The Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) was an agency of the United States federal government created to coordinate scientific research for military purposes during World War II. Arrangements were made for its creation during May 1941, and it was created formally by Executive Order 8807 on June 28, 1941. It superseded the work of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), was given almost unlimited access to funding and resources, and was directed by Vannevar Bush, who reported only to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The research was widely varied, and included projects devoted to new and more accurate bombs, reliable detonators, work on the proximity fuze, guided missiles, radar and early-warning systems, lighter and more accurate hand weapons, more effective medical treatments (including work to make penicillin at scale, which was necessary for its use as a drug), more versatile vehicles, and, the most secret of all, the S-1 Section, which later became the Manhattan Project and developed the first atomic weapons.
Origins and background
When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the United States possessed no significant government apparatus for mobilizing civilian science for military purposes. The country's military research establishments were small, underfunded, and disconnected from the nation's leading scientists at universities and industrial laboratories. The National Academy of Sciences, while authorized since 1863 to advise the government on scientific matters, lacked funds and operational capacity; its subordinate National Research Council had been largely ignored by the armed services during the interwar years. The only significant exception was the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), established in 1915, which had developed effective working relationships between government, universities, and the aircraft industry.
The scientific leaders who would create OSRD represented what historian Roger Geiger has called "a new generation of leadership in American science," one that had come of age during the fiscally constrained conditions of the 1930s. Unlike their predecessors, who had insisted that private philanthropy alone should support research, this generation was open to federal funding—though determined that scientific decisions remain in the hands of scientists. Many were also political conservatives who distrusted the expansion of government under the New Deal, making their willingness to create new federal agencies all the more striking.
Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer who had recently left the vice presidency of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to become president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, had been contemplating how to organize American science for a war he believed was coming. Bush drew on his experience as chairman of NACA and discussed his ideas with colleagues including Karl Compton of MIT, James Bryant Conant of Harvard, and Frank Jewett of Bell Telephone Laboratories and the National Academy of Sciences. As Conant later recalled, the group had concluded that "the military system as it existed, and as it had operated during the first war, ...would never fully produce the new instrumentalities which we would certainly need."
The German conquest of Western Europe in spring 1940 forced the issue. In early June, as German armies swept through France, Bush secured a brief meeting with President Roosevelt through presidential aide Harry Hopkins. Bush presented a single-page proposal for a new agency that would mobilize civilian scientists for defense research. Bush prepared himself to answer difficult questions. Roosevelt, who prized improvisation and had grown comfortable drawing New Deal critics into his wartime government, needed little persuading. The meeting lasted fewer than fifteen minutes. Roosevelt approved it on the spot, writing "OK—FDR" on the document. Within days, Roosevelt signed letters appointing Bush and his proposed colleagues to the new National Defense Research Committee, which came into formal existence on June 27, 1940, by order of the Council of National Defense.
Bush later acknowledged that the creation of the NDRC amounted to "an end run, a grab by which a small company of scientists and engineers, acting outside established channels, got hold of the authority and money for the program of developing new weapons." He would serve without a government salary, retaining his paid position at the Carnegie Institution even as it became eligible for NDRC contracts.
Establishment The NDRC proved effective in its first year, but Bush identified limitations that required a more powerful organization. NDRC's authority extended only to research, not to the engineering development necessary to transform laboratory discoveries into usable weapons. While the committee coordinated with the armed services, it lacked formal authority to ensure that its work meshed with Army and Navy requirements. Military medical research, vital for keeping troops healthy and treating casualties, remained outside NDRC's scope entirely.
These were not merely organizational inconveniences. The NDRC had been funded from the president's emergency fund via the Council of National Defense, which left it on uncertain legal footing and chronically short of money. Bush also wanted the authority to build prototype weapons and equipment: if the armed services refused to adopt something his researchers had developed, he could produce a working model and, as he saw it, dare them to ignore it. The addition of "Development" to the new agency's title was deliberate. Bush later noted that Congress understood and supported the principle that laboratories should be able to proceed beyond research and build hardware to demonstrate their results.
To address these limitations, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8807 on June 28, 1941, creating the Office of Scientific Research and Development within the Office for Emergency Management of the Executive Office of the President. The executive order charged OSRD with advising the president on defense-related research, coordinating the federal government's scientific work, mobilizing the nation's scientific personnel and resources, entering into contracts and agreements for research, and initiating research on behalf of allies whose defense the president deemed vital to American security. Crucially, OSRD would now receive direct congressional appropriations rather than relying on discretionary presidential funds, placing its operations on firmer legal and financial ground.
