ROBERT E. WILSON 



no longer necessary in most companies for the research director 

 to "justify" his basic research program or protect it against 

 encroachment by pressing practical problems. In any case, the 

 two trends I have mentioned are both unmistakable and en- 



couraging 



I trust you will understand if I use research in the petro- 

 leum industry to illustrate a number of my points. Not only am 

 I more familiar with that than with any other industry, but it 

 represents a sort of median in the spectrum of industrial re- 

 search — it was not one of the earliest to embark on a real research 

 program, nor is it one of the "johnny-come-lately's" of which 

 there are so many since World War II. It affords many out- 

 standing examples of what both basic and applied research 

 have meant to the progress of an industry. Its expenditures for 

 all types of research are fairly large — in the neighborhood of 

 $280,000,000 in 1958 — but as percentage of the sales dollar 

 (under 1 per cent) they are small compared with those of a 

 number of other large industries. The size of laboratories covers 

 almost the whole range from large to small. The latest figures 

 available show only 2 per cent of the industry's research sup- 

 ported by the federal government/ For all these reasons, I 

 believe it may be considered fairly typical of true industrial 

 research, as distinct from research in industrial laboratories 

 largelv supported by the government. 



Basic research in our industry really began less than forty 

 years ago, and was, in part, from almost the outset, a coopera- 

 tive effort which other industries might do well to emulate. 

 When the American Petroleum Institute was founded in 19 19, 

 there were onlv thirty or forty chemists or chemical engineers 

 and very few, if any, physicists, doing any kind of research in 

 the industry, and most of what they did would today be classed 

 as technical service or quality control. There was practically no 



* National Science Foundation, Review of Data #10, May 1958. 

 206 



