American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War.(Review)

American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War, by Jessica Wang. Chapel Hill, North Carolina, University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xiv, 375 pp. $82.50 Cdn (cloth), $32.95 Cdn (paper).

In American Science in an Age of Anxiety, Jessica Wang, an associate professor of American history at U.C.L.A., explores the chilling political situation of science and scientists during the beginning of the Cold War in the United States from 1945 to 1950. Wang's aim, as she says, "is not only to illuminate the effects of anticommunism on scientists but to understand better the integration of scientists into the Cold War political consensus. Domestic anticommunism did more than interfere with individual scientists' lives; it affected the entire scientific enterprise. The Cold War transformed the politics of the scientific profession, the relationship of science to the state, and the bureaucratic order devoted to scientific …