Double Danger

Of the countless millions spent each year to advance U.S. technology, how much is going into basic scientific research? Dangerously little, warned Cal-Tech's President Lee A. DuBridge last week at a meeting of the American Management Association in San Francisco. Said he:

"Many people [think] that there is no real distinction between science and technology . . . This ... is not only a very superficial view, but a very dangerous one. The implication ... is that the burden of scientific research, though it was largely carried by the universities during the igth Century and the first quarter of the 20th

Century, has now been largely assumed by the industrial laboratories, and more recently by Government laboratories. All three kinds of laboratories, it is said, are working toward the same goal, and the great expansion in industrial and Government laboratories means and will result in great acceleration in the rate of growth of science. Even if the university laboratories should go out of business, some would conclude that science will continue to thrive in the laboratories of industry and Government . . .

"But like the eastand westbound sections of the streamliner, however identical they appear to be, [these laboratories] are simply not headed in the same direction. The aim of science is to discover new knowledge and new principles. The aim of technology ... is to invent new devices, new machines, new processes, new techniques. And in the long run the new developments in technology will be based only upon the new knowledge uncovered by science."

Americans, said Dr. DuBridge, are "approaching a real crisis in ... basic science. [They] take such great pride in the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars of Government and industrial money is going into research in applied science that they are unconcerned and even uninformed about the fact that but a tiny fraction of this amount is being fed into the laboratories of basic science."

In CalTech's annual report, President DuBridge pins much of the blame for the sad plight of basic research on a "confused" policy of the Federal Government, which has left "the support of science . . . largely with those [Government] agencies whose primary functions are military." As a result, basic science is fighting a losing battle for funds, and "there is increasing pressure to extend to basic science the secrecy restrictions which necessarily pervade military weapon development . . . An excellent way to stifle science is to cut off its sources of support. A still better way is to suppress its freedom . . ."

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