STATE OF SCIENCE—COMPTON 407 
sending its first railroads across an undeveloped territory and pouring 
eager thousands of its citizens into the frantic California gold rush, 
in 1949 has spread across a continent and developed the land from 
coast to coast. Its teeming agriculture has reached new heights of 
productivity so that we have been able to feed not only ourselves but 
much of the war-torn world as well. Our industries thrive, the 
majority of our people are well employed at good wages, and the chief 
danger seems to be that we may over-extend ourselves and push 
prosperity beyond the point of stability. At a glance, this picture 
would not seem to leave much for our creative energies. 
A closer examination of the facts leaves less room for complacency. 
Not only do we have left to solve many problems of our own areas, 
but we have facing us also the inescapable fact of one world. Even 
if we were disposed to pursue our own destiny, unmindful of the rest 
of mankind, we have recognized that it is impossible to do so, and 
that our national good is strongly linked to the good of the rest of the 
world. This has been the philosophy underlying the Marshall Plan 
and of much of our postwar thinking. 
One of our principal causes of concern as scientists is the grave 
interruption that foreign science suffered by the war, and we are 
anxious for its rehabilitation. The destruction of institutions and 
implements of learning has been a source of distress to scholars 
throughout the ages, and American scientists have viewed with a 
sense of personal loss the destruction of libraries, laboratories, and 
other important tools of learning as one of the sad byproducts of war. 
We should like to see foreign science restored to its prewar vigor, 
not only in the interest of fundamental knowledge everywhere, upon 
which we and everyone can draw, but also because of the way in 
which a healthy body of science can contribute to economic and social 
recovery of all nations. 
To my way of thinking, it would be a helpful and legitimate thing 
if those countries whose programs of scientific research were most 
seriously disrupted by the war would see fit to include funds for the 
rehabilitation of those programs in their requests for United States 
aid under the provisions of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948. I 
believe that such requests should be sympathetically received, since 
sound plans for economic development must rest upon technology 
supported by fundamental research. It is not difficult to envisage 
the ultimate practical good to be derived from renewed investigation 
in such fields as utilization of human resources, food and nutrition, 
medical sciences, chemistry, physics, metallurgy, geology, meteor- 
ology, hydrology, engineering, and soil mechanics. If only a small 
percentage of Marshall-Plan funds were invested in this manner, 
there can be no doubt that rich returns of a long-range nature in 
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