time: the refreshing river 



preted as meaning that his profession should be tolerated only in so 

 far as it is muzzled."^ 



Some seven years later, A. V. Hill abandoned his earlier position 

 by entering the House of Commons as parliamentary representative 

 for the University of Cambridge. The fact that on this occasion he 

 stood as (independent) Conservative candidate, threw, in the opinion 

 of some, an interesting light on the significance of his former entreaties 

 to scientists to keep out of politics, but in view of the very prominent 

 part he has taken in some of the most progressive causes of our time, 

 such as the succouring of exiled men of science from the Continent 

 of Europe, freely allow that he has altered his original views on the 

 value of the public services which a scientist can render. 



The Holiness of Pure Science. 



A similar controversy worthy of our notice arose again in 1941. 

 An editorial in "Nature"^ urged that "we should abandon once and for 

 all the belief that science is set apart from all other social interests as 

 if it possessed a peculiar holiness." The distinguished physical chemist, 

 M. Polanyi, rushed to the attack. "I, for one," he said,^ "can recognise 

 nothing more holy than scientific truth, and consider it a danger to 

 science and to humanity if the pursuit of pure science, regardless of 

 society, is denied by a representative organ of science. For the last 

 ten years we have been presented by an influential school of thought 

 with phrases about the desirability of a social control of science, ac- 

 companied by attacks on the alleged snobbishness and irresponsibility 

 of scientific detachment. The 'social control of science' has proved a 

 meaningless phrase. Science exists only to that extent to which the 

 search for truth is not socially controlled. And therein lies the purpose 

 of scientific detachment. It is of the same character as the independence 

 of the witness, the jury and the judge; of the political speaker and 

 voter; of the writer and teacher and their public; it forms part of the 

 liberties for which every man with an idea of truth, and every man 

 with a pride in the dignity of his soul has fought since the beginning 



^ Much the same ground as had been traversed in the Hill-Haldane controversy was 

 gone over again by the eminent pharmacologist, Sir Henry Dale, in a Presidential 

 Address to the Royal Society (Nature, 1941, 148, 678; Proc. Roy. Soc, A 1942, 

 179, 254; B 1942, 130, 248), and the reply to him by the geneticist, C. D. Darlington 

 (New Statesman, 1941, p. 524). A failure to appreciate the social responsibility of the 

 scientist as citizen vitiates the otherwise interesting book of J. R. Baker, The Scientific 

 Life (London, 1942). 



^ Nature, 1940, 146, 815. ^ Nature, 1941, 147, 119. 



94 



