A bombastic California automobile entrepreneur works the levers of a new presidential administration to advance his interests. Political meddling in government research scandalizes American scientists. The intersection of science and politics becomes a cultural battleground. “Acid Test” tells this story, which unfolded not this past spring, but in the spring of 1953. Sinclair Weeks, Dwight Eisenhower’s new Secretary of Commerce, ousted Allen Varley Astin as Director of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in late March. The bureau, he claimed, had been “insufficiently objective” when it tested and condemned AD-X2, an aftermarket additive intended to extend the life of lead-acid car batteries. The blowback from American scientists was fast and fierce—and effective. By autumn, Astin was securely back in post. That victory would prove crucial as the scientific community adapted to a radically changed postwar political context.
Cartoonist Jim Berryman depicted Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks injecting toxic politics into the National Bureau of Standards. Washington Evening Star, 7 April 1953. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
When I stumbled on this story in the Enrico Fermi Papers at the University of Chicago, which document Fermi’s effort to organize the American Physical Society (APS) response to Astin’s firing, two things struck me. The first was surprise. This episode was new to me, despite the considerable time I’d spent reading and writing about Cold War American science. My surprise deepened when I realized that it wasn’t just me; NIST had made an excellent short documentary about the incident, but the historical literature said very little about it, most of it in passing. Second, I found it viscerally compelling that such an influential episode hinged on science that was so wonderfully boring. The controversy that led American scientists to their first decisive political victory of the Atomic Age turned on questions about the unglamorous fields of battery electrochemistry and statistical experiment design.
The unassuming nature of the science involved goes a long way toward explaining why this episode has remained obscure. Metrology laboratories like the NBS are boring on purpose. Their work improving and maintaining the measurement standards that smooth the operation of all other scientific inquiry is designed to fade into the background—a standard measure whose use demands too much active thought isn’t doing its job. But, as any baker who’s tried to recreate a recipe without adequate measuring devices will tell you, when standards stop working, so does everything else.
Figure 1. Boring science in action: a 1952 battery additive test at the National Bureau of Standards. Records of Dr. Allen V. Astin, Box 12, National Archives and Records Administration II, College Park, MD.
We underestimate the potency of boring science at our peril. Weeks, for his part, miscalculated if he thought that the recondite nature of the bureau’s work would mean that firing its director would cause little fuss. The strength of the scientific community’s reaction reveals much about the esteem in which the bureau’s work, boring though it might have been, was held. In the heated and much-studied debates over nuclear politics, scientists ceded a great deal of ground to political considerations. When it came to standards, however, they drew a line on the lab bench and held it. Their victory helped establish the terms of the stable and productive relationship between science and government that has survived for the past seven decades.
Attending to the political importance of boring science is crucial as the structures of government science face a sustained political assault on their independence. Most of the ways science matters—really matters, insofar as it ensures the stability of our society—involves practices like metrology and meteorology. These fields tend not to attract Nobel Prizes or newspaper headlines, but their rich intersections with the conduct of day-to-day life make us depend on them. We might not notice when they work; we will once they no longer do.