58 ORGANIZING SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH FOR WAR 



advance. Each Division and Section Chief wanted to place contracts with 

 institutions which in his opinion could best contribute to the solution of his 

 problems; and he was not concerned with the fact that OSRD contracts in 

 other fields might have been placed with those institutions. A fairly heavy 

 concentration of contracts among institutions in the northeastern part of 

 the United States and on the Pacific Coast began to develop, and members 

 of the Committee were aware of the fact they were open to possible criti- 

 cism because of this concentration. Inasmuch as the NDRC was seeking to 

 bring into defense research the best scientific talent in the country, Conant 

 had a study made to see how effectively this was being accomplished. As a 

 rough measure of leadership in science, he took the starring of names in 

 American Men of Science. As the selection of names to be starred in a par- 

 ticular field is made by scientists in that field, this gives the scientists' own 

 estimate of the standing of their colleagues. Conant's study showed that as 

 of October 15, 1941, 52 per cent of the starred chemists were engaged in 

 defense work for OSRD, for industry or for the Government. The corre- 

 sponding figure for starred physicists was 78 per cent. The difference 

 between the two figures was a reflection of the fact that modern war calls 

 upon the physicist to a greater extent than upon the chemist. 'Conant pointed 

 out that the figures on physicists, when considered in the light of the 

 expanding interest in electronics, pointed to the probability of a very serious 

 shortage of physicists. 



An analysis of the distribution of starred physicists and chemists showed 

 that OSRD was already contracting with institutions employing 98 per cent 

 of them. The amount of money in OSRD contracts with the various insti- 

 tutions naturally did not correspond exacdy with the distribution of the 

 starred scientists among those institutions; and one result of the survey was 

 to indicate to the Division Chiefs particular institutions which might be able 

 profitably to absorb more OSRD work. 



When war came and with it an expansion of the OSRD program and 

 of the Army, Navy and industrial research and development programs, the 

 demands for physicists far exceeded the supply, and institutions with com- 

 petent physicists either took military research contracts or released men to 

 institutions which had contracts. As gas was not used in the war, the demand 

 for chemists never reached the proportions of the demand for physicists and 

 less difficulty was experienced in placing contracts for needed chemical re- 

 search. Engineering colleges and engineering departments of universities 

 were not used as fully as they wished to be. In the early days of NDRC 

 when the emphasis was upon research, the heavy demand was for physicists 

 and chemists. As emphasis switched to development in the later days of 

 NDRC, it might have been possible to make more effective use of the staffs 

 of engineering departments and engineering colleges; but by that time the 

 pattern had been pretty well set and the pressure under which everyone 



