476 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LI. No. 1324 



yearly by investigators who either have defi- 

 nite problems assigned to them by others or 

 ■who see a problem so clearly that they can at 

 once present it to a board or committee or 

 executive agency in charge of funds, and im- 

 mediately win financial and other support for 

 its study. We can not have too much of this 

 sort of work and most of the research agencies 

 now under consideration, such as the National 

 Research Council, the various scientific de- 

 partments of the national government, the re- 

 search departments of the agricultural exjperi- 

 ment stations, the great research institutions 

 and commercial laboratories, are all well cal- 

 culated to foster and develop work on prob- 

 lems whose possibility of solution is fairly evi- 

 dent or whose significance is already so fully 

 understood that their study is suggested even 

 though they seem for the time insoluble. 



It seems to me equally obvious, however, 

 that these agencies do not provide at all ade- 

 quately for the second type of problems, those 

 which at present lie outside of and beyond the 

 domain of clear thought at least on the part 

 of the majority of intelligent people, and this 

 again quite regardless of whether the problems 

 seem to relate to practical matters or to have 

 only a theoretic or philosophical interest. I 

 think we must admit that many of the great 

 advances in knowledge have been made by 

 some one's breaking over these bounds of the 

 average scientists thinking and experiment- 

 ing and attacking some problem which had 

 been quite unthought of or was regarded so 

 unclearly as to be considered wholly visionary, 

 impossible of attack or even ridiculous. To 

 illustrate, I think we must admit now that the 

 Wright brothers were more favorably situated 

 for the solution of the problem of human 

 flight in heavier than air machines than was 

 Langley. Langley was in a great government 

 supported institution with supposedly all the 

 resources for the attack on the problem from 

 the mathematical, physical and experimental 

 mechanical side at his command. The Wrights 

 had to develop financial and other support as 

 they went along. The case illustrates perfectly 

 the weakness likely to inhere in governmentally 

 supported research. Langley in his position. 



could not afford repeated failures in experi- 

 menting on a problem which was still regarded 

 as chimerical if not ridiculous by the great 

 mass of intelligent people of his time. The 

 Wrights, working on their own initiative, with 

 everything to win by final success and little to 

 lose by temporary failure, with no explana- 

 tions to make to governing boards or scientific 

 societies, were in a vastly more helpful and 

 normal environment, it seems to me, for estab- 

 lishing a new point of departure in a new field 

 of activity. At least the Wrights succeeded 

 and Langley was unable to push further his 

 partial success in an achievement which if it 

 had been followed up might have won him the 

 distinction which went to the vastly less well 

 supported efforts of the Wrights. Langley in 

 his position under the eye of the government 

 could not feel himself able to support tempo- 

 rary failure or even partial success, though in 

 reality the endeavor was worth prosecuting 

 through a thousand failures. 



Another instance is the historic one of Pas- 

 teur's discovery of the relation of microorgan- 

 isms to fermentation and decay. No more 

 fundamental and enlightening work has been 

 done in the whole history of biological re- 

 search. It gave the final quietus to the doc- 

 trine of the spontaneous generation of germs 

 in decaying organic matter and laid the foun- 

 dations for a whole series of discoveries in 

 theoretic pathology as well as applications in 

 medicine and the practical arts. Yet if we 

 accept the current accounts of the attitude of 

 Pasteur's colleagues and the general public to 

 his earlier work in these lines, we can see that 

 it would have been quite impossible for him to 

 have gained support in advance for his re- 

 searches on problems supposed to be settled, 

 or quite insoluble. 



Pasteur, like the Wrights, won his way to 

 popular support, but it is certainly a question 

 whether the work, brilliant though it is, which 

 has so far come from the great institute 

 founded in his honor equals in significance 

 the work done by the great master. 



It is the despair of organizers of research 

 that work of the first rank such as that of Pas- 

 teur and Darwin shows so little dependence on 



