Speaking for nature and nation: Biologists as public intellectuals in Cold War culture

The American scientific community was at the height of its political power just after World War II. Physical scientists wielded especially strong influence within the federal government as Cold War attitudes and military spending became entrenched elements of American culture. Biologists, on the other hand, found themselves mostly shut out of the federal advisory system. Between 1946 and 1972, a group of increasingly vocal biologists---mostly geneticists---attempted to influence public attitudes and policies by taking their scientific and political messages directly to the public. H. J. Muller, L. C. Dunn, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Bentley Glass, Joshua Lederberg, and their sympathetic colleagues used media interviews, educational pamphlets, public conferences, radio broadcasts (including appearances on the U.S. Department of State's Voice of America network), newspaper columns, and advertising as avenues to shape public policy on urgent biological issues. They became especially involved in discrediting the Soviet academician Trofim Lysenko, reconceptualizing the high school science curriculum, and advocating a role for the life sciences, especially exobiology, in the American space program. This dissertation uses case studies of each of these areas to explore the particular challenges biologists faced in locating outlets for their non-scientific views. The waning influence of scientists as public spokesmen in the 1970s coincided with a growing separation between fame and merit in the American academy. In the post-Cold War era, scientific success is indicated through financial success, not ideological triumph. The decline of scientific public intellectualism---one of the legacies of the end of the Cold War---represents a fundamental rupture of the alliance between scientific and national achievement.