308 ORGANIZED SCIENCE 



scientist's vanity may come to look beyond scientific success to the 

 material rewards for such success. And his ambition may look beyond 

 "the approbation of his peers" to the immense research grants their 

 good opinion may win him. As the stakes constantly go up, the prior- 

 ity dispute is waged with intensified bitterness and unscrupulous- 

 ness. As the pace of scientific research constantly quickens, the in- 

 vestigator strikes an increasingly precarious balance between the 

 thoroughness required to avoid irresponsible work and the speed 

 required to avoid work iinpiihlishable because a competitor gets his 

 results out first. It seems unlikely that the Invisible College can sus- 

 tain these growing stresses without some ultimate change in its 

 fundamental constitution. On the other hand, one does well to re- 

 member that, if today much intensified, these particular stresses are 

 not at all a novelty in science. 



Communication between the alchemists was poor because there 

 was less desire to communicate than to boast of one's secrets. A re- 

 sidual secretiveness is still detectable at the beginning of modern 

 science: the first "communication" of certain discoveries of Galileo, 

 Huygens, and Hooke are by them given in the form of almost unde- 

 cipherable anagrams. But long before the publication of scientific 

 results could win any tangible reward, scientists had learned to ivant 

 such publication— and of course science as a whole profits from that 

 desire. Making an important scientific discovery, one enjoys some- 

 thing of the rapture of creation. Publishing that discovery, one makes 

 claim on the appreciation of one's contemporaries and, even if they 

 should prove entirely incompetent to understand and appreciate, a 

 claim on the remembrance of generations of one's successors. Losing 

 priority of publication, this wisp of immortality is lost, and the rap- 

 ture is turned to bitterness by the realization that one's labor was 

 wholly superfluous. And so of course long before first publication of 

 results could win any tangible reward, scientists showed intense con- 

 cern, and hot rivalry, for priority of discovery and publication. The 

 "sacred fury" that powered the lifelong endeavor culminating in Kep- 

 ler's discovery of his Third Law is today perhaps somewhat soiled, 

 and certainly more discreetly veiled. But I believe that throughout 

 the modern era something of that fury has united scientists in a com- 

 mon endeavor while also dividing some of them in the struggle to be 

 such a chief priest of the cult of discovery as was Kepler himself. 



