...In this chaotic time, Vannevar Bush’s Science, the Endless Frontier has emerged as a symbolically meaningful text among scientists...as the basis for the government’s long-running support of university research....He would later be credited as the architect of the so-called social contract of science, whereby federal funding is allocated primarily to university researchers in pursuit of free inquiry that might later yield some economic or social benefit. But this mythologized rendering of the innovation system overlooks other key ideas, like those expressed by sociologist Robert K. Merton, that described how the United States should govern science democratically based on lessons learned from the Second World War...

Most enduring [of Merton's work is] from the 1940s addressing what he called “the normative structure of science,” which is still taught as “the norms” of science: communalism (science as communal property), universalism (participation without prejudice), disinterestedness (against ideology), and organized skepticism (deliberative, not dogmatic). These conditions, which Merton claimed are distinct to free scientific inquiry, allow science to thrive as an institutional form...

...They offer a direct critique of science under totalitarianism and a prescription for its democratic protection. In the decades leading up to [the 1940s]...German universities and research institutes became leaders for scientific work, attracting the best students from all over the world. German was a lingua franca within many sciences—chemistry, biology, medicine, physics, and psychology...The world watched as these renowned scientific institutions were brought under direct control of the Nazi Party, which displayed an “ambivalent and unstable” regard for science...the Third Reich reallocated state investments toward science that “promise[d] direct practical benefit” to their regime, they purged science of those whose personal attributes and “extrascientific affiliations” made them, in the party’s mind, “a priori incapable of anything but spurious and false theories.” The famous out-migration of prominent scientists from Germany, including Nobel laureates Albert Einstein, James Franck, and Erwin Schrödinger, was one byproduct of this policy, but the process also included bureaucrats. Merton described how the combination of authoritarian politics, ethnonationalist culture, and utilitarian economic concerns produced a “general tone of anti-intellectualism” that destabilized the legitimacy of Germany’s once-revered systems of knowledge production...

This is from a recent article in ''Issues in Science and Technology,' and is informative reading.