Governmental Research 123 



"Finally, it would be fatal to the success of a Department entrusted 

 with the encouragement and organization of research to concern itself 

 with exploitation or commercial development or administrative applica- 

 tion of the results which may be obtained. ..." 



It should be noted also that the English plan separates the adminis- 

 trative functions from the technical or scientific, the policies and pro- 

 grams of the latter being exclusively under the control of advisory com- 

 mittees composed of scientific or technical experts who are not members 

 of the Department. 



In the United States, the major branches of scientific research under 

 governmental jurisdiction have not been gathered together under a single 

 administrative head as in England but have been left each to the inde- 

 pendent direction of the department of state in which it may be acci- 

 dentally located, although there is now under consideration a measure 

 that would group all the engineering and many of the scientific bureaus, 

 except those dealing with agriculture, under a single Department of 

 Public Works. The direction of scientific work, as at present organized, 

 is almost exclusively in the hands of scientific men who combine the 

 functions of an administrator and leader in research. 



The American plan of independent administrative units does not 

 mean that there are not often very intimate relations between scientific 

 services in the various government departments including interchange 

 of programs, partition of projects between them and other forms of co- 

 operation maintained by a sufficiently close liaison, either formal or 

 informal; although it could hardly be maintained that this common 

 effort is as effective in all cases as could be wished. Again, certain 

 scientific and technical services, such as the Advisory Committee for 

 Aeronautics, are specifically constituted by law to include a membership 

 from the several interested departments and the research work of this 

 Committee is distributed among them. This method of bringing 

 together the representatives of several branches of the service, some 

 dealing with the application and others with the solution of scientific 

 problems in a definite field of research, makes for better understanding 

 between theory and practice, and the scientific workers have the benefit 

 of valuable advice from the men who are to use the results of the in- 

 vestigation. This constant interplay is beneficial to both. This method 

 of joint research control could be extended with advantage to many 

 other fields of the applications of science in which the government is 

 interested. 



One of the most important and fundamental fields of general interest, 

 in which a beginning has been made to bring the departments together, 

 is that of standardization and specifications. It has been proposed to 



