BASIC RESEARCH IN PRIVATE RESEARCH INSTITUTES 



world activity, the IGY became important as an example of 

 international collaboration which could be carried on in spite of 

 crucial differences in political policies and beliefs. The success of 

 the IGY was important for reasons which probably transcended 

 the intrinsic value of the detailed scientific observations them- 

 selves. As a consequence, on the Executive Committee we had 

 to judge and approve expenditures which seemed outrageously 

 large in relation to their possible scientific merit or importance, 

 and we served as the excuse for logistics costs for various polar 

 expeditions and airplane and rocket flights which cost money 

 enough to have subsidized the physical sciences in great luxury 

 at all our universities for many decades. All the money was 

 spent, mostly, of necessity, by our military services. We en- 

 countered or produced in the IGY many examples of a drastic 

 loss of a sense of proportion between the costs of a project and 

 its substantive content. 



I would like to point out that all of us have contributed 

 to a more or less purposeful confusion in our use of the words 

 "basic research." It seems to me that a great deal of the money 

 listed as spent for basic research is spent for highly technolog- 

 ical activities and operations, and that far too small a fraction of 

 it, indeed, is actually spent for the subsidy of thinking, by giving 

 to selected, competent individuals both the freedom and the time 

 to think. When a scientific scholar, as distinguished perhaps 

 from a business executive, speaks of basic research, surely he 

 must have primary reference to the support of ideas, not the 

 operations aspect of technological performances or record 

 achievements, however spectacular, such as submarine trips 

 under the polar ice or successful Antarctic logistics for the IGY. 



I might suggest that for purposes of discussion the term 

 "academic research" could be considered to refer to the intenselv 

 personal activity of individual professional workers in search of 

 scientific knowledge, the kind of activity we all recognize as 



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