NOTES 
On the Establishment of the Oahu Research Center of the 
University of California 
In recent years there has been a general 
recognition by many national governments 
that so-called basic or fundamental scientific 
research deserves financial support. Usually 
this recognition has been stimulated not so 
much by admiration for the scientists or a 
desire to increase the cultural heritage of man- 
kind as by a hard-headed cost accounting ap- 
plied to the history of technological progress 
in the past 25 years. In the long run it pays 
to support basic research. In the process of 
financing apparently useless projects the gov- 
ernments have, in spite of waste and some 
incompetence, received more than their money s 
worth in by-products. In the United States, 
naturally, the first example that comes to mind 
is the Manhattan Project and its subsequent 
development into the complicated investiga- 
tions now carried on by the Atomic Energy 
Commission. One is apt to forget that the 
Federal Government, while making its major 
effort in the field of atomic physics, also sup- 
ports a multitude of other research projects and 
that these are not always developmental in aim 
or technological in scope. While some gov- 
ernments, operating on the principle that he 
who pays the piper calls the tune, have tended 
to support basic researches only in their own 
laboratories, sometimes to the extent of 
starving the universities out of certain fields, 
in the United States there has been a consist- 
ent effort to avoid centralization by contracting 
for basic research with the institutions most 
competent to carry it out, namely, the uni- 
versities and technological institutes. 
The result has been, since the end of World 
War II, what is probably the greatest outpour- 
ing of the taxpayers’ money into a purely in- 
tellectual venture that the world has seen. For 
7 years the people of the United States have 
paid and have asked no questions. The ad- 
ministrators of the program, both civilian and, 
surprisingly enough, military, have recognized 
that it is almost impossible to assess the value 
of a basic research program in a decade. The 
results are often intangible, sometimes of a 
purely negative kind (as showing, for example, 
that a frontal attack on a given problem is 
unprofitable) or, in some cases, of value only 
in training the technologists and research 
workers of the future. Recently, however, there 
have been murmurs of discontent. As the tax 
bill grows larger and international tensions 
increase, three groups have criticized the most 
sensitive of the basic research programs: that 
supported by the Armed Services. First, the 
operating agencies of the Armed Forces, the 
men responsible for using weapons and plan- 
ning battles, have felt that they have received 
practically no benefit from the basic research 
program, that progress is too slow in a period 
of war such as that in Korea, and that the 
money would be better spent on technological 
development the results of which can be fore- 
seen now. Second, university administrators 
have complained that they are slowly being 
strangled by the red tape which is inevitably 
spun around research projects supported by the 
taxpayer and which increases every year. Com- 
plicated cost accounting and unimaginative 
auditing exasperate them and make them in- 
clined to ask research workers in fundamental 
science to return to their ivory towers, however 
cramped these may now appear. Last, the re- 
search workers themselves are complaining. 
Some of them have been on contract work for 
6 or 7 years, have obtained good results, and 
have written voluminous reports, as required 
by the university contract system. But these 
reports have been buried in official archives; 
often the operating arms of the services do not 
even know of their existence; sometimes the 
solution of a serious military problem already 
exists in embryo in the files of the agency most 
worried about it. No serious rift has developed 
yet, but, if the present tendencies persist, one 
can foresee the end of military support for 
basic research. 
In many of the sciences this rift, no matter 
how wide it became, would not be serious for 
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