Science and Public Policy: The Open World 75 



believe that scientists themselves can best decide how to allo- 

 cate such resources for basic science as are provided from a 

 total Research and Development Budget. They may not do 

 the job very well, but it is inconceivable that anyone else 

 could do the job better, whatever the criteria by which the 

 relative claims of different fields of work are judged, whether 

 of possible utility or intellectual merit. 



Nothing, as I have already implied, is static in science — 

 neither fields of interest nor methods, techniques or what you 

 will. Molecular biology began, as it were, yesterday; radio- 

 astronomy, which took off from radar, the day before that; as 

 the involvement of European countries in overseas colonial 

 territories declines, their interest in systematic helminthology 

 and parasitology and tropical diseases declines; nuclear physics 

 increased the number of atomic elements and radio-chemistry 

 revivified organic chemistry; lasers emerge and find a use in 

 highly different fields ranging from tele-links in weapons sys- 

 tems to ophthalmic surgery. As the techniques of one branch 

 of science become applied to another, new border-line subjects 

 emerge, and these then become established as disciplines of their 

 own. The changing pattern of science is thus not only like 

 that of a turning kaleidoscope; it is that of a turning and ex- 

 panding kaleidoscope, the beads and bits in which are added 

 to hourly, and in an unpredictable way. As the pattern changes 

 so does the intellectual stimulus of its different parts. No one 

 scientist understands the whole pattern, for in one sense all 

 scientists are specialists. But in another we are all becoming 

 border-line scientists. It is, therefore, a fair proposition that 

 scientists as a class v/ould be more likely than would non- 

 scientists to get the sense of the whole changing pattern of 

 science. It is essentially for this reason that I hold that the 

 main responsibility for deciding how to allocate the resources 

 set aside for basic science should be firmly laid on representa- 

 tives of the scientific community itself. 



For all practical purposes, of course, the resources available 

 to basic science are totally deployed at any given moment, and 



