THE PRODUCTION OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE 181 



Sir Ernest Rutherford, who established the foundations of 

 radioactivity. Under men such as tliese, ahnost all the ^vork 

 carried on in the laboratory has been concentrated on the 

 subject in which they themselves were working; and instead 

 of teaching general physics, the laboratory is a most valuable 

 and effective research institute. Kamerlingh Onnes estab- 

 lished at Leyden a laboratory for research at very low tem- 

 peratures, where he investigated the superconductivity of 

 metals and the extraordinary properties of liquid helium. 

 Peter Kapitza was so original in his ideas for the study of the 

 physics of very high magnetic fields that the Royal Society 

 fathered for him a special laboratory at Cambridge, and 

 Kapitza is now carrying out similar work in the Soviet Union. 

 In different fields of scientific work, Harlow Shapley at Har- 

 vard is concentrating the work of a group upon the proper- 

 ties of the meta-galaxy, and T. H. Morgan in his laboratory 

 at the California Institute of Technology has concentrated 

 on the problems of genetics, especially as exemplified in the 

 Drosophila fly (Chapter VII, page 160). 



In all these cases, the interest and capacity of a university 

 teacher have supplied the incentive for the organization of a 

 research institute as part of the university structure. Unfor- 

 tunately, such institutes often languish and die when the 

 teacher himself passes; only rarely can the university find a 

 successor who will justify the continuance of the specialized 

 work. Greater stability is attained when such institutes have 

 been founded deliberately by philanthropic foundations who 

 desired to expend money on the advancement of scientific 

 knowledge. With the present trend toward the use of more 

 and more complicated and expensive apparatus and toward 

 greater specialization in the methods used in investigation, 

 research institutes are becoming more and more necessary for 

 the advancement of knowledge in the future. 



At this point it may be well to summarize the various 

 agencies available for the production of scientific knowledge. 

 The basic institution on w^hich everything else depends is the 

 scientific department of the university, and this differs from 



