SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. 
Organization of Industrial Research. 
By ARTHUR D. LITTLE.* 
The war, which has changed everything, has given a new aspect to research. 
Hereafter the nation which would live must know. Through the wreck and peril 
of other peoples, Americans have learned with them that research has something 
more to offer than intellectual satisfactions or material prosperity. It has become 
a destructive as well as a creative agency, and in its sinister phase the only 
weapon with which it may be fought is more research. The organization and 
intensive prosecution of research has thus become a fundamental and patriotic 
duty which can neither be ignored nor set aside without imperilling our national 
existence. 
In considering any plan for the organization of research, one is immediately 
confronted by the difficulty that science in its highest expression is essentially 
individualistic and democratic. It resents autocratic control, languishes and 
becomes sterile under minute oversight and direction from outside. The great 
advances in human knowledge have almost invariably been due to individual effort 
set in motion by the scientific imagination and sustained by a consuming desire 
to ascertain the truth. Pasteur, Curie, and Rutherford were not dependent on 
organization for their results. They worked to the best advantage in proportion 
as they were free to follow the vision which moved before them. No amount 
of organization can make a Faraday. It may, perhaps, discover one, and is then 
privileged to provide encouragement, working facilities, and recognition. With 
these assured, it is the part of wisdom to leave him as much alone as possible. 
Any really effective plan of research organization must provide for the excep- 
tional man, the man whose angles have not been ground down, who is sometimes 
not comfortable to rub against, but who has the spark of genius. He is usually 
a man who hates rules and systems, regular hours, time slips, and all the para- 
phernalia of organization. Organization can help him none the less by relieving 
him of burdens, making him master of his own time, furnishing equipment, pro- 
viding organized and immediately available library facilities, and by directing 
his attention to specific problems. 
While the superlative work in science, like the superlative work in art, must 
always be an expression of the genius of the individual, and quite beyond the 
power of organization to insure, there remains a vast deal of what may be called 
the secondary work of rounding out the great discoveries, and especially of giving 
them an industrial application, which may he rendered most effective only through 
proper organization. The nimbus which, just at this time, surrounds the word 
“research” should not blind us to the fact that research involves a great deal 
of hack work, work for good honest plodders, who accumulate the data which 
permits or confirms the generalization, or which is required to give it practical 
effect. 
Broadly stated, the aims of research organization should be:— 
1. To find, develop, and train men. 
2. To create such a background in the public mind as shall insure support 
for research and the industrial utilization of research results. 
3. To secure co-operation between different branches of science, as, for example, 
between chemists and mathematicians. The fortuitous combination of the 
*President, Arthur D. Little, Inc. 
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