THE SUPPORT OF BASIC RESEARCH 



for not insisting that the sound support of basic research re- 

 quires 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. ... I mean 

 thus to say that we might use public funds to purchase a crea- 

 tive 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 bv 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. . . . If we were to allocate 40 to 60 million 

 dollars per year to the creation of such Research Professors or 

 Research Scholars ... in one decade we would have in this 

 country a solid phalanx of 500 or 600 outstanding investigators 

 dedicated to basic research and unquestionably free to devote 

 their personal time and attention to creative ideas for the rest of 

 their lives." 



Difficulties with this proposal are easy to see: the ad- 

 ministrative uncertainties of selecting the career investigators; 

 the financial complications of finding the money; the philosoph- 

 ical concerns that grow out of the fact that this is only one way 

 of forwarding basic research and in some cases is not the most 

 effective way. But there are precedents that have worked well; 

 the research professor at a university and the permanent staff 

 member of a private research institution were models for Dr. 

 Tuve's proposal. Citing a number of famous scientists as evi- 

 dence, Robert Morison drew the generalization that a secure 

 academic position and freedom to investigate whatever prob- 

 lems a scientist finds most challenging are conducive to research 

 success. In the same vein, Conrad Elvehjem concluded that the 

 research professorship "is an ideal method of insuring substan- 

 tial returns for each research dollar spent, and I believe we 



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