320 I. The Admimstjritive Problem 



mittee states the problem and bacteriologist, pathologist, parasitologist 

 all work to a common end. The central body receives reports, calling 

 conferences or interviewing individual workers, making sure that people 

 stick to their texts and finally synthesising the results. It has been 

 suggested that the government should apply the team method to 

 agricultural research and be itself the central coordinating synthesising 

 agent. That the government should organise all the workers as its team, 

 should allocate grants and problems, and gather together the results for 

 direct economic purposes, thus eliminating waste of energy and in- 

 determinate research merely wasting public funds. This is a specious 

 scheme immensely attractive to administrators. 



But the analogy with medical research is very imperfect. In medicine 

 there are a very large number of workers who have advanced to the 

 confines of knowledge. There is much material and many laboratories 

 at their disposal, medical schools and hospitals. Further they deal with 

 only one organism, the human being, when the individual is so valuable 

 that great sums may be spent on investigation. But our field presents 

 very different features and there are so few workers that the suggested 

 team work and method of coordination are largely superfluous. Further 

 there is not one but manv sciences each equal to human medicine — 

 animal or plant pathology, horticulture, breeding, chemistry and study 

 of the soil, mechanical appliances and so forth, and these are too divergent 

 for coordination to a common end. In fact team work in this realm is 

 largely an illusion. 



There are however occasions on which team work would be possible 

 and expedient. For instance during the war it became clear from the 

 results of scientific experiment that the later stages in the feeding of 

 cattle were uneconomic. Yet these results were not acted upon by the 

 farming community for the farmers were not convinced, chiefly because 

 the results had not sufficient volume of evidence and experiment behind 

 them. The only effective way to obtain such evidence would have been 

 to repeat the experiments on a very much larger scale and this could 

 only have been done by allocating the work among various institutions. 



Let us turn now to the organisation proposed by the Ministry of Agri- 

 culture in dealing witli j)]ant diseases and I may say that we are hoping 

 in the next few yeais to make groat advances in this direction. There are 

 still however many financial dillicultios, foi- government grants which 

 at first sight seem liberal c()iii|)ai(Mi with those given in the past turn out 

 to be veiy inad(M|ua1e when viewed by present day standards. 



Tlit^ following are the various organisations proj)os(>(l by tlu> Ministry : 



(1) Institutes, governed by universities or bodies like the Lawes 



