Three Historical Appraisals: Catalyzing 11 



and engineering community, has proved to be the most im- 

 portant modern way of transferring ideas about the nature of 

 military problems to the scientists, and ideas about military 

 uses of science and engineering into military technology. 



A second mechanism fashioned by ONR into an important 

 instrument of catalysis is the Working Technological Advisory 

 Committee. Such a Committee consists of professionals active 

 in the field, who meet with Navy people to discuss problems 

 and to give two kinds of informal advice: advice to the Navy 

 on what it might do, and advice to themselves on the research 

 and development work that they themselves should do in their 

 laboratories. This way of generating technical guidance and 

 shaping up new research efforts has provided in its numerous 

 variants many new ways of insuring relevance and quality 

 in government-sponsored research. 



I believe, finally, that ONR was the first to realize the advan- 

 tages to the Government of the modern peacetime form of the 

 university-operated, government-sponsored laboratory. It has 

 established a number of such laboratories, and each has become 

 a major leader in its field of endeavor. Because of the intimate 

 personal relationships with the academic community, ONR 

 has been able to foster in this manner a high degree of coup- 

 ling between research interests in government laboratories and 

 research interests in government-sponsored laboratories as well 

 as with industrial research efforts, A remarkable number of 

 ONR-sponsored research endeavors have been carried out by 

 close cooperation among a mixture of government and gov- 

 ernment-sponsored laboratories, with industrial participation 

 and assistance. 



I may sum up ONR's contribution in this important field 

 of administration by noting that, by the competence of its 

 personnel, and by its imaginativeness, ONR established a new 

 kind of relationship between government offices and labora- 

 tories and the scholarly community, in which both have worked 

 together for the advancement of science and technology and 

 the improvement of the Navy's capabilities for national de- 

 fense. This spirit of cooperative endeavor that has marked 



