Science and Public Policy: The Open World 67 



machine and the leaders of science in the outside world — 

 whether in the Universities or in Industry. In these respects 

 the Office of Naval Research has established a pattern of 

 operation which is the envy of the wide world. In the recogni- 

 tion of this achievement, I have been asked by the President 

 of the Royal Society of London to bring you the congratula- 

 tions and good wishes of the Society on this happy occasion. 



The particular topic about which I have been 

 The Scientist invited to speak relates to the significance of 

 at His Bench communication and secrecy in the world of 



science. Since it happens to be only a single 

 aspect of the wider issue of the conditions of scientific progress, 

 I intend to discharge my task in the context of a general and 

 brief review of the latter problem recognizing that by so doing 

 I am abiding by a tradition of self-enquiry which seems to 

 have become a peculiar habit of scientists. I know of no other 

 field of culture, whether it be politics or art, religion or music, 

 whose practitioners are given to as much communal analysis 

 as we are. And I assume we engage in it because we hope it 

 will lead to a better understanding of the processes whereby 

 scientific knowledge grows, of the constraints which inhibit its 

 free development, and of the pitfalls to be avoided as we strive 

 after some kind of scientific perfection. 



Let us, therefore, begin with the individual research worker. 

 Usually we shall see him growing up in a university department 

 where his first field of inquiry would have been greatly in- 

 fluenced by the work, however narrow or however wide its 

 intellectual scope, that was going on around him. To some 

 extent, he, therefore, begins as a victim of fashion; and to an 

 extent which will vary with his own powers, and particularly 

 with his capacity for truly original thinking, he will continue 

 as such, given that he carries on as a research worker at all. A 

 far-reaching advance in the laboratory in which he may be 

 working, whether it happens to be in his own or in a related 

 field of interest, may turn the direction of his inquiries. So, too, 

 will some new major development in another laboratory. 



