Freedom's Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science

Cold War histories focusing on race, culture, gender, and geopolitics frequently acknowledge the importance of science as a tool of government policy, but the ideological underpinnings that define, legitimize, and perpetuate concepts of scientific freedom are seldom explored. Audra Wolfe innovatively addresses this gap in Freedom's Laboratory by examining how the U.S. government targeted the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1989 using the concept of “scientific freedom” (p. 2) as a form of ideological containment. Paradoxically, Wolfe argues that apolitical science and the free exchange of information were political constructions perpetuated by U.S. officials and academics seeking to win “global hearts and minds” (p. 7) by contrasting Western scientific benevolence and objectivity against perceived statist biases tainting the Soviet scientific establishment. Although many American scientists relied on government contracts, she claims few saw any conflict of interest with their commitment to apolitical science. Wolfe convincingly demonstrates that concepts of scientific...