ORGANIZATION OF SCIENCE 



and provisions for freedom of publication and the prevention of arbi- 

 trary censorship must be a part of the basic poHcy. 



(2) The forms of support and organization of science must be 

 determined by social needs and purposes and are therefore matters of 

 concern not only to scientists but to government and to the ultimate 

 beneficiaries of science, that is, the people, as consumers and workers. 

 Those who most directly need and use the results of scientific research 

 in education, industry, agriculture, medicine, and public health have a 

 special interest in the development of science, and means must be 

 provided by which this influence can be exercised. The two primary 

 conditions should therefore be: (a) a central organization by which the 

 conduct of science is made responsive to public requirements and needs; 

 and (b) the representative character of the directing agency or agencies, 

 insuring democratic methods in administration. 



These two requirements of autonomy, on the one hand, and 

 subservience to social needs, on the other, have seemed antithetic to 

 some, but I do not believe this need be the case. There is much 

 evidence of the vitality and progressiveness of science in other countries 

 where it is largely under public control. The extreme example of public 

 control is in the Soviet Union, where the direction of scientific research 

 is centralized in the Academy of Sciences, through which the support 

 of the state flows to all of the research agencies. Other European 

 countries occupy positions intermediate between this maximum and 

 the minimum reached in the United States, where almost alone among 

 modern nations science has retained a predominantly private character. 

 Even here, the wartime activities of the Office of Scientific Research 

 and Development and the Committee for Medical Research show that 

 no essential incompatibility exists between research and public control; 

 while the long peacetime history of United States Government scien- 

 tific departments and especially of the Department of Agriculture illus- 

 trate the feasibility of accomplishing at once a scientific and a social 

 purpose. 



Much experience in the United States and in other countries 

 indicates that, to obtain the maximum results from a given eflfort in 

 scientific research, the interests of the research workers themselves must 

 be consulted, but that these are not fundamentally diff'erent from those 

 of the community around them. Scientists traditionally are primarily 

 devoted to their work, often sacrificing other interests to it and exclud- 



479 



