Think Tanks and Scientific Hothouses

University departments have long been centres for scientific creativity, but constrained by the need to teach, and - more recently at least - to bring in research funding. During the Second World War, an entirely different form of scientific research centre was created. Under the umbrella of the Manhattan Project, elite scientists were freed from budgetary and teaching constraints, and the very best in their fields were brought together in the effort to develop nuclear weaponry for the United States. Despite the ongoing pressures of war, and the morally-ambiguous results of their work, many of the scientists involved looked back fondly on the intensely focussed and supportive research environment. Perhaps naturally scientific hothouses and think-tanks have been a subject for science fiction in the decades since.

Military Think tanks

The legacy of the Manhattan Project appeared most directly in science fiction of the immediate post war period, which used a range of then-extant real-world scientific research centres or their unnamed close twins as settings for breakthroughs or for further weapons work. Contemporary or near-future stories set at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Brookhaven, Hanford and other nuclear research centres were relatively common. 

An interesting example here can be found in the short story Breeds there a Man? by Isaac Asimov (Astounding, June 1951). This is told from the point of view of a psychologist who is called to the assistance of a project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (a centre founded in 1943 as part of the effort to refine nuclear fuels and still active to the current day). In the story, the key scientist working on a form of impenetrable force-field capable of deflecting nuclear blasts appears to go insane. He eventually confides a theory that humanity is an alien experiment, and that exceptional minds are culled as potentially harmful either to the experiment’s creators. The story ends with the successful demonstration of the shield, but the psychologist’s efforts proving unsuccessful.

Perhaps understandably, fictional examples of this kind of military research establishment became a staple of the Spy Fi genre that peaked in the 1970s. Examples include the Lansdowne Park biological and chemical weapons establishment in Department S (TV episode, “A Small War of Nerves”, 1969), the computer research centre in The Avengers (TV episode, “Who Shot Poor George Oblique Stroke XR40?”, 1968) or Project Zero in The Champions (TV episode, “Project Zero”, 1968). The first of these is an example of a class of stories in which a disenchanted scientist steals their own research either through moral scruples or for personal profit - in this case taking a nerve agent in the belief that only a demonstration of its lethality can lead to a ban on further research. The second is an example of the many research centres in Spy Fi raided by villains in search of secrets for their own profit or to disrupt progress - here trying to destroy a military computer. The last is perhaps more subtle - Project Zero appears to be a legitimate military research establishment founded by the UK government to develop a gun capable of triggering nuclear fission in enriched fuel at a distance. However it proves to have been established by a cabal of villains who have fooled the scientists involved (who range from chemists to physicists and engineers) into relocating to the underground establishment and forgoing contact with their families due to security concerns. The same basic premise of scientists being misled into working on a secret project for false actors can be found in the 1965 The Man from UNCLE episode “The Virtue Affair” (although here the project is a guided missile system). The secrecy of the military research sector works against its own interests here, making the deceptions relatively easy to establish and maintain.

The representation of military think tanks in science fiction extend well beyond the Earth, with examples to be found in the extended Star Wars universe, and in a vast range of militaristic science fiction. A notable case can be found in the television series Doctor Who, on the planet Skaro. This is a world which saw an extended period of war between two nation-states: the Thals and the Kaleds. Centuries of warfare, including nuclear warfare, led to the civilisations being restricted to two enclosed city environments. In one of these, the Kaled Scientific Elite were gathered by the chief scientist Davros (as first and most thoroughly explored in TV serial “Genesis of the Daleks”, 1975). While they were working in peak wartime conditions, rather than the more relaxed attitudes of post-war think-tanks, they exemplify the anything-goes, resource-rich mentality of elite projects (albeit with individual dissenting scientists). Amongst their creations were the Daleks - ruthless machine-housed mutants which became the Doctor’s principal opponents.

An equally sobering example of a military-funded think tank in which the scientists take control of their actions can be found in Murray Leinster’s series of novels about young space engineer Joe Kendrick. In City on the Moon (novel, 1957), humanity has progressed to the early stages of lunar colonisation, and amongst their constructs is a scientific research space station in a fixed orbit above the lunar far-side. Their purpose is to devise and experiment with new methods to use nuclear energy, which is much needed on Earth and in order to open up space travel. However, as one of Kendrick’s allies, engineer Mike Scandia, reports, this research community begins acting very strangely. In this hothouse environment, the eight resident scientists have devised a method to disrupt atoms which is capable of destroying the entire Earth. Instead of allowing this secret to escape, they instead opt to destroy themselves and the entire Space Laboratory.

