The Story

Einstein’s 1939 letter (links to a previous story) urged President Roosevelt to pursue a programme that would beat the Nazis in building nuclear weapons. The programme would eventually become the Manhattan Project, the world’s first moonshot (Casadevall & Fang, 2016).

Various criteria render this programme a moonshot. As Malliaraki defines:

“[A moonshot is a] private or public, typically ambitious, exploratory and groundbreaking in nature initiative, often cross-disciplinary, targeting a concrete problem/challenge, with a large impact, a well-defined timeframe, and clearly defined (societal or technological) goals targets and progress monitored along predefined milestones” (Malliaraki, 2020).

The Manhattan Project was a pioneering endeavour by its scale alone. As Dennis (2017) explains, the project is the first example of what we call “big science.” It cost – in financial terms – $2bn, roughly $30bn in today’s money (Wellerstein, 2013). It constituted a huge leap for how we do science, employing about 130,000 people at its peak (ibid.). This model can be found in modern approaches to climate science and multi-site clinical trials, which Huebner et al. (2017) have referred to as cases of “radical collaboration.” With this new model of scientific research, new ethical questions can be raised, one of which concerns responsibility. Indeed, who is responsible for decisions made throughout a project’s lifecycle, and are they also responsible for the project’s outputs? Furthermore, how is this responsibility attributed from without the research group? Who – whether an individual or a group – is to be held accountable when things go wrong? (Or be rewarded when things go well!)

Of course, you will have noticed this story is a “Research Tragedy.” Skip here for the penultimate panel in this story.