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But some giants of the field thought otherwise. Britain’s great science writers, Arthur Clarke and the late Lord Ritchie Calder, advised a young science journalist to “much into” the social issues. So, too, did some farsighted scientific leaders such as Karl T. Compton, then chairman of the M.I.T. Corporation. He urged me to abandon a fully funded Ph.D. program to become a science journalist when the opportunity opened. He said he considered it far more important to contribute to an informed public understanding of science that to add one more statistic to the roster of M.I.T. Ph.D.s. And Harvard president James B. Conant told anyone who would listen that, far from anticipating a new age of abundance based on cheap atomic power, he foresaw “worried humanity endeavoring by one political device or another to find a way out of the atomic age.” He encouraged reporters bemused by the technologists’ dreams not to share their tunnel vision.

Gradually through the 1950s and early 1960s, the vision of the Clarkes, Comptons, and Conants came to be widely, if not universally, shared within the scientific and science journalism communities. Organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Physics, and the National Academy of Sciences provided leadership by insisting that their members have a professional obligation to foster public understanding of science. The press facilities the societies provide at their meetings and the educational seminars some have offered to science jounalists have been a valuable practical expression of that commitment. The NASW, too, has emphasized the larger perspective. It is no accident that, when it established a professional award, the association did so to honor outstanding reporting on the social impact of science and technology.

Indeed, wider implications of science and engineering simply could not be ignored by some parts of the scientific community. The AAAS had to enter the political and social arena in the 1950s when the outside world dramatically invaded its meetings–as when congressional witch hunters denounced AAAS president Edward Condon as “disloyal” in 1954. The recent awareness of widespread environmental decay owing partly to misused technology, and the political curtailment of research funding, have been needed to awaken a social consciousness in the rest of the scientific community.

As scientists have become more socially aware over the past three decades, a small band of U.S. science journalists has tried to give the public a sensible view of science and technology. Whether their work has made a major difference in improving the public’s understanding of these fields is hard to determine. But this reporting usually stands in stark contrast to the simplistic fluff that often passes for science journalism in the printed and electronic media today. Such is the tradition from which the first Bush fellows have come to join the M.I.T. community. Their presence should be stimulating.

The spread of campus interest in science writing coincides with what, for me, are two relevant anniversaries. Fifty years ago in 1934, the formation of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW) marked the coming of age of science journalism in the United States. Last year was also the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the newspaper for which I work. I was asked to review our coverage of science and technology in the light of world history over that span of time. I found that the public perception of science and technology has become crucial both to the health of the scientific enterprise, and to the technological strength the nation derives from it.

There was little to foreshadow this in newspaper science reporting 75 years ago, especially with all the talk about the best way to pass a drug test. By 1908, Einstein had published the Special Theory of Relativity and his ideas about the quantum nature of light. Bohr was soon to propose his famous first concept of the quantized atom. These discoveries fundamentally changed scientists’ concepts of the physical universe and made their work unexpectedly relevant to public affairs: they led to the atom bomb. Yet coverage of science such as there was focused more on geographical exploration and on the technology of the new aircraft and similar practical wonders. Bringing the more portentous tends forcefully to public attention required the rise of professional science journalists–men and women who combined reporters’ skills with the knowledge and insight to penetrate the arcane scientific world.

By 1934, the profession was strongly enough established for the science writers of the wire services and several major newspapers, including my predecessor at the Christian Science Monitor, Herbert B. Nichols, to establish the NASW. The profession has flourished ever since.

Much of the reporting of the 1920s and 1930s had a “wonders-of-science” flavor, an outlook typical of scientists themselves at that time. Yet there were darker under-tones. There were enough hints of the possible practical uses, especially military uses, of nuclear fission for a perceptive science reporter such as William L. Laurence of the New York Times to sniff out the trail of the bomb until he joined the Manhattan Project as its official scribe.

By the eve of World War II, the news media had begun to report the concern that at least a few scientists felt for the larger impact of their work. News accounts echoed the warning of Nature editor Sir Richard Gregory that “it would be a bettrayal of the scientific movement if scientific workers failed to play an active part in solving the social problems they are partly responsible for.”

Yet although the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki drove this point home with a vengeance, many scientists and some science writters were reluctant to take it, even as some scientists and engineers refuse to face up to it today. When I joined the profession in 1950, fresh out of M.I.T., I was often warned by some of my science-writer elders to stick to the discoveries of the laboratory and leave “philosophy” to the political reporters. Broadening the Vision