188 THE PATH OF SCIENCE 



Students fresh from college acquire adequate training and 

 at the same time keep in touch with different branches of 

 their subject and avoid the danger of immature specializa- 

 tion. A laboratory should therefore be organized in de- 

 partments with an intradepartmental section in which a 

 young man who develops the ability to carry out his own 

 work may be able to take up work on his own initiative, 

 retaining his position in the department and carrying on 

 his work under the general supervision of the chief of his 

 department. There will always be a tendency in the de- 

 partmental organization for men to desire to split away 

 from the department to which they are attached and be- 

 come semi-independent in the laboratory, and this tendency 

 must be resisted in the organization and by the director of 

 the laboratory. At the same time, it is important that the 

 control should not be so rigid that men feel that they are 

 prevented from exercising their own initiative. 



Twenty-five years later, the writer of this passage must 

 acknowledge that it does not correspond to the realities of 

 the situation. Scientific research cannot really be organized 

 under department leaders, who are themselves working scien- 

 tists carrying out research w^ork. The fact is that the unit of 

 scientific research is a scientist ^vith a group of assistants and 

 he is, by definition, capable of directing his own work by his 

 own methods. In the operation of his work, he must be inde- 

 pendent of all control and free to do whatever he ^vishes. 

 The function of his superior in the organization is not to con- 

 trol the operation of the work; it is to direct the work toward 

 the problems that seem most desirable, to insure and assist 

 co-operation between the individual research units, to pro- 

 vide the necessary working conditions and environment, and, 

 in an industrial laboratory, to see that any results obtained 

 are applied in practice. This cannot be done by a man ^vho 

 is himself interested in his own scientific w^ork since he ^vill 

 inevitably devote himself to research on certain problems, 

 using some members of the department as assistants and leav- 

 ing the rest of the department without control. This state- 

 ment can easily be challenged by those who have observed 

 the successful direction of university laboratories by active 



