BASIC RESEARCH IN PRIVATE RESEARCH INSTITUTES 



institutions, but perhaps this has already been accepted by 

 most of you. In any case, I believe we should take firm position 

 on the point that the support of true basic research is the support 

 of ideas, and this always means the support of a creative in- 

 vestigator. I think we should make it clear to Congress and to the 

 public that the whole basic record of scientific progress has been 

 made by individual men who could spend their time freely on 

 the scientific problems which puzzled them. I see no valid 

 reason for not insisting that the sound support of basic research 

 requires us to use the technique long used in the universities and 

 copied by the private research institutes, namely, that of buying 

 a creative man's time and giving it back to him. Endowment has 

 been the technique previously used, by the ancient universities 

 and by the Carnegies and Rockefellers and others. Congress 

 may have strong views against granting public funds as perma- 

 nent endowment, but we can surely insist that there are specific 

 and identifiable individuals in the world of scientific research 

 whose lifetime efforts can safely be underwritten in advance as 

 good single investments in basic research. 



I mean thus to say that we might use public funds to 

 purchase a creative investigator's working lifetime, and then give 

 it back to him to spend in his research efforts. A single lump 

 sum of say $700,000 would pay the remaining lifetime salary 

 of a gifted research man after he has been clearly identified as a 

 creative investigator by the age of 30 or 35, and would pay in 

 addition for one or two technical assistants or two or three 

 students to work with him. We could stipulate to the Regents 

 or Trustees who accepted such a lump sum to underwrite the 

 scientific investigator's lifetime activities that if he changed 

 from the life of a working research scholar to become a manager 

 of large grants or the supervisor of a large team, the Regents 

 would shift him to their own salary rolls and revert the grant 

 which made him a Distinguished Research Scholar. 



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