THE SUPPORT OF BASIC RESEARCH 



vices, technical specialists, and scientists from other fields that 

 his particular work requires — all of these and similar adminis- 

 trative, financial, organizational, and cultural variables help to 

 determine both the amount and the quality of basic research. 



These three parts of the answer to the question What ar- 

 rangements will best suffort basic research? are the subject 

 of the remainder of this summary. 



The Intellectual Environment 



When the authors of The Pursuit of Excellence, the 

 Rockefeller Brothers Fund report on American education, 

 looked back over the span of history, they reached the provoca- 

 tive generalization that a society gets the kind of excellence it 

 understands and appreciates. The raw, rebellious, revolutionary 

 American Colonies produced great and enduring political 

 theory and political institutions, but not the great art being 

 produced in Europe of the same period. 



The quantity and quality of research depend upon the 

 total social and intellectual life of the nation. As a consequence 

 of general agreement on this relationship, much of the discus- 

 sion was centered on the problem of achieving broader general 

 appreciation of scholarship, and broader understanding of the 

 importance of the total search for new knowledge. Speaker 

 after speaker emphasized the importance of developing the 

 right climate for research, and speaker after speaker asserted 

 that in the effort to develop this climate science does not stand 

 alone. Science is part of scholarship, of intellectual effort, and 

 the climate conducive to basic research is the climate conducive 

 to scholarship generally. At one point, the chairman interrupted 

 the discussion with the summarizing statement that "The sub- 

 ject we are dealing with goes beyond any of the sciences. The 

 subject we are dealing with is scholarship." President Eisen- 

 hower, in his dinner address, reminded the participants that the 



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