Commercial/Industrial and Private Thinktanks

While military think tanks were a natural descendant of the Manhattan Project, the idea that scientists might be more productive when concentrated and given freedom also spread into the commercial and private sector (albeit often under government or military contracts). Between the late 1940s and the 1960s, General Atomics appears to have become such an environment, recruiting many ex-Manhattan Project personnel and pursuing the goal of pulse-driven atomic interplanetary (or even interstellar) spaceflight in the form of Project Orion. During its peak years, this project appears to have had much the same anything-goes freedom to conceptualise and experiment, and the same concentration of talent, as its military predecessor. In his book Project Orion: The atomic spaceship 1957-1965 (non-fiction, 2002), George Dyson (son of leading scientist Freeman Dyson) quotes the physicists involved as recalling the environment fondly:

“That was the best working environment and best working conditions that I have experienced in my life” remembers Jerry Astl. “And that’s why we achieved what we did, because nobody worried whether it was your sphere or not, if you knew you could help you did help. Nobody worried about punching the clock. There was free exchange of information and opinions. And I believe that is what is necessary to formulate everybody’s mind and push it forward. If you can bring together high theoreticians and men with practical experience and ability to create, and if you can get them to work together, like brothers, then you have something.” (pg 93)

Project Orion was eventually cancelled as the risks of fallout and nuclear proliferation were recognised and legislated against. General Atomics continued to exist, but inevitably appears to have become increasingly constrained by financial and practical considerations.

A similar concentration of intellect appears to have developed at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, a privately-funded, non-University but academic research institute, which recruited many ex-Manhattan Project physicists, including Einstein and Oppenheimer. The institute has appeared in a range of science fiction, including examples such as C H Thames’ The Eye and I (Fantastic Fiction, April 1955), Fritz Leiber’s Appointment in Tomorrow (Galaxy, July 1951) and more recent work such as Robert Sawyer’s The Oppenheimer Alternative (novel, 2020). Probable descendants or imitators of the institute, such as the Galactic Institute for Advanced Study in E E ‘Doc’ Smith’s Masters of the Vortex (novel, 1968) also came up fairly frequently.

This institute or others like it - independent and privately funded, but loosely affiliated with a university or other organisation - may have been the model for Star Trek’s Daystrom Institute. Named after a computer designer, Richard Daystrom (who appeared in the Original Series episode “The Ultimate Computer”, 1968, with less than entirely positive results), the Daystrom Institute extends beyond the remit of computer technology and into other areas of science, such as archaeology, with appearances across the Star Trek series cannon. Its management and funding are never very clear (although in Star Trek’s post-scarcity paradigm the latter is unlikely to be a problem), although it clearly has a working relationship with Starfleet (whose own remit is a mixture of military and scientific work).

This idea of privately-sponsored research institutes appears elsewhere in science fiction, although rarely as the focus of the story. In Created Equal, by Bill Higgins (short story, Galaxy, Feb 1974), for example, the story regards a criminal case in which a man is accused of murder for destroying the first self-aware computer, which was developed at the Sands Laboratories:

“Pinon-sprinkled hills, only beginning to fester with housing developments, surrounded the eighty-acre research center on three sides. Sands had grown from a private inventor’s workshop, a plaything of a wealthy rancher interested in off-beat inventions and tax write-offs. His will had established the existing structure of the enterprise, a nonprofit but well-salaried development lab which had flourished in spite of endless legal forays by disappointed heirs. Growing steadily, Sands had won over the years a national reputation for creating superb instrumentation and control systems.”

 However the focus in the narrative is on the legal case and the defense barrister, rather than the research lab and its operations.

A similar sort of fluid and flexible research environment, although one driven more by commercial pressures, was found in some of the larger industrially-funded research centres, with a notable example being Bell Laboratories. Founded in 1925 by a telephone company, the research centre originated groundbreaking work in communications, radio astronomy, computing, software, quantum and semiconductor physics, resulting in eleven Nobel Prizes. Bell Labs still exists (now owned by Nokia) but the funding for fundamental research (i.e. that without a clear pathway towards commercialisation) was substantially curtailed in the 1980s and 90s. This pattern of growing financial pressures affecting research capacity in private industries during the late twentieth century is common. In the UK, for example, the General Post Office (GPO) was an important technological innovator until its privatisation in the late 1960s.

