Science and Public Policy: The Open World 71 



. . . From this absence of connexion there is often a want of 

 mutual esteem and a misapprehension of their relative impor- 

 tance to each other." 



I often wonder whether the different ways in which the 

 U.K., the U.S.A and Germany have treated the connexion 

 between science and technology do not to some extent reflect 

 differences in the ways these three countries increased their 

 wealth during the 18th and 19th centuries. In Britain — and 

 this, I believe, was not the case in the United States or Ger- 

 many — revenues from non-industrial investment overseas were 

 an important addition to the profits which manufacturing in- 

 dustry provided. Those days are long since past, as only too 

 evident from the nature of Britain's present balance of pay- 

 ments problem. 



But by whatever routes different countries 

 Scientists Today may have made their way into the present 

 age, and to the enjoyment of what has be- 

 come a common scientific heritage, scientists since the Second 

 World War are now all in much the same position — the prime 

 actors in a new dynamic phase of the world's social and po- 

 litical evolution. All who belonged to countries which were 

 involved in the war found themselves part of the most de- 

 termined and directed drive to gain and harness scientific 

 knowledge that the world had ever known, and supported on 

 a scale which made the cumulative total of the resources that 

 in previous decades had gone to science seem trivial. The im- 

 mediate results, as we all know, were the emergence of radar, 

 jet engines, penicillin, the atom bomb, D.D.T., and a host of 

 other things. 



The secondary results of this harnessing of science were as 

 numerous, and in some ways more important to the future of 

 the world. The demand in which scientists and engineers 

 found themselves twenty-five years ago has not only continued, 

 but has spread to all countries. There can never have been a 

 period in history when any other profession has been so uni- 



