In the fall of 1933, with the United States in the depths of the Great Depression, Karl T. Compton, MIT's president and chairman of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's recently created Science Advisory Board, proposed allocating $16 million of the Public Works Administration's $3 billion budget to fund a "Recovery Program of Science." Its purpose would be to boost depleted research budgets and provide jobs for the legion of unemployed scientists and engineers. The funds were denied because no legislative authority existed for funding research through the PWA.

Undaunted, Compton spent the following year crafting a more ambitious proposal that would not only provide short-term relief to struggling scientists but also establish a national program for scientific research. Today, with the government committing tens of billions of dollars from its $787 billion stimulus package to funding basic science, and tens of billions more to get advanced technologies to market (see "Chasing the Sun"), Compton's ideas seem relatively modest. But his efforts marked the beginning of a profound shift in the relationship between science and government, and in making the case Compton braved opposition on multiple fronts.