Science and Public Policy: The Open World 81 



they were doing. Journals provided an easier and wider 

 method of communication, and also eventually a means where- 

 by the individual scientist could satisfy his desire to proclaim 

 his discoveries to the world, in an effort to "get in first". The 

 fear that one's incipient discoveries might be pre-empted from 

 some unknown quarter is both an urge to secrecy when a 

 piece of work is in progress, and a spur to publication when 

 it is completed — or, indeed, before it is completed. But in 

 spite of the understandable impulse which may lead a scientist 

 to suppress information about some brain-child of his until 

 he feels the time is ripe to disclose it, I do not think that 

 secrecy plays any useful part in the open world of science. In- 

 deed, I should be inclined to say that the temptation to suc- 

 cumb to the impulse would normally be in inverse proportion 

 to the quality of the work, and to the quality of the man 

 concerned. 



We are no longer in the days of, say, Lavoisier when, be- 

 cause of the small numbers of scientists in the world, it might 

 have been expected that discoveries would usually be the 

 product of only one mind, and that they would emerge at one 

 particular moment in time. Scientists who were once numbered 

 in their tens are now counted in thousands and tens of thou- 

 sands. We all base ourselves on a common pool of knowledge. 

 We all know the general form of the "hot problems" in physics, 

 or chemistry, or genetics. When we exclude the small number 

 of absolutely novel discoveries or hypotheses which constitute 

 the foundation stones of the body of scientific knowledge, and 

 which are added to only rarely, we need not feel surprised if 

 in these days the same ideas are formulated more than once, 

 in different parts of the world, and often about the same time. 

 It is almost inconceivable that a Mendel could today report 

 the basic law of genetics, and that no-one would pick it up 

 till thirty years later. What is more likely is that we would find 

 that more than one Mendel had been thinking along the same 

 lines, and that two, three, or four of them were about to pub- 

 lish their results at about the same time — and much the same 



