Science and Public Policy: The Open World 85 



these questions of security in basic science, whether pure or 

 "mission-orientated", is that I do not believe that the source 

 of the great ideas which have transformed the scientific scene 

 has ever been the secret laboratories of governments. It 

 is in the open world, not the closed world of military 

 science, where the big ideas have germinated, sprouted and 

 flowered. This is not because the inherent creative quality of 

 the men who have worked in Government laboratories was or 

 is on average below what one finds in, say, a university depart- 

 ment. Far from it. My hunch is that the young man who starts 

 working under conditions of secrecy in a field which is defined 

 for him by his superiors is less likely to enjoy the riches of 

 imaginative discovery than the man working in a free and open 

 environment where his work is exposed to the full blaze of 

 scientific criticism. Secrecy and great thoughts do not thrive 

 together. 



The third point which determines my judgment in this 

 matter is the fact that the vast growth in scientific activity of 

 the past two to three decades has paradoxically made it diffi- 

 cult for anyone to keep up with what is published, even 

 in the open world of science. We are involved in what has 

 been called a "crisis in communication". So much is published 

 that, secrecy or no secrecy, the average scientist is likely to be 

 ignorant of published observations which could help galvanise 

 his own work. Whatever else, he does not want to do work 

 which has been done already. When one adds to this the fact 

 that the research worker often fails to realise the significance 

 of one or some of his own observations — we all have had 

 experience of this^ — it becomes all the more important that 

 there should be no unnecessary barriers to information which 

 someone else can provide. A trivial thought, captured from 

 anywhere, from some printed sentence, from the storehouse of 

 memory, can suddenly illuminate what has been obscure, and 

 by so doing bring about a revolution in understanding. 



It is all very well hoping that some modern computer 

 system by which the mounting flood of new scientific informa- 



