Sarah Kreps
In the spring of 1943, Hans Bethe, a theoretical physicist and professor at Cornell University, left Ithaca, New York, for a classified government site in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Once there, he led the theoretical division of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Bethe was just one of dozens of academics pulled from elite American research universities into wartime service, applying their intellectual training to solve critical national security challenges. When the war ended, Bethe returned to Cornell, where he helped transform the university into a hub of Cold War–era research, working to invent—among other innovations—the synchrotron, one of the world’s first particle accelerators. That development, in turn, paved the way for the creation of advanced radar systems and semiconductors.
Bethe’s career path epitomized the long-lasting and mutually beneficial partnership between U.S. universities and the government. Before 1940, U.S. federal support for scientific research was minimal and mainly limited to agriculture and public health. But during World War II, the government turbocharged its funding for research and development and boosted it again during the Cold War. The government extended grants to a kaleidoscopic variety of academic efforts that included conducting basic physics experiments, developing materials to enable hypersonic flight, and inventing artificial intelligence algorithms. This funding often constituted the only reliable support for long-term high-risk projects that private industry, focused on near-term profits, typically neglects.
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