The National Research Fund: A case study in the industrial support of academic science

In 1925 the National Academy of Sciences inaugurated a campaign to raise funds for the support of scientific research in American universities. Organised first as the National Research Endowment, then as the National Research Fund, the promoters of the scheme hoped to obtain the bulk of the money from industrial corporations. Their efforts failed. But the history of the Fund, including the reasons for its failure, provides an instructive case study in the behaviour of business enterprises in the financing of academic research.