Esthetic Satisfaction

As executive vice president of Smith, Kline & French Laboratories (drugs), Businessman Francis Boyer has to deal with and hire scientists. Last week he told a Philadelphia convention of the American Chemical Society how he tries to decide whether a scientific researcher is apt to make real discoveries.

"How can a businessman," asked Boyer, "or a politician for that matter--tell a good scientist? He certainly is incapable of forming any sensible judgment on scientific grounds. He must, I think, turn to the human side. Every scientific discovery is in a sense the autobiography of the man who made it."

After asking advice from eminent friends, Boyer decided that a creative scientist must be "an all-round man, not a narrow specialist . . . This type of man is the one best able to leap barriers between fields, to borrow techniques, to synthesize new concepts." Besides many-sidedness, the productive researcher should have "the ability to see the relationship between apparently unrelated facts, the ability to appreciate the significance of the unobvious." He should have "intense curiosity combined with intense skepticism." His motivating force should be "the esthetic satisfaction he obtains in bringing order out of chaos."

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