United States
In the United States, the employment of scientists by state and federal governments was, like in the U.K., affected by the Second World War. President Roosevelt first created the National Defense Research Committee under Vannevar Bush. This was then expanded to the Office of Scientific Research and Development, also led by Bush. The OSRD employed scientists on a contract basis, with the OSRD as client and individual scientists as contractors. Scientists were contracted to research (through study and experiement) a specified subject, without constraints as to method, and to issue reports to the OSRD.
After the war, scientific research was continued by agencies such as the Office of Naval Research established in 1947, which again employed scientists as contractors. Scientific research was published in the normal way. The Atomic Energy Commission, established in 1946, and the National Institutes of Health, established in 1930, also paid scientists for scientific research, and were major sources of government research funding.
The National Science Foundation was eventually established in 1950. Defence research was explicitly excluded from its charter, even though Dr Bush had originally envisioned the NSF as including that as well. The armed forces established their own research departments, such as the Office of Ordnance Research for the Department of the Army, established on the campus of Duke University in June 1951.
U.S. local, state, and federal governments also employ scientists directly. The federal government employs them in departments such as the Department of Agriculture, Department of the Interior, and the Public Health Service. States and cities employ scientists in similar roles, including at fish and game commissions, parks, aquariums, arboretums, and museums; and at agencies such as environmental inspection agencies, crime laboratories, and public health monitoring agencies.
Read more about this topic: Government Scientist
Famous quotes related to united states:
“Places where he might live and die and never hear of the United States, which make such a noise in the world,—never hear of America, so called from the name of a European gentleman.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The rising power of the United States in world affairs ... requires, not a more compliant press, but a relentless barrage of facts and criticism.... Our job in this age, as I see it, is not to serve as cheerleaders for our side in the present world struggle but to help the largest possible number of people to see the realities of the changing and convulsive world in which American policy must operate.”
—James Reston (b. 1909)
“The House of Lords, architecturally, is a magnificent room, and the dignity, quiet, and repose of the scene made me unwillingly acknowledge that the Senate of the United States might possibly improve its manners. Perhaps in our desire for simplicity, absence of title, or badge of office we may have thrown over too much.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
“What chiefly distinguishes the daily press of the United States from the press of all other countries is not its lack of truthfulness or even its lack of dignity and honor, for these deficiencies are common to the newspapers everywhere, but its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion. It is, in the true sense, never well-informed.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“I hate to do what everybody else is doing. Why, only last week, on Fifth Avenue and some cross streets, I noticed that every feminine citizen of these United States wore an artificial posy on her coat or gown. I came home and ripped off every one of the really lovely refrigerator blossoms that were sewn on my own bodices.”
—Carolyn Wells (1862–1942)