Rewards and Satisfactions 139 



and a basis for hope in a more friendly world to visit the 

 Soviet Union and find one's friends thoroughly famihar 

 with what one has pubUshed on a given subject. Not only 

 do they know what we have done, they are very likely 

 hard at work confirming or disproving with exactly the 

 same outlook as the scientific community elsewhere. 



Time was when the spiritual satisfactions of being a 

 scientist had to be bought at considerable sacrifice of ma- 

 terial well-being. I can remember during my student days 

 when an older colleague advised us that it was probably 

 unwise to embark on a scientific career unless one enjoyed 

 an independent income. This is no longer the case. As a 

 group, scientists probably do about as well financially as 

 any other group. Very few scientists, of course, reach the 

 really high brackets occupied by the top business execu- 

 tives, movie actresses, lawyers, and surgeons. But the aver- 

 age scientist does a lot better than the average actor and 

 is probably not much worse off than the average business- 

 man, lawyer, or physician, if lifetime income and various 

 fringe benefits are taken into account. Furthermore, if his 

 money income is lower, he is likely to be living in a com- 

 munity which does not set a high value on material con- 

 sumption. He is thus freed of the necessity felt by many 

 business and professional people to keep up a certain ap- 

 pearance of affluence. 



The three chief sources of employment for scientists 

 are the universities and colleges, industry, and government. 

 In 1960 there were slightly over 200,000 persons who 

 registered themselves as scientists in the United States. 

 Almost half of them were employed in industry or were 

 self-employed. Twenty-eight percent were in educational 

 institutions and 16 percent in government institutions, ex- 

 clusive of the military services, but this statistical picture 

 must be interpreted with some caution. As we have seen. 



