Technology and Culture

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 189 focuses almost exclusively on the institution’s scientists and the research that brought them national prominence and on Caltech’s administrators and their efforts to bring to the institute both money and prestige. This approach works best for the early years, when the influence of Hale and a few wealthy trustees is clear. Here, in fact, Goodstein rounds out the picture provided in Robert Kargon’s 1982 study of Millikan and Caltech by rooting institution builders such as Hale in the context notjust of their professional connections but also of their local community and social relationships. This focus on Caltech’s “great” men is, however, wholly inadequate for the later years when the institute was no longer marginal and isolated from powerful national political and economic forces. The absence of an analytical framework limits the appeal of this book. Some may also find annoying the failure to document sources other than those from which direct quotations have been drawn. For the most part, these are the professional historian’s complaints, and Millikan’s School is clearly directed at a different audience, most likely one with some link to Caltech. Those readers will find Goodstein ’s book to be substantive, informative, and a good read. Rebecca S. Lowen Dr. Lowen holds a Ph.D. in American history from Stanford University. She has a Guggenheim postdoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum, where she is completing a book on patronage and science at Stanford University. Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945—1975. By Brian Balogh. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. xi + 340; notes, index. $34.50. Forty-five years ago in On Understanding Science, James Conant defined the general education agenda in science and technology for the next five generations of college graduates. Underlying Conant’s analysis was a set of assumptions reflecting his experience as an administrative advisor to the bureaucratic leadership of various World War II technical projects such as the building of the atomic bomb and the development of an effective synthetic rubber program. Conant argued that in a participatory democracy it is unreasonable to expect us all to have the knowledge necessary to evaluate intelligently the wide-ranging myriad of technical questions that more and more dominate issues of public policy. What was required of a program in general education, Conant argued, was to train individuals not to be experts per se, but to be “experts on experts,” that is, to know enough to be able to intelligently interrogate the experts and evaluate the ensuing responses. 190 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Just how prescient Conant was on this issue, just how futile proved his solution, and just how the problem has grown are nowhere better illustrated than in Brian Balogh’s Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power. My only complaint about this study is a technical one. Balogh has provided an exceedingly rich documentary trail to bolster his argument. For some reason, he and the publisher decided not to provide a coherent collected bibliography. The reader interested in tracking a particular source is forced to hunt through the forest of footnotes to find the first, full reference to a work of interest. It can be a time-consuming and frustrating experience. A work of this penetrating intellectual and polemical power deserves better. Using the American nuclear power industry as a case study, Balogh painstakingly documents how the testimony and activity of expert advice was used initially to create the demand pull which brought the industry into existence. This community of experts was drawn largely from the engineering and scientific community which in World War II had developed the technology underpinning the creation ofthe atomic bomb. Balogh then goes on to show how opposition to nuclear power, at first isolated, inchoate, and inarticulate, mobilized its own commu­ nity of experts to stymie and eventually bring the nuclear power industry to its knees. The expertise drawn on by the opposition in­ cluded not only those trained in physics and engineering but in fields as wide-rangingas environmental studies, anthropology, public health, and economics. And...