Longtime MIT professor and Noble laureate David Baltimore, who passed away earlier this month at age 87, was rightly lauded by MIT for his enormous contributions to science. Flushed down the memory hole is the saga of the fierce opposition he faced when trying to found the Whitehead Institute back in 1981.

The Boston Globe called it a “corporate takeover of MIT.” Enraged faculty, happy to live on the government dole, railed that it would “skew the biology department in directions faculty did not wish to take.” There was particular concern that Baltimore himself would “gain undue influence over hiring within the department.”

Because government grants never skew research, huh? And a government takeover of academic science could never happen, right? And, surely, government affirmative action programs and DEI policies would never gain influence over merit-based STEM hiring.

You see, the Whitehead Institute was financed by a wealthy entrepreneur, Edwin “Jack” Whitehead, who made his fortune in the crass commercial business of manufacturing laboratory equipment. If private fortunes were allowed to fund scientific research, academia would lose its “independence.” Academic freedom itself was at stake!

What a difference the passing decades have made. What a string of successes private foundation like the Whitehead Institute and those that followed delivered. And what a mess politicized federal funding made of Big Science – its reputation trashed, its research programs driven down billion-dollar rabbit holes, its ranks riddled with incompetent DEI hires and outright fraudsters churning out irreproducible research, its public support cratering.

Nobody remembers what happened nearly half a century ago. But the Beaver was there and has watched this slow-motion train wreck unfold ever since.

Story suggested by MIT News