Technology is inseparable from policy, surrounded constantly by rules governing its design and use. Sometimes these rules are codified regulations and standards, but where official rules are absent there are always procedures and customs that pattern how technology is deployed and operates. A historian of technology would describe this point in shorthand by saying “technology is always political.”

Generally, such rules are in place for good reason: they make it possible for people to coordinate their use of the technology, they make it easier for more people to use, they amplify its benefits and limit its harms. Sometimes the rules are inadequate or harmful: they make use of the technology inequitable, they fail to limit its harms, they stifle its deployment and adaptation.

Such rules have played an important role so far in the story of the critical technologies of the COVID-19 crisis. The U.S.’s lag in testing is not simply a matter of getting a late start, but of overcoming restrictions that have prevented the use of tests developed in other countries and hampered the development and production of tests by private companies. Now regulatory hurdles are being modified in the race to develop not only tests but vaccines, treatments, and new production sources for protective equipment and ventilators. The failure to alter our rules has already surely cost us lives in a time of crisis, and the argument for fast-tracking is strong.

But we cannot change our rules haphazardly. There are, for instance, calls to remove barriers and expedite data-gathering in an apparent effort to move ahead with certain drugs that President Trump has favored, reportedly due to private lobbying.

To a certain extent, relaxing rules is a matter of accepting additional risk, but it is also a matter of making governance more intensive than we can usually afford it to be. Under ordinary circumstances, we often put in place rules that are more rigid than they absolutely need to be. Some will complain that such rules don’t make sense, but the fact is we cannot practically supervise the application of a more intricate and flexible rules that would achieve the same benefits. There are simply too many things that need to be governed and not enough qualified people to do the governing. But, in times of crisis, we can afford to focus expert attention on the flexible application of rules because time is of the essence and our priorities have become much narrower.

The trick is to set up an organization that is capable of such technological governance. Which brings me to Donald Trump’s uncle, John Trump, who understood this point very well.

John Trump was an engineer and physicist at MIT, who specialized in the development of high-voltage electrostatic generators, which were used as particle accelerators and to generate high-energy x-rays that could be used, for instance, in cancer treatments. During World War II, he became a senior member of MIT’s Radiation Laboratory, or Rad Lab, which played a central role in the wartime development of radar in the U.S.

The roots of the U.S. radar effort go back to 1922, when Navy engineers discovered that passing boats on the Potomac River interfered with radio signals, and the Navy eventually established a dedicated radar program in 1934. But in December 1941, although a radar set at Pearl Harbor detected the approaching Japanese invasion, the rules and procedures needed to translate that detection into an early warning were not in place. The radar worked but it didn’t do its job.

The British were more successful in their parallel effort. By the time of the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, radar stations were in place allowing daytime interception of incoming German airplanes. A key figure in not just overseeing the development of radar technology but integrating it into Royal Air Force operations through the development of effective rules, procedures, and training regimens was the science adviser Henry Tizard. I have argued elsewhere that his abilities as a coordinator between the developers and users of a technology were so revered by his allies that they effectively created a personality cult around him, making him into an exemplar what it means to be an effective adviser. Under ordinary circumstances, Tizard would not have been a likely candidate to be an icon:

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Shortly after the Battle of Britain, Tizard departed for North America with a small team carrying information about the latest developments in British technology, including the cavity magnetron, a device enabling radar to operate in microwave wavelengths that promised a leap in efficacy. That technology was put in the hands of a Microwave Committee led by physicist, financier, and lawyer Alfred Loomis, and further developed at the new MIT Rad Lab, directed by physicist Lee DuBridge.

A year later, following the disaster at Pearl Harbor, the Rad Lab began receiving urgent requests from the military services for new devices, which it developed and sent out on a “crash” basis. Whereas Tizard’s accomplishments prior to the Battle of Britain involved developing rules for a brand new technology, the crash program was at least partly about violating established rules for the production of military equipment.

Rather than waiting to thoroughly test the technology under controlled conditions to understand its capabilities and then standardizing it for mass production by industrial suppliers, the lab sent early units it produced quickly into operations. This created a strong need for liaison between the military and the Rad Lab, both so that Rad Lab personnel could consult on how to properly install and use the equipment and so that they could report back on how the equipment performed under field conditions and what the military’s requirements for new equipment were.

In the spring of 1942, MIT engineer Edward Bowles, the secretary of the Microwave Committee, left the Rad Lab (apparently due to frictions with Loomis and DuBridge) but was quickly hired by Secretary of War Henry Stimson as an “expert consultant” and given an office just above Stimson’s in the Pentagon. His first task was to respond to a critical British report on U.S. radar use in the Panama Canal Zone. However, he soon came to understand his role more generally as providing a crucial bridge between lab personnel and the field, eventually sending out “Advisory Specialist Groups,” largely comprising members drawn from the radar effort.

After Bowles left the Microwave Committee, Trump took over as its secretary. In 1943, as U.S. forces participated in the invasion of Italy, the Rad Lab set up a British Branch to augment liaison between the two countries’ radar efforts and to augment liaison between the lab and military forces. John Trump took over leadership of the British Branch in February 1944 and in November he took over as leader of one of Bowles’ groups advising the Army Air Forces. At that time, he started making frequent trips between BBRL’s headquarters and Paris to assist in the integration of radar into operations against Germany on the continent.

In April 1945, Trump entered Germany just behind U.S. ground forces and within two weeks he was interviewing officials from the company Telefunken, which built German radar devices. Trump recorded in his war diary,

To me this interview proved to be quite thrilling because we had long been deeply interested in the organization and thinking of the German radar people. It seemed clear, however, that the information which we are likely to get in this field will be primarily of historical importance and can be expected to contribute only an occasional technical detail to our own development effort.

The Germans told Trump, “Industrial companies working on radar made little effort to utilize the physicist groups, [German television pioneer Rudolf] Urtel explaining that these scientists did not have either desirable training of the appropriate point of view. The scientists evidently work pretty close to their universities or in the private laboratories, coordinated somewhat ineffectively by the Reichsforschungsrat [a national research organization]. … Industrial laboratories were apparently not well coordinated, but received their directive from technical members of the Luftwaffe. Just as there was a gap between German scientists and industrialists, there was also an even greater gap between both of these and the military. It was virtually impossible for a scientist or engineer to accompany radar equipment into combat areas to observe its performance or to assist in training. Although Telefunken was the manufacturer of the Wurtzberg [a radar set used for aiming anti-aircraft guns], Urtel was one of the few engineers who ever succeeded in seeing it under operational conditions—this only during the last year.”

What began as a story of American failure to take the rules surrounding radar seriously had, for Trump, ended as a story about a critical strength of the U.S. radar effort, enabling the Americans (and the British) to not only quickly turn out new technologies, but to integrate them effectively into the Allied war effort. He remembered this lesson well almost 40 years later.

For the pandemic, then, the crucial lesson moving forward is that we can expedite innovative processes that are normally more rigid, but only if we deftly integrate the expertise of medical researchers and practitioners, statisticians, manufacturers, and policymakers, among others. This requires the ingenuity of scientists, but just as much the facilitation of talented administrators with a good understanding of how the pieces of the puzzle fit together.

For us outsiders, whether those efforts are being successful will be difficult to ascertain, both because we lack a good understanding of how a pandemic response can be expected to operate, but also because that process will not be totally transparent to us in real time. But we should try our best to find out. So far, the story has not been very encouraging.

In the weeks ahead, I will live blog John Trump’s war diary to give some sense of how this process worked on the ground 75 years ago.