Anniversary Address by Prof. C. S. Sherrington. 11 



The necessary supply of trained research workers cannot be retained or 

 replenished except by a steady policy pursued. If the financial provision 

 for research is too severely cut down, that will mean the extinction of various 

 investigations which cannot be satisfactorily continued at all under narrower 

 limits of expenditure than are imposed at present. One feature of modern 

 research is that it has become more largely team-work, the combined effort of 

 an assorted group of individuals with special training. Want of volume has 

 tended to be a weak point in our national research. Eeduction of the 

 support by Government will react most rapidly on the number of competent 

 investigators available, the number that makes a fair volume of team-work 

 possible. The Eeport of the Advisory Council states that the effect of a set- 

 back of this kind will be long-continued and adds that it may be lasting. 



To pull down under emergency what has been built up through years of 

 careful experience and is proving efficient, can hardly be ultimate economy. 

 It is to unlearn a useful lesson learnt. Curtailment of the State aid — 

 relatively small in this country — given to scientific research must harm 

 the scientific production of the country. Some curtailment, however, at this 

 time seems unavoidable. Though extension of buildings and equipment and 

 personnel is wanted, it may be necessary to withhold that extension at this 

 time, maintaining broadly the statics quo ready for expansion when that is 

 once more feasible. But if research be an indispensable factor in the 

 rebuilding of the national life, sacrifices should not be required from it dispro- 

 portionately greater than from other services of a similarly essential kind. 

 Eeduction of the State's support on a scale to entail ruin to the existent 

 organisation would be a wastage rather than an economy. Calmly viewed, 

 what more reminiscent of the wastage of the War itself than for machinery 

 actually constructed, assembled, and producing what is needful for a nation's 

 strength as a pillar in the industrial and intellectual temple of the world, to 

 be now under temporary change abandoned or broken up ; and at a time when 

 industry as a whole stands convinced of scientific research as a necessity for 

 its recovery and well-being. 



My hope would be that scientific research on its present maintenance will 

 be considered part of the intellectual bread of the community, part of the 

 bed-rock on which rests the efficiency, not to speak of the industrial equip- 

 ment of the nation ; that it will be treated as such in the measure of State- 

 support continued to it ; that the State will remember that that support has 

 to embrace at least both the Universities on the one hand, and, on the other, 

 the research institutions administered by the State, for this reason, namely, 

 that the couutry's organisation for research, complex in origin, yet economical 

 and effective, stands as an integral system, to whose entire existence is 



