ACCEPTANCE OF VOLUNTARY SERVICES 279 



of the war in connection with their regular occupations, and the war effort 

 would have been affected adversely had they severed those connections. 

 If OSRD had been restricted to persons willing to accept full-time Govern- 

 ment employment, it would have lost the benefit of some of the most 

 creative imaginations which were brought to bear on its problems. This 

 statement can be made without reflecting in the slightest degree upon the 

 small but highly capable full-time scientific staff which OSRD had for the 

 day-to-day supervision of its scientific research and development program. 



Use of woe appointments brought OSRD the services of scores of out- 

 standing scientists who otherwise would have been unavailable. It also 

 brought speed because part-time voluntary service could frequently be ob- 

 tained by a telephone call, while full-time employment took days of process- 

 ing and occasionally weeks of waiting while the prospective employee was 

 winding up his affairs in the post which he was leaving. Parenthetically, 

 it is inconceivable that any Government agency would have been permit- 

 ted to have as many full-time top officials as OSRD would have needed 

 had it not been for the WOC appointments. 



It was recognized that the situation was one in which conflicts of inter- 

 est were possible. In the interest of speed and success, OSRD needed to 

 contract with the outstanding research organizations in the country; for 

 its scientific advice it needed to go to the best-qualified men, and they 

 were frequently employed by these same organizations. Members of NDRC 

 and CMR were officers of Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of 

 Technology, California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Uni- 

 versity of Illinois, University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University, 

 and Bell Telephone Laboratories. Clearly, no research program could be 

 well rounded which ignored these institutions. 



The committees early adopted the rule that no member would partici- 

 pate in the discussion of, or vote upon, any proposal affecting the institu- 

 tion from which he received his salary. A similar rule was followed in 

 the divisions and sections. The rule eventually found embodiment in Ad- 

 ministrative Circular 2.02 dated February 17, 1943, which emphasized that 

 no OSRD officer or employee should represent the Government in any 

 of its business transactions with a nongovernmental organization which 

 paid all or part of his salary. All such transactions were to be turned over 

 to some member of the division, section or other part of the office having 

 no connection with the organization involved. In appropriate cases, an 

 Acting Division Chief or Acting Section Chief was appointed to handle 

 the case. The circular pointed out that this procedure merely followed 

 the example set by Bush who, as OSRD Director, had delegated complete 

 exercise of judgment in negotiations with the Carnegie Institution of 

 Washington to the Executive Secretary of OSRD and who, as President 

 of the Carnegie Institution, had delegated to the Executive Officer of the 



