Stargazer

Harvard's famed Astronomer Harlow Shapley, who has long gazed upward with Red stars in his eyes,* took a searching look about him at the state of science in a world of ideological struggle and bounced off the party line.

"Science cannot flourish under the domination of a social system," he told an interviewer before leaving for Paris to attend a conference on U.N. research laboratories. "It must be free and not warped to fit an irrelevant plan...To the extent that they are prostituting their, sciences in this direction, the Russians will be the losers." But, he added wistfully, "we shall lose some also, because they are excellent scientists, and they with us could help so much in the great scientific attacks on the ignorance, diseases, and the poverty of man."

Scientist Shapley sought to rise above lesser loyalties. "Whether it is the anti-evolution statutes in some of the American states, or Nazi attacks on the 'Jewish' relativity theory, or the Kremlin's telling the astronomers what cosmogony is good for them and what is bad, the demoralization of the spirit is dangerous." Although he believes that nine-tenths of the Russian scientists are "aware of the social mistake," they can do nothing about it: "The Soviet version of the moment is the worst, because the affliction is nationwide. I wish I had some assurance the malady were transitory...We cannot condone the Soviet infringement," he concluded, but "perhaps in some way we can help them discover the error and ultimate futility of their policy."

* An ardent worker on numerous Communist front organizations, he made his latest major contribution to the cause by serving as chairman of the pro-Communist Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in New York's Waldorf-Astoria last March (TIME, April 4).

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