In 1945, the United States was not only the strongest economic and military power in the world; it was also the world's leader in science and technology. In American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe, John Krige describes the efforts of influential figures in the United States to model postwar scientific practices and institutions in Western Europe on those in America. They mobilized political and financial support to promote not just America's scientific and technological agendas in Western Europe but its Cold War political and ideological agendas as well.
Drawing on the work of diplomatic and cultural historians, Krige argues that this attempt at scientific dominance by the United States can be seen as a form of "consensual hegemony," involving the collaboration of influential local elites who shared American values. He uses this notion to analyze a series of case studies that describe how the U.S. administration, senior officers in the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the NATO Science Committee, and influential members of the scientific establishment—notably Isidor I. Rabi of Columbia University and Vannevar Bush of MIT—tried to Americanize scientific practices in such fields as physics, molecular biology, and operations research. He details U.S. support for institutions including CERN, the Niels Bohr Institute, the French CNRS and its laboratories at Gif near Paris, and the never-established "European MIT." Krige's study shows how consensual hegemony in science not only served the interests of postwar European reconstruction but became another way of maintaining American leadership and "making the world safe for democracy."
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ABSTRACTThe promotion of the benign atom as an instrument of American foreign policy and hegemonic ambitions was important to scientists and policy makers alike who sought to win "hearts and minds" in the early years of the cold war. The distribution of radioisotopes to friendly nations for research and medicinal purposes in the late 1940s was followed by Eisenhower's far more spectacular Atoms for Peace initiative, announced at the United Nations in December 1953. This chapter describes the polyvalent significance of the diffusion first of radioisotopes, then of reactor technology, notably at the famous conference in Geneva in 1955. It places particular emphasis on the role of scientists and their appeal to scientific internationalism to promote national scientific leadership. It is stressed that openness and security, sharing knowledge or technology and implementing regimes of surveillance, were two sides of the same coin.
In one of the largest studies conducted to date of hospitalized patients with cSSSI, meropenem, 500 mg IV q8h had comparable safety and efficacy to imipenem-cilastatin, 500 mg IV q8h.
The formal communication system of agricultural scientists working at two major teaching and research centres in Brazil is investigated with an eye on formulating policies to improve it. To avoid the pitfalls surrounding the use of sources like the Science Citation Index in this area, a sample of the articles actually published by the scientists was used to construct the data base. Results are presented on where the scientists publish, on the content of their papers, on whom they refer to, and on the age distribution of their references. The picture which emerges is one of a fragmented scientific community whose members have only tenuous links with their colleagues in other domestic institutions, and whose work appears to be lagging behind the research frontier in their field. Policies for ameliorating this situation are suggested.
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