The Rockefeller Foundation's Funding Policy for Molecular Biology: Success or Failure?

Abstract

The role of the Rockefeller Foundation in shaping early molecular biology has been a topic of considerable interest in the sociology of science. Warren Weaver, who as one of the Divisional Directors of the Rockefeller Foundation had the power to dispense vast sums of money to various biological research programmes, has claimed that it was the $90 million spent by the Foundation in the period 1932-59 (coupled with his own mode of distributing it) which produced the highly successful discipline of molecular biology. IOlby, Kohler,3 Yoxen and Fuerst5 have, in their separate ways, tried to focus on, and to account for, the crucial role played by the Rockefeller Foundation in the emergence of molecular biology. Yet in spite of this collective effort to understand the relationship between the Rockefeller Foundation and early molecular biology, Abir-Am feels that 'the precise ways in which the research policy of the Rockefeller Foundation might have affected the course of molecular biology have remained elusive'.6 Assessing the Effectiveness of the Funding Policy

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