Mat 5, 191f 



SCIENCE' 



631 



common — that great advances are made by 

 sudden flashes of thought through the 

 mind of some lucky and presumably un- 

 occupied individual. If this were so, there 

 would be little need for the high degree of 

 training which is necessary for almost any 

 scientific service in our day. We may find 

 a simple illustration of this point in or- 

 ganic chemistry. "We know that the arti- 

 ficial production of important chemical 

 compounds, such as indigo and rubber, has 

 been accomplished. But how many of us 

 ieven begin to realize the training that was 

 necessary and the research that had to be 

 done before success could be claimed. The 

 Badische Company spent seventeen years 

 completing the indigo work after the first 

 synthesis, and expended about five million 

 dollars before a pound was put on the 

 market. I might say that without at least 

 fifty years of work by thousands of re- 

 search chemists, neither problem could have 

 been solved. 



I would also be right in saying that if 

 you removed from that structure even a 

 part of the purely theoretical work, such 

 as that where organic chemists spent their 

 lifetimes testing the compounds for the 

 imaginary double bonds of the hypothetical 

 benzol ring, such synthesis would not have 

 been brought about. 



In my study I have a photograph of 

 about thirty young research men grouped 

 about Wohler. This is the chemist of Got- 

 tingen who first discovered that an organic 

 compound could be produced in a labora- 

 tory. It was he who also made the first 

 metallic aluminum. The picture was taken 

 in 1856, about as early as decent photo- 

 graphs were possible. Every year since 

 1856 that Gottingen laboratory, among 

 others, has been training chemists in re- 

 search. They have gone into fields of in- 

 finite chemical variety. Each man has 

 been a center in some distant place, and 



around this center there has often been 

 built up in turn some kind of chemical 

 structure. Many became teachers, and 

 their students in turn became experiment- 

 ers and teachers. Many followed indus- 

 trial chemistry and extended the field of 

 the ever-increasing army of chemists. In 

 my particular photograph is one man who 

 in 1866 became the Professor Goessman of 

 the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and 

 was later professor at Amherst and very 

 prominent for years in the Massachusetts 

 State Board of Agriculture. 



Since 1856 the same seeking for knowl- 

 edge by renewed groups of such men has 

 been continually going on in many foreign 

 laboratories, but is only slowly being taken 

 up in our country. Is it not time that we 

 awakened to the fact that, as research chem- 

 ists, we are still in our infancy ? If we are 

 ever to be a leading country in industrial 

 chemistry, research is absolutely necessary. 

 If such research is done elsewhere, then the 

 major part of the advantage will lie else- 

 where also. 



This is one of the most difficult points for 

 an American to recognize. Forests may be 

 leveled by a brawny arm with an ax, canals 

 may be dug with a dredge, but practical 

 science needs knowledge and training, and 

 always more training. 



Scientific research, or research in the 

 natural sciences and in the industries, 

 might be defined as the pioneer work of 

 the developed country. In this light it is 

 easy to see that our turn has come. Not 

 long ago our pioneer work was of another 

 kind. It was opening up the undeveloped 

 land. It was actively and well done. But 

 the work must change because our require- 

 ments have altered. 



Carl Helffereieh, director of the Deutsche 

 Bank and now secretary of the treasury of 

 Germany, writing before the war, said: 



