operation for creative scientists and engineers 

 doing research in industry is to be coupled (but 

 not overcoupled) to the requirements of the 

 operating organizations. I have had the oppor- 

 tunity to observe performance in situations where 

 the research laboratory was totally decoupled 

 from the perceived needs of the Corporation, 

 yielding a highly unproductive and random 

 output. It should be noted, however, that a 

 possible danger of coupling is that long term, 

 highly speculative research tends to suffer, since 

 speculative longer term work is more difficult to 

 manage, judge, and be patient with. 



Regarding scientific and technical personnel, 

 Kent Kresa, Vice President and Manager, 

 Northrop Corporation, Hawthorne, Calif., rais- 

 ed the general problem of technological ob- 

 solescence and offered several solutions: 



New and improved techniques emerge which 

 make the more mature technology obsolete, and 

 along with this obsolescence, is a subset of highly 

 trained professionals who have worked in that 

 specialty since its inception, but do not have the 

 capability nor the desire to begin anew in another 

 discipline. I foresee no easy solution here, except 

 for massive reeducation programs or early retire- 

 ment. 



Finally, regarding the practioners of R&D, 

 David Langmuir, Research Consultant, TRW 

 Systems Group, Santa Monica, Calif., remarked 

 about the ways scientific and technical people 

 appear to have changed. 



I think that the motivations of researchers have 

 shifted in the past half century from a mixture of 

 predominantly love and fame to a mixture heavily 

 weighted with wealth and power, and that this has 

 been more obvious to people outside theranksof 

 scientists than to those within. I do not think we 

 will find our proper role in the big picture until we 

 think and speak more precisely about it. 



NATIONAL POLICY QUESTIONS 

 REGARDING SCIENTIFIC AND 

 TECHNICAL MANPOWER 



Some relationships between long-range plan- 

 ning for science, national manpower policies 



and Ph.D. programs were discussed by F. N. 

 Andrews, Vice President for Research and Dean 

 of the Graduate School at Purdue University, 

 West Lafayette, Ind. 



In the 1950's, we began a nationwide program to 

 increase our supply of scientists and engineers. It 

 is my own observation that this was highly 

 successful, that we did indeed train people in 

 many disciplines at a very high level, and that 

 advances in the sciences and engineering have 

 been of great benefit to the nation. Since then 

 changing political and economic conditions and 

 changes in population growth have had a 

 profound effect upon all major research univer- 

 sities. In somedisciplinesthejob marketforPh.D. 

 trained individuals is poor and is not likely to 

 improve. In some disciplines the decreased 

 graduate school enrollment suggests that we will 

 in the fairly near future be facing shortages of 

 highly skilled individuals. A long-range plan for 

 science would give some guidance to planning 

 for advanced study. We appear, for example, to 

 have an oversupply of astronomers. Obviously, 

 we should not start new Ph.D. programs in this 

 area, but we do need to train some minimum 

 number of new people to replace those who 

 retire. 



Manpower projections for new disciplines are 

 almost impossible to achieve; therefore, we must 

 have some kind of a base which will permit new 

 sciences to develop and flourish. Forty years ago 

 we had no idea how dependent we would be on 

 high energy physics, and solid state physics, to 

 choose only two examples. 



Apropos of national manpower con- 

 siderations Mark Shepherd, Jr., President, 

 Texas Instruments, Inc., Dallas, Tex., called for 

 a solution to "the frequent temporal mismatch" 

 between the supply of and the demand for 

 advanced degree graduates: 



Another serious problem is the frequent temporal 

 mismatch in quantity between supply and de- 

 mand of advanced degree graduates from the 

 universities. Moreover, the dislocation of bright, 

 young, creative, technical people brought about 

 by shifts in the economy and termination of job 

 assignments has a profound effect on them. 

 Unquestionably, this mismatch is causing the 

 nation problems today, and will cause problems 



54 



VITALITY OF THE RESEARCH SYSTEM 



