Jan 01 1935The Foundation decides to enter new fields in the humanities and arts: libraries and museums, drama, radio, motion pictures, American studies, and the collection and interpretation of native cultural materials. A film library, established at the Museum of Modern Art, wins international recognition. A year earlier, a special trustee committee had reviewed the humanities program and found it wanting: “It frankly appears to your committee that a program in the humanities, based on a cloistered kind of research, is wide of the goal…It is getting us facts but not necessarily followers.”
Jan 01 1934For the first time, the Foundation takes up work in agriculture when trustees approve a program of rural reconstruction in China. In addition to agriculture, the new program embraces sanitation, preventive medicine (above), marketing, rural economy and community work. World War II ends the program.
Jan 01 1933Beginning in 1933 and extending for more than two decades, the Foundation expends $1.5 million in identifying and assisting 300 scientists and scholars fleeing Nazi Germany to settle in friendly locations. Many relocate to US universities.
Jan 01 1932The Foundation begins its attack on another public health hazard—schistosomiasis, a disease caused by the liver fluke carried by snails living in canals of irrigated lands—with the publication of a study of the disease in Egypt (see image from the research above).
Jan 01 1932The Foundation grants are used to establish full-time departments of psychiatry in teaching hospitals and medical schools, including Chicago, Duke, Harvard, McGill, St. Louis, Tulane, Yale and Washington.
Jan 01 1932Warren Weaver comes to the Foundation and during his 27-year association becomes the principal architect of programs in the natural sciences. He sees his task as being “to encourage the application of the whole range of scientific tools and techniques, and specially those which had been so superbly developed in the physical sciences, to the problems of living matter.” Later, Weaver would coin the term “molecular biology.”
Jan 01 1931A grants program aimed at a better understanding of reproductive biology results in fundamental work that leads to the development of better contraceptives. The National Research Council’s Committee for Research in Problems of Sex receives more than $1 million. The Foundation grants $1 million to five universities around the US for research on reproductive endocrinology.
Jan 01 1931The Great Depression brings added emphasis on social science and economics research. Grants are made to leading centers for research: the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Social Science Research Council, and the London School of Economics.
Jan 01 1930The Foundation grants support the preparation of the Dictionary of American Biography and of critical texts of Spenser and Chaucer.
Jan 01 1930The American Council of Learned Societies, which from the beginning derived most of its support from the General Education Board and then from the Foundation, receives the first of many additional grants to support fellowships in humanistic studies.
