Address of Welcome 



C. A. DYKSTRA 



President of The University of Wisconsin 



THE University of Wisconsin is a happy host today. It welcomes 

 to its campus scientists from many laboratories who are drawn 

 together for the discussion of common problems and common aims. 

 It recognizes in this symposium the challenge that faces intelligent 

 men of good will everywhere— the great need there is in the con- 

 temporary world for sitting down and reasoning together. From such 

 a process comes progress. 



We are concerned here with functions which operate in the 

 biological and chemical world. We seek these out and discover how 

 they work so that, knowing about them, we may cooperate with 

 nature for the good of man. This we do by observation, experimenta- 

 tion, analysis, and, finally, the objective setting down of results 

 that may yield a pattern or a principle. As we look about us and see 

 biological specimens called men reacting to special or group inter- 

 ests as passion and selfishness may happen to dictate, we ask our- 

 selves, a bit dismally perhaps, whether the statesmen and public 

 leaders of the world can ever be persuaded to try out the scientific 

 method as an approach to the problems of world organization. We 

 also need desperately a healthy society and a sound international 

 body. 



Here, today, we pay tribute to the internationalism of science. As 

 we scan our program for the week we are struck by the fact that 

 men from different backgrounds and from many nationalities and 

 races can come together peacefully in a symposium to present the 

 results of long years of human effort in a field of science, check these 

 results, and try to establish what they mean or may mean to life on 

 this planet. Today and right here men labor together who, were they 

 still living in their family homelands, would be enemies, legally and 

 politically. This is the great modem paradox— that as the world of 

 communication has made the globe a unity and as the domains of 

 science, hterature, music, art, commerce, and industry have become 

 international, we have at the same time the phenomenon of a more 

 bitter nationahsm than ever before. Something is wrong that needs 



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