On the morning of 3 April 1953 employees reporting to the US National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Washington, DC, found a bouquet of two dozen carnations at the front gates. A card, attached with a white bow, read: ‘In memory of Dr. A.V. Astin and the traditions of the National Bureau of Standards.’ Allen Varley Astin, the bureau’s director, had been forced out days earlier by Sinclair Weeks, the new secretary of commerce in Dwight D. Eisenhower’s fledgling administration.
Astin’s dismissal came after the NBS, the federal metrology laboratory, had tested and deemed useless a product branded ‘AD-X2’, an additive advertised as extending the life of car batteries. Weeks, seeking to show support for small business, deemed the judgement reckless in light of the thick sheaf of testimonials praising the product. ‘The National Bureau of Standards has not been sufficiently objective, because they discount entirely the play of the market place’, he told a Senate committee the day Astin’s ouster was announced.
AD-X2, sold by Jess M. Ritchie, a charismatic former bulldozer operator, was a blend of salts designed to be mixed into a car battery’s electrolyte. The lead-acid battery became standard in gasoline-powered cars around 1920 and motorists soon came to know battery trouble as a familiar bugbear. Additives, which purveyors claimed would revive dead batteries or extend the lives of healthy ones, proliferated. The NBS had tested dozens of nostrums of similar composition and repeatedly declared them ineffective, and sometimes harmful. Ritchie, though, remained indefatigable. Declaring NBS condemnations outdated and prejudicial to his product, he mounted a dogged political pressure campaign, asking his distributors to write to their senators, lobbying members of the Senate Small Business Committee, and pleading his case directly to Weeks, who took action.
The years after the Second World War were a golden age for American science. Scientists, flush with government money, enjoyed considerable latitude in how they used it. But when Eisenhower took office in January 1953 as the first Republican president in two decades, questions arose about how that relationship might evolve. In the nuclear age science was politically charged. American scientists welcomed the resources their new relevance brought, but eyed the compromises that came with moving in political spheres warily. Astin’s firing came at a critical juncture in the negotiation of postwar science-government relations, and it sparked a furious reaction. The mournful bouquet at the NBS gates was one small expression of a rapid and relentless response from the scientific community.
Through the first two weeks of April more than 12 scientific organisations, including the American Physical Society, American Chemical Society, and American Association for the Advancement of Science, released public statements decrying Weeks’ actions. Scores of individuals wrote to Weeks and Eisenhower beseeching them to reconsider. Scientists made comparisons with the ideological control of science exerted by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. ‘If we are so cowed that we cannot ally ourselves in the defense of science and scientific standards of truth, we invite the fate of the German scientists of the 1930s’, Harvard University’s Edwin Kemble warned his colleagues in Physics Today. Behind the scenes, cooler heads , though no less affronted , worked to exert more subtle pressure on Weeks. Within the NBS, more than 400 staff, citing impugned honour and cratering job satisfaction, threatened to resign if Astin was not reinstated. Before two weeks had passed, Weeks agreed to leave Astin in place pending a review by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) , a concession that upheld the principle that only the scientific community was qualified to police its own institutions.
Throughout the summer of 1953, AD-X2 routinely featured among critiques of Eisenhower’s administration alongside his light touch with Senator Joseph McCarthy and the sharp elbows of his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. Political cartoonists adopted the car battery as a symbol of political juice. Finally, in October, two NAS review committee reports vindicated the bureau’s conduct and conclusions. Weeks invited Astin to stay on permanently. Almost simultaneously, though, the Post Office vacated its fraud order against Ritchie’s company , issued in February but suspended days later , for ‘conducting an unlawful enterprise through the mails’ and he was free to continue selling his product. All sides claimed victory.
For the bureau, that victory was notable because it was so clearly political. They had not convinced the government to implement their laboratory findings in policy, but had nevertheless succeeded in a struggle for institutional autonomy. That success became a template for a stable postwar relationship between science and politics, which survived the following seven decades. Scientists, as the slogan went, were ‘on tap, not on top’ , but they enjoyed considerable control over the plumbing.
The AD-X2 affair had a long afterlife as a cautionary tale in science-policy circles. David L. Hill, a nuclear physicist who testified in opposition to Lewis Strauss as successor to Weeks as secretary of commerce in 1959, after Strauss’ crusade against J. Robert Oppenheimer, leaned on the incident to strengthen his case against Strauss’ confirmation, pointing out that, as interim secretary, Strauss had appointed a Ritchie ally to a key post. In 1969 AD-X2 was the marquee case study in a congressional handbook designed to help lawmakers navigate the tangled interface between science and politics. The affair shaped the perspectives of a number of individuals who later served on the President’s Science Advisory Committee. For decades it remained a ready reminder that although scientific consensus was insufficient to motivate policy choices, the independence of scientific institutions was sacrosanct.
That independence, the subject of heated battles through the spring and summer of 1953, is now under direct assault in the US , as illustrated this August with the removal of the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which plunged the agency into chaos and led to a wave of resignations. Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (as NBS is now known), the National Institutes of Health, and other federal institutions are accustomed to the autonomy required to draw conclusions that might or might not translate into policy, but which form a reliable basis for informing it. That public-service mission, combined with freedom of inquiry, has long been a powerful draw for personnel who could command higher salaries in industry or greater prestige in academia.
The history of the AD-X2 affair is a timely reminder that the newfound political relevance of science did not guarantee the autonomy of US federal scientific institutions, so essential for attracting and retaining a talented and driven workforce. It had to be fought for. Relative independence was the reward for sustained and effective political action. In 1953 scientists warmed to the fight to establish the principle of institutional autonomy. In 2025 they face the more complex challenge of defending it.
Joseph D. Martin is Associate Professor of the History of Science and Technology at Durham University.
