Topic: Science & Innovation

Women and technocratic elites clashed at the 1974 World Population Conference. At stake was women’s control over their own bodies.

A 1994 meeting moved women’s empowerment front and center for grantmaking in global population.

One philanthropy invested in scientists and pushed the atomic age forward.

A new program in the natural sciences increased funding and attention to the life sciences, and coined a new term along the way.

A short-lived environmental research program in the 1970s was an early foray into climate change funding.

Working to change US medical education was one of the Rockefeller Foundation’s biggest endeavors in the 1910s and 1920s, extending from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore to Beijing, China.

A 20-year-long project, funded by Rockefeller philanthropies, took technologies enabling astronomy to an unprecedented scale.

Incorporated in 1923 with funding from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the IEB built a major scientific network in Europe and the US in only five years.

The mid-20th century was an era influenced by mass communications, and a handful of philanthropic programs sought to tap into the possibilities of film and radio.

At midcentury, Rockefeller Foundation staffers hoped new technologies might find solutions to complex problems.