Between 1930 and 1970 the Rockefeller Foundation made several grants to historians of science (broadly interpreted) who eventually ended up in the United States. Among these were Otto Neugebauer, the Austrian historian of ancient mathematics, who eventually found an academic home at Brown University, George Sarton, a Belgian-American historian of science but only after he retired from the staff of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Henry Guerlac of Cornell University, and political scientist Don K. Price of Harvard University. In his long career at the Rockefeller Foundation Warren Weaver, originally a mathematician, was involved in each of these award decisions. As correspondence at the Rockefeller Foundation Archives in Tarrytown, NY, USA, shows, two of the four were made reluctantly but turned out to be quite successful. The other two were almost routine and had more mundane even modest outcomes. From this one might conclude that challenging program officers to stretch their preconceptions and go beyond their comfort levels can have strongly particularly positive results.