A science fictional example of a well-funded scientific research and development division in a commercial context, largely paralleling Bell Labs, can be found in George O Smith’s Venus Equilateral series - a set of 13 short stories written in 1942-1947 and later anthologised. The titular communications hub is a space station at the Sun-Venus L4 point (i.e. orbiting the sun at the same distance as Venus but ahead of it in its orbit). The short stories in this series were typically problem-solving exercises, in which the scientific and technical staff of Venus Equilateral Inc are given freedom (and funding) to explore new ideas, try out new technologies or troubleshoot problems in a relatively relaxed environment. While many of their outputs are commercialisable, that is seldom the plot driver or primary concern, and the team are shown as willing and able to contribute and bounce ideas off one another in a manner similar to that described in General Atomic above.

A private establishment on a larger scale (as it appears in the film narrative rather than the theme parks on which this is based) is Tomorrowland (feature film, 2015; dir. Bird). The titular city was designed as a haven for scientific discovery by a collaboration of Gustave Eiffel, Jules Verne, Thomas Edison and Nikolai Tesla and located in a parallel dimension. Reaching a peak of scientific discovery decades, or even centuries, ahead of Earth in the mid-twentieth century, the city subsequently became abandoned and decayed as a result of an experiment gone wrong, and is revived at the end of the film - recruiting scientists and those with the correct open mindset from the general population and removing them to the parallel to work unimpeded.

Think Tank Gestalts

 An interesting aspect of scientific think-tanks in either science or science fiction is the concept that their outputs as a collective are greater than those the individuals would have been able to achieve separately. Some science fiction takes this to its logical extreme and imagines not only a group project, but an actual group mind - a gestalt created from the intellects of the participating scientists.

This is the situation encountered in the science fiction sitcom Red Dwarf (TV, 1988-2020). In the episode "Legion" (1993), the crew visits a long-defunct deep space research space station which was “home to the finest minds of the 23rd century”. There they encounter an entity known as Legion, who provides them with luxury and appears to live surrounded by exquisite art, as well as advanced inventions of the station such as hard-light hologram technology. However this person soon begins acting irrationality. It becomes clear that Legion is in fact an artificial being designed to hold a gestalt of the great minds in the research centre, and who had been responsible for many of its greatest breakthroughs. Finding himself constituted instead of the Red Dwarf crew, he is driven mad:

“Not only do I possess your combined intellects and memories, I also share the sum of your malice and rage and anger, magnified many times. I'm capable of quite insanely irrational behaviour.”

The small crew, of just four, and their unconventional personalities exacerbate the problem, but the story demonstrates how vulnerable a gestalt personality can be to instabilities in its midst. In this case the only available solution is to remove three of the minds leaving the most rational of the crew to dominate the gestalt and secure their escape.

Scientifically-motivated gestalt minds can also be found in two Doctor Who stories. "Shada" (1980) is an unusual serial in Doctor Who history as it reached an advanced state of development and pre-filming before being cancelled as a result of industrial action. Footage was used in the Doctor Who story "The Five Doctors" (1983), and the full story has been reconstructed in webcast, audio drama, novel and animated form. The story features a villain known as Skagra who has drained the minds of the Foundation for the Study of Advanced Sciences from the base on a space station known as Think Tank, and downloaded these into a spherical device. The titular Shada is a Time Lord prison, where Skagra hopes to find another exceptional scientist for the gestalt he is creating - the Time Lord criminal Salyavin. With the completed gestalt, he hopes to dominate humanity. It falls to the Doctor to prevent this, at the risk of himself being absorbed into the gestalt. Ultimately, first the Think Tank (housing the scientists’ vacant bodies) and then the sphere (housing their minds) are destroyed.

A similar experiment, although even more ambitious in scope, appears in another Doctor Who story, “Time and the Rani” (1987). While in "Shada" the villain takes over a gestalt designed for scientific research, here the gestalt is created deliberately by the villainous Rani. In this story, she collects the greatest scientists of history, including Einstein, Pasteur and Hypatia. An amoral biochemist, the Time Lord scientist has created a giant brain to house the intellects of all her captives in a gestalt, and is determined to add the Doctor to the collective mind. She uses this to harvest the solution to problems - in the immediate case to find a material that will destroy a strange matter asteroid heading towards her research base. However the Doctor (in this case Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor) starts spouting gibberish, driving the collective mind towards madness, and he has to be removed from the mix. Ultimately, this gestalt too is annihilated when the giant brain is destroyed.

In each case discussed here the output of the gestalt exceeds the potential output of its components in either speed or scope, but the gestalt itself proves reluctant, operates under duress or proves vulnerable to the skewing influence of one specific mind within it.

Anarchic Think-tanks

A key property of scientific hothouses in both reality and fiction is the freedom they provide for scientists to exercise creative approaches without stiflingly-close supervision or immediate pressures of finance or governance (although, of course, distant military, academic or commercial pressures are undoubtedly always present). This lack of close supervision, together with the creativity which often accompanies scientific imagination, has led a number of authors to consider scientific think tanks as anarchic and often amusing places.

Allegory, by William T Powers appeared in the April 1953 edition of Astounding SF Magazine. This short story begins with an office clerk, John Mark, in the ‘Research Guidance Centre’, responsible for entering research proposals into a computer and passing on their near-inevitable rejections. An inventor, Norris, proposing to exploit their functioning anti-gravity device, shakes the clerk’s complacency by introducing the idea that “what the computers say seems to have very little to do with reality.” The fact that the device demonstrably works, in defiance of computer-dictated laws of physics, is enough to undermine an entire worldview. Soon the clerk is unable to function normally and at the end of the story is sent to a well-sealed asylum:

“When the door swung wide, he gasped. Norris looked up from the work-bench, gestured at the huge, gleaming laboratory, the scurrying white-coated men, the racks of equipment, the panels studded with jacks and meters, and said, grinning, “Welcome to the loony bin.””

In other words, only by stepping outside of conformity and rigid thought processes can scientific advances be brought to fruition.

Gregg Williams may not have been imagining a lunatic asylum but he wasn’t far off describing ones in the two short stories of his T.A.B.R.O.T. series. The Computer and the Oriental (F&SF, July 1973) introduced readers to the Tactical Army Base Research Outpost Number Two or TABROT. This is described as a scientific task force, and - while military funded - “houses the nation’s most brilliant misfits the Army could get a hold on” and exercises far from military discipline. A subset of the base staff create something known as the Tuesday Night Forum - basically a drinking club of their more creative members at the local pub with a penchant for practical jokes.

After a chaotic encounter with the principle of Chinese divination through I Ching in the first story, they go on to create radio-controlled plastic in the second (Plastic and Practical Jokes, F&SF, Mar 1974), in which a general boasts told “TABROT has the highest incidence and success of ideas in R&D than any other organisation in the world” but in which the practical jokes and anarchy continue at full pace. The practical approach to the team is demonstrated by their approach to attempted espionage: 

“Colonel John, whose energy seemed almost as inexhaustible as his height, was explaining something to Socrates, drawing rapidly on the tablecloth as he went. (This has been a good thing ever since a man from the Russian embassy, thinking he had penetrated our defenses, found out about our scribblings and contracted an agreement with Finney to buy our tablecloths at fifty dollars apiece. Finney keeps half of it, we buy more beer with our share, and the Russian sits up nights clucking over his top-secret tablecloths - everybody's happy.)”

This kind of approach was also adopted by the television series A Town called Eureka (TV, 2006-2012 [1]). This centered on a town founded as a corporate settlement for a free-ranging science consultancy and R&D firm called Global Dynamics, set up in 1947 at the behest of Albert Einstein as a scientific haven. Indeed employment by or for Global Dynamics is a necessary prerequisite for living in the town. Eureka houses an exceptionally high concentration of scientific and technical geniuses, which are seen from the perspective of a city police officer and his delinquent daughter who stumble across the secret and frequently chaotic scientist’s paradise. The series is a comedy drama, which combines episodes of genuine drama and angst (many caused by technical accidents) with incidents in which the unpredictability of the new scientific advances cause more comical effects.

Less serious still is the scientific community of Griffin Rock (a small seaside town in Maine) in the animated series Transformers: Rescue Bots (TV series, 2011-2016). Seemingly without external organisation or concerns over funding, the town nonetheless appears to have a long history of acting as a Eureka-like magnet for scientists (mentally unbalanced or otherwise) and becoming a testing ground for their unregulated inventions. These meet with mixed success, resulting in a range of perilous and/or amusing adventures for the titular Cybertronian rescue team and their human allies.

Importantly, while each of these anarchic areas have frequent experiments going wrong, as must be expected from trial and error research, they also have procedures and defenses in place to protect against the consequences, including ample provision of psychologists, rescue robots, emergency procedures and shielded areas to protect the populace.

The Decline of Think Tanks.

