so the page does not depend on the NSF’s URL staying alive. Original: https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/2023-04/EndlessFrontier75th_w.pdf.