At this moment, as it happened, newspapers reported that Robert Oppenheimer was under investigation by the Atomic Energy Commission as an alleged security risk. That, of course, was a different kind of problem, but it came as another powerful blow. For many of us, these events brought to a head the unsubstantiated rumors of subversion, supposedly by Communists planted in our midst, that had been fanned into flame by Sen. Joe McCarthy. Although he never did uncover a genuine Communist in the government, he succeeded by his accusations in getting a number of (generally quite innocent) people forced out of their jobs. In April 1954 we could not know that McCarthy's career of denunciations was to fade away in a few months. Fear, especially among bureaucrats in the lower echelons of government, was pervasive. Security agents were under pressure to show their anticommunist zeal by noting any evidence suggesting possible ...
Kicking Joe McCarthy Out of the Lab
In April 1954, I was one of thousands of biomedical scientists who gathered as usual for the annual meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). On this occasion, however, we received an unexpected shock. Rumors were circulating—with circumstantial detail that left little doubt as to their truth—that some highly regarded investigators, previously supported in their unclassified research by the U.S. Public Health Service, had found their grant appl
Written byJohn Edsall
| 4 min read
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