Bush was named Director of OSRD and retained direct access to Roosevelt, with no intervening bureaucratic layers. As historian Daniel Kevles has observed, this arrangement made OSRD responsive to, but not limited by, the military's perception of its own needs; the agency could proceed on a given research project whether the armed services approved or not. The reorganized NDRC, now chaired by James B. Conant, became one of OSRD's two main operating divisions. Bush retained the power to reject NDRC proposals or proceed without its recommendation. The other division was the newly created Committee on Medical Research (CMR), chaired by A. Newton Richards of the University of Pennsylvania, which assumed responsibility for medical and biological research relating to national defense.
Organization
Leadership
OSRD was structured to maximize scientific autonomy while coordinating with the military services. Bush, the director, reported directly to the President, with no intervening bureaucratic layers. An Advisory Council, composed of the director, the chairmen of NDRC and CMR, and representatives of the Army and Navy, provided policy guidance.
+ OSRD Principal Officers Position Incumbent Affiliation Director Vannevar Bush President, Carnegie Institution of Washington NDRC Chairman James B. Conant President, Harvard University CMR Chairman Alfred N. Richards Vice President of Medical Affairs, University of Pennsylvania Executive Secretary Irvin Stewart Former FCC Commissioner Special Assistant to Director Carroll L. Wilson Former assistant to MIT President Karl Compton
National Defense Research Committee
Following the creation of OSRD, NDRC underwent a major reorganization in December 1942. The original five broad divisions were replaced by a structure of nineteen technical divisions, two panels, and two special committees, each focused on a specific class of military problems:
+ NDRC Divisions (December 1942 reorganization) Division Subject Chief 1 Ballistics research Leason Adams 2 Effects of impact and explosion John Ely Burchard 3 Rocket ordnance John T. Tate 4 Ordnance accessories Alexander Ellett 5 New missiles H. B. Richmond 6 Subsurface warfare John T. Tate 7 Fire control Harold L. Hazen 8 Explosives George Kistiakowsky 9 Chemistry Walter R. Kirner 10 Absorbents and aerosols W. Albert Noyes Jr. 11 Chemical engineering R. P. Russell 12 Transportation Hartley Rowe 13 Electrical communication C. B. Jolliffe 14 Radar Alfred L. Loomis 15 Radio coordination C. Guy Suits 16 Optics and camouflage George R. Harrison 17 Physics Paul E. Klopsteg 18 War metallurgy Clyde Williams 19 Miscellaneous weapons H. M. Chadwell
In addition, NDRC maintained the Applied Mathematics Panel, the Applied Psychology Panel, and special committees on propagation and tropical deterioration.
Committee on Medical Research
The CMR was organized into six divisions covering the major fields of military medicine:
+ CMR Divisions Division Subject Medicine Infectious diseases, tropical diseases, convalescence, neuropsychiatry Surgery Wounds, burns, neurosurgery, surgical specialties Aviation medicine Physiological effects of high altitude, acceleration, decompression Physiology Blood substitutes, shock, nutrition Chemistry Treatment of gas casualties, insect and pest control Malaria Antimalarial drugs and treatment
CMR worked closely with the Division of Medical Sciences of the National Research Council, which provided expert advice through specialized subcommittees.
Administrative structure
Beyond the technical divisions, OSRD maintained administrative offices for contracts and finance, personnel, field service, publications, and liaison with foreign allies. At its peak in 1945, the agency employed approximately 850 full-time paid staff in Washington and an additional 650 people working part-time or without compensation, for a total of roughly 1,500 personnel. This small central staff coordinated work performed by thousands of scientists and engineers at contractor facilities across the country.
Operations
The contract system One of OSRD's lasting organizational innovations was its systematic use of government research contracts to fund civilian science. When Harvard president James Conant first learned of Bush's plans, he expected that wartime research would be organized as it had been in World War I—by constructing government laboratories and staffing them with soldier-scientists. Bush quickly corrected him: "we will write contracts with universities, research institutes and industrial laboratories." The implications, Conant later wrote, were immediately apparent: this approach "portended the beginning of a new relationship between the federal government and the nation's universities."
Rather than attempting to bring scientists into government or expanding military laboratories, OSRD funded research at universities, industrial firms, hospitals, and other private institutions, which retained their independence while working on government-defined problems. This approach reflected both the growth in United States' industrial and university research capacities since the prior war, and the ideological preferences of OSRD's leaders, who sought to keep scientific direction in civilian hands.