JOSHUA LEDERBERG 
then lie unread. A typical weekly reminder list distributed in 
our department may include upwards of a hundred titles. It 
would be a more than full-time occupation to digest just this 
sample of science, and it takes a constant act of judgment to 
decide what to take time for. The useful output of scientific 
work has not yet been impaired by the density of “creativity 
space’’. In any case, society’s return for its investment in science 
is so great that it cannot afford to hold back from an even 
greater, though possibly less efficient, allocation of its resources 
to science and technology. Whether the individual motivation 
for a scientific career can sustain the pressure on creative oppor- 
tunity is a perturbing question. The situation is bound to be 
ageravated by the general increase in population and in the 
relative popularity of science, perhaps most of all by the sudden 
accession of the once underdeveloped nations to the main 
streams of world science. 
The problem is compounded by the archaic clumsiness of our 
basic mechanisms of communication. Man’s dilemma is the 
discrepancy between the size of his population and complexity 
of his institutions, on one hand, and his individual feebleness, 
measured as a data input rate of no more than 50 bits per second. 
The linguistics of the future may improve the technique of 
speech, or open other channels of communication for our daily 
needs. Meanwhile it is anomalous how inefficiently science has 
applied existing technology to tend to its own needs of com- 
munication. Incredible to say, within the present system only 
by chance could I in future discover comments that others 
might publish in criticism of this very paper. The phenomenon 
of science has only recently attracted the analytical interest that 
can help to expose such anomalies. Until it has gone much 
further we can only guess at their roots in personal and cultural 
psychology. They do lend support to the hypothesis of uncon- 
scious resistance to effective, and therefore perhaps disturbing, 
communication. 
The changes in the scope of research have changed its quality. 
Research is the effort to add to human knowledge. The extent 
of existing knowledge was hitherto more readily discoverable: 
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