Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oral History Program records

The Oral History Program (originally the Oral History Laboratory) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was started in April 1975 by Charles Weiner, Professor of the History of Science and Technology, and operated until 1979. The program sought to document important people and events in the history of science and technology with a focus on MIT. The program sponsored many concurrent projects of varying size and duration. Oral history interviews were recorded onto audio (and occasionally video) tape, transcribed, checked for accuracy by the interviewee, and deposited in the MIT Institute Archives. In addition to historical projects, the Oral History Program worked on developing uses for oral history in the classroom. The program sponsored workshops for students during the Independent Activities Period and work opportunities through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.

One of the earliest and most elaborate projects sponsored by the program was the documentation of the recombinant DNA research controversy. The project ran from 1975 to 1979 and included over 100 interviews with scientists, educators, and politicians. Supplementary materials, in the form of publications and press clippings, were also gathered.

Other projects of the included documenting the history of computers at MIT, the origins and development of MIT's Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects, the MIT Physical Science Study Committee, the Project Athena computer network at MIT, and the New England nuclear energy controversy in the late 1970s, and gathering life histories of prominent women in science and engineering. The program also ran several biographical projects whose subjects included, among others, Harold Edgerton, Vannevar Bush, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Robley D. Evans.