SCIENTIFIC AND INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH. 
Stents and Industrial Research in the 
United States, Canada, and Australia. 
By T. BRAILSFORD ROBERTSON, Ph.D., D.Sc.* 
It is very surprising to note, after a sojourn of some years in 
America and in Canada, the extraordinary indifference of Australia 
to the lessons taught by the war in respect to the vital importance of 
higher education and research. In Europe, Asia, and America the 
war has completely transformed the attitude of the leading industrial 
States towards higher education and investigation. What all the warn- 
ing words, propaganda, and precepts of our scholars’ and investigators 
for half a century had failed to do, the sharp demonstration of war 
effected within the brief space of five years. Research was discovered 
to the politician, not as the amiable weakness of elderly scholars, but 
as the mainspring of national industries and the arbiter of life and 
death in war. 
So it happens that in America to-day money is being lavished 
upon research, particularly, of course, research of some immediate 
material value, “ Industrial Research ” so called, but not to the exclusion 
of the “ pure” sciences from which are to issue the industrial discoveries 
of the future. 
In the first place immense sums of money are now being expended 
by industrial firms in the United States on research, often along purely 
theoretical lines. Thus it is estimated by Dr. J. C. Fields, from data 
supplied to him by the firm, that the General Electric Company ex- 
pended on research in its various laboratories in 1918 no less a sum 
than two million dollars (£400,000). The Eastman Kodak Company 
employ a staff of forty research workers, and its research laboratory 
Costs thirty thousand pounds per annum to maintain; as much, it 
may be pointed out, as the entire annual expenditure of the University 
of “Adelaide, which is expected, by this expenditure, to dispense the 
totality of human knowledge, from classical literature to surveying, 
tO some six or seven hundred students annually. The Western Electric 
ompany employs three hundred research workers, and expends for 
this purpose two and a half million dollars annually. .The Dupont 
xplosives Company employs in its four chemical research laboratories 
two hundred and ninety workers, and expends two million dollars 
annually on research. 
For what purpose, we may inquire, do these industrial firms expend 
such vast sums for the prosecution of scientific research? We muy 
dismiss the idea that they do it for sheer altruism. hat wonld not 
@ “good business,’ and the directors of these firms are, it may be. 
Safely assumed, men possessed of sound business instincts. Mere dis- 
Play, or advertisement value, may be similarly dismissed, for the 
rete Professor of Physiology in the University of Adelaide, formerly Professor of Biochemistry in the 
Iversity of Toronto ; Professor of Biochemistry and Pharmacology in the University of California, 
0.40043 145 eA 
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