BASIC RESEARCH IN PRIVATE RESEARCH INSTITUTES 



the support of selected individuals who work directly with the 

 materials of their ideas. This kind of operation is a way of life 

 together for a small group of dedicated investigators. It is a quest, 

 not a job to be done. The measure of their success is the quality 

 of their efforts and the character of their critical selection of 

 goals to be sought, not the quantity of their output of scientific 

 results. These men serve the conviction that greater knowledge 

 and deeper understanding are undeniably good. 



Continued support of this conviction by the maintenance 

 of prototype activities is then, I think, the principal service to 

 basic research which is now to be asked and expected of the 

 private research institutes, or at least of those private agencies 

 which were established many years ago, when there was less 

 financial and technical exuberance, with regard to the support 

 and administration of research effort, than we see all about us 

 today. 



Confusion between Scientific and 

 Technological Activities 



We have lumped under "Research and Development" so 

 many huge technological activities in the national budget, and 

 correspondingly in corporation budgets and elsewhere, that 

 the figures have become practically meaningless. Under "Re- 

 search" and even under "Basic Research" we have encouraged 

 and budgeted huge enterprises of essentially operational charac- 

 ter, most of them promoted with some enthusiastic hope of great 

 national prestige. Essentially these projects are based on the twin 

 arguments that the United States must be first and biggest, and 

 that tax money is not real money but just a voucher for directing 

 the expenditure of national effort toward certain speculative 

 goals because otherwise this effort would not be spent at all or 

 would just be directed toward more personal goals. 



After the special usefulness in war technology of men 



173 



