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The Rockefeller Foundation Timeline
1950 -- 1959
1950
- Max Theiler of RF’s Virus Laboratory in New York City wins the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology for developing the yellow fever vaccine.
- RF initiates broad scale support for research in genetics with grants to establish centers and build entire university departments at California Institute of Technology, Indiana, Texas, Columbia, Wisconsin, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Stanford and others, as well as at many locations abroad.
- An RF-supported cooperative agricultural development program, similar to that developed in Mexico, begins in Colombia under Dr. Lewis M. Roberts.
- RF begins support of historical research in areas of contemporary significance. Over the next decade, it will spend nearly $7 million to support research, including interdisciplinary and interpretive work (Toynbee, Braudel and Barraclough) and partial support for the editing and publication of papers of American statesmen: Hamilton, Madison, Lincoln, Wilson.
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John Foster Dulles becomes Chair of the Board of Trustees and serves until 1952.
1952
- A decade of awards begins to scholars in international relations and in legal and political philosophy.
- John D. Rockefeller 3rd becomes Chair of the Board of Trustees and serves until 1971. Dean Rusk becomes President and serves until 1961.
- A $112,000 grant enables Dorothy Thomas and Simon Kuznets to undertake the first analysis of U.S. population change, capital formation and economic activity.
1953
- Harvard’s School of Public Health receives the first RF grant for a family planning project. In 1960, Johns Hopkins receives the second.
1954
- The mosquito carrying yellow fever is eradicated from 13 major Latin American countries as an outgrowth of RF methods developed in Brazil in the 1930s.
- RF supports the Growth of American Families project, the first of the national fertility studies now carried out every five years with U.S. government support.
- RF begins a program of institutional support in the arts. Grants help found the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, and support drama and other arts at Karamu House in Cleveland, one of the nation’s leading interracial centers for drama and other arts.
1955
- The government of India requests that RF send a population advisory mission. The group recommends an approach that addresses maternal and child public health. A year later India becomes the first nation to adopt an official family-planning program.
1956
- “Corn production in Mexico has increased steadily since 1947,” reports Dr. J. George Harrar, architect of RF’s agriculture program, later to become RF President. “The country [has] been able to meet the demands of increasing population since 1947 without resorting to the importation of this basic food from abroad.” During this period, Mexico becomes a net exporter not only of corn, but of wheat and other cereals.
1957
- RF reestablishes relationships with former Fellows now behind the Iron Curtain, awarding new fellowships and making grants in Poland for laboratory and library equipment.
1958
- The Population Council receives the first of many grants, spanning 39 years and totaling more than $40 million.
- Through the New School for Social Research, RF grants $10,000 to writer and neighborhood activist Jane Jacobs for research into the relationship between function and design in urban environments. She receives another grant the following year for $8,000. The book resulting from that research, Jacobs’ masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is published in 1961.
1959
- The Foundation receives a bequest of the Villa Serbelloni on Lake Como, Italy. The villa, set among 50 acres of park and gardens, becomes RF’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center, hosting international conferences and scholars-in-residence.
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