BASIC RESEARCH IN PRIVATE RESEARCH INSTITUTES 



basis, I understand, and the Sloan-Kettering Institute is a con- 

 spicuous example. 



Whether an operation very greatly expanded beyond the 

 capabilities of its private funds by the acceptance of short-term 

 grants and contracts is correspondingly more fruitful in really 

 basic research, correspondingly more productive of new and 

 genuine scientific knowledge, as distinguished from technolog- 

 ical investigations, I believe is still undetermined. It is true 

 that those who actually carry forward the various research 

 programs supported by these discontinuous grants for projects 

 would be vastly more free in their efforts and less concerned 

 with how their work may look to others if they were operating 

 entirely on continuing private funds, as under endowments. 



In addition, numerous smaller private research funds, 

 which I shall not attempt to enumerate, especially those related 

 to research professorships or to individual departments, as in 

 some medical schools, fit rather well with our criteria of support- 

 ing basic research by supporting a selected man, and of operat- 

 ing under at least a moderate degree of austerity. 



It is important for us to recognize the relatively small size 

 of the annual budget for this academic kind of basic research. 

 The overall total probably does not reach twice what it was 

 before the war in terms of a constant dollar. Even though our 

 methods are more wasteful, and we buy numerous industrial 

 tools and instruments, and we pay all of our graduate students, 

 the total number of competent and fully trained investigators 

 who are really devoted to seeking new laws and new regularities 

 in nature's processes and are not guided toward practical ends 

 such as better radio or radar or better submarine detection or 

 navigation or better rockets or antibiotics is not large. The 

 number of these academic men in basic research is still not too 

 different from the prewar number of similar fully trained scien- 

 tific investigators. In some ways we must take a larger discount, 



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