Over the latter quarter of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the scope for pure blue-skies research centres somewhat declined. A shift to focus on short-term profit, combined with stock market pressures and decreasing military budgets, led to a more restricted role for science-driven investigations, and an increasing role for charity, commercial and university-funded research. The rise of protest movements through the same period, together with increasing levels of media scrutiny, also led to pressure on research establishments, such as the UK military’s Porton Down research centre (known for chemical and biological weaponry). In the UK, for example, the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) was divided into Dstl (The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory) and Qinetiq (a commercial defense technology company) in an effort to slim down and commercialise its original research remit. While military research centres such as Porton Down and Oak Ridge continue to exist, their research is generally more closely scrutinised and focussed.

This does not mean that pure research outside of universities is entirely neglected. The introduction of commercially or privately-funded initiatives such as Breakthrough or X Prizes (which promise huge reward for the first to achieve particular objectives) have acted as incentive for private capital to return to fundamental research - albeit with the intention of practical applications. Also on the applied side, but nonetheless rewarding innovation, is the workplace culture that has been associated with Dot Com companies such as Google in the early 2000s, in which experimental side projects were strongly encouraged (although, again, this was curtailed under financial pressures). More recently, charitable institutions such as the Kavli foundation and the Perimeter Institute have become increasingly visible funding research centres both inside and outside of university infrastructures.

The trend away from large pure research centres has nonetheless been reflected in a decreasing frequency with which such centres appear in science fiction. However it still remains informative to consider the recurring themes in the earlier examples.

Much of the fiction of scientific hothouses engages with narratives of scientistism and technocracy - the fear and/or expectation that idealistic groups of scientists will ultimately wish to take control and reshape the world in the manner they consider most appropriate. A typical example, amongst many, appears in Doctor Who in the form of the National Institute for Advanced Scientific Research, aka Think Tank, which appeared in the 1975 story “Robot”. This private research centre is taken over by members of the Scientific Reform Society, who try to misuse the titular robot (designed for work in dangerous conditions) to steal nuclear codes from multiple nations instead, with the intent of introducing “a more rationally ordered society”.

While scientism is a common fear, it is not only the scientists themselves who appear to be suspect. The narratives of many of these centres )and of gestalts in particular, as in Red Dwarf’s “Legion) emphasised the risk that a think tank could be corrupted by one or more individuals whose objectives - whether personal or ideological - or mentality were contrary to their interests. These bad actors vary from megalomaniacs to organisations or even nation states opposed to those in charge. While it is rarely stated explicitly, these fictions float the idea that allowing too great a concentration of intellectual power in one place is dangerous and creates vulnerability. Indeed, in cases where the scientists are not aiming to impose their own ideology, the stories often show them as vulnerable innocents, with their work at risk of corruption (as seen, for example, in The Champions or more recently in Eureka) - like hot-house flowers, scientists in this picture might not be able to survive in the outside world and must be protected. These narratives ask questions of who is responsible for the output of such centres and whether minds well fitted for research are necessarily those best suited to ask questions regarding its impact - or, on the other hand, whether it is appropriate and moral for scientists to wipe their hands of those questions. Inevitably, responsibility for innovation rests at least in part with the innovators, but do they (or their funders, or indeed any other small group) have the sole right to decide its fate?

However the very reason such centres present a potential hazard is that they are so frequently portrayed as extremely successful. As the narratives of the Manhattan Project and Project Orion, as well as the success of the Institute of Advanced Studies, showed the freedom of thought and creativity could produce environments in which many scientists were happy, fulfilled and produced exceptional research. The relief from immediate commercial pressures allowed for experimentation and innovation. As Williams put it in Plastic and Practical Jokes:

“it isn't a matter of asking questions and looking up the answers. It's research and testing and months of trial and error - sometimes years. You don't know what it is until you've found it, but then again, you can’t find it until you know what it is. So there you have it.”

In other words, the creative process in a research context can lead to enormous steps forward - but not on commercial timescales and not without very nearly as many steps backwards along the way.

In the current economic and political climate, at least in the UK, US and many other nations, large groups of scientists are relatively unlikely to be given the freedom from financial, administrative and other pressure (in the form of grant applications, administrative duties, applications for studentships, teaching and other duties) that some enjoyed in the post-Second World War years. Indeed, even at the time, the freedom of large research centres was something likely only enjoyed by a small subset of the scientific community. The majority have always been constrained in a system in which the demand for (administrative, teaching and funding) resources far outstripped the supply.

The narratives of scientific think tanks warn of some of the worst dangers of the human psyche, but also showcase some of the best aspects of human ingenuity. They remind us that science, as much as any other human endeavour, is a creative process, and that the synergies arising from a complementary group can be enormously powerful. Born in hothouses, hardened off through adversary, the ideas coming from such centres have the potential to shape a better future.