Carnegie Institution of Washington

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This article is about a scientific institution. For the center of higher learning which is now a part of Carnegie Mellon University, refer to Carnegie Institute of Technology. For the Carnegie Institute which operates the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, see that article.

The Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW) is a foundation established by Andrew Carnegie in 1902 to support scientific research. Its first president was Daniel Coit Gilman, founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School. Today the CIW supports science in six main areas: plant biology, developmental biology, global ecology, Earth and planetary sciences, and astronomy (through the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (OCIW)).

"It is proposed to found in the city of Washington, an institution which...shall in the broadest and most liberal manner encourage investigation, research, and discovery [and] show the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind..." —Andrew Carnegie, January 28, 1902

One of the first grant recipients was George Hale in 1904. Hale needed backing for the construction of a telescope built around a large mirror blank that he had received as a gift from his father. The OCIW funded the completion of the 60-inch Hale Telescope on Mount Wilson, in the San Gabriel Mountains above Pasadena, California. Immediately work began on designing the even larger Hooker Telescope (100-inch), completed in 1917. Two solar telescopes were also constructed with Carnegie support and together they form the Mount Wilson Observatory, still chiefly supported by the Carnegie Institution after 100 years.^{[citation needed]} The OCIW went on to help Hale design and build the 200-inch telescope of the Palomar Observatory (construction was mostly paid for by a Rockefeller grant). The OCIW's chief observatory is now the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, where two identical 6.5 meter Magellan telescopes operate. OCIW is the lead institution in the consortium building the Giant Magellan Telescope, which will be made up seven mirrors each 8.4 meters in diameter for a total telescope diameter of 25.4 metres (83 feet). The telescope is expected to have over four times the light-gathering ability of existing instruments.

In 1920 the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York was merged with the Station for Experimental Evolution to become the CIW's Department of Genetics. The CIW funded that laboratory until 1939. It closed in 1944 and its records were retained in a university library. The CIW continues its support for genetic research, and among its notable grantees in that field are Nobel laureates Barbara McClintock and Alfred Hershey.

The Institution supported archaeology in the Yucatán Peninsula in the 1910s through the 1930s, including extensive excavations (under Carnegie associate and Mayanist scholar Sylvanus G. Morley) of Chichen Itza , Copán, and other sites of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization.