JAMES B. FISK 



tions, lies not in keeping the organization small, but in the 

 administrative recognition of the actual nature of research. 

 It involves appreciation of the fact that basic new scientific 

 ideas come from individual scientists and not from "man- 

 power," and that the research laboratory must therefore have 

 the individual scientists clearly in focus. This is fundamentally 

 an easy policy to administer. 



Once the basic administrative policy is set, the large labora- 

 tory can be every bit as stimulating, perhaps more stimulating 

 to research men than a small one. There are two factors which 

 work in this direction. One is that specialists in individual areas 

 need a certain number of immediate associates in their own 

 fields to keep them professionally sharp and to provide natural 

 teammates with whom to attack difficult problems. The other 

 and perhaps more important factor is that scientific creativity 

 tends to flourish particularly in the presence of a judicious 

 mixture of disciplines. The brilliant individual then has people 

 to talk to in different or neighboring fields who are just as 

 bright as he is, and such interactions are likely to be especially 

 fruitful in generating reallv new ideas. 



As an example, two of the most basic advances in metal- 

 lurgy in recent years, the discovery of metal "whiskers" as single 

 crystals with strength of ten or more times that of the bulk 

 material, and the actual visual identification and discovery of 

 dislocation structures, were both made in the Bell Laboratories 

 through the interaction of metallurgists with scientists in other 

 fields. Another example, namely information theory or "cyber- 

 netics," mentioned earlier, resulted from the interaction of 

 mathematicians and engineers. 



All these observations bear on environment. The list is 

 not complete. It should include some comments on laboratory 

 housing and facilities, on libraries, on scientific apparatus, on 

 the importance of adequate technical assistants, and on services 



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