Evening star., 1952-10-03
Man and His knowledge

Dr. Vannevar Bush, in his excellent address
to the District Medical Society, has given voice
to a lot of wise comment on the vast complexity
OF the human mechanism" and on the monu-
mental problem that men face in trying to
integrate and interpret all the things they
constantly learning about themselves.
Man, of course. is still great mystery in
many respects This is true of him not only in
terms of the spirit but in terms of the flesh as
well. In Dr. BuShS words, scientists and engi-
neers spent couple of billion dollars and made
an atomic bomb; why isn't the same thing done
to clear up the cancer problem?" The answer,
as he says, is plain enough. Wholly apart from
the half-century of fundamental research that
preceded the fabrication of the worlds frst
A-weapon the processes of nuclear f1Ssion are
incomparably less intricate than the fabulous
lntricacy of a human being, including the
fabulous intricacy of the wild and unbridled cell
multiplication that causes malignant growth
in human being. Such intricacy-the wondrous
and sometimes terrible intricacy of mans life
poses problems and calls for courses Of action
that are far different from those involved in
building, say, bridge or a relatively simple
instrument of mass destruction.
Nevertheless, unbelievably complex though
man is, he is steadily acquiring an immense
volume of new knowledge about himself as well
as about the inanimate world around him.
4Huceu, dCCUIu1IlS W OI DuoIt-WIlO SpcdhS WILL
authority as head of the Carnegie Institution of
Washington and chief of our wartime Office of
Research and Development-the very growth of
this knowledge, in so many branches of science
and at such rapid rate constitutes in itself
problem Of the first magnitude. How digest 1t
all? Where can the time be found to pull it
together in one piece? With the increase in
specialization with experts in myriad OF diff
ferent fields developing their own technical
jargons that are unintellgible to the uinitiated,
how avoid Tower of Babel? How avoid stua-
ton in which everybody comes to know more
and more about less and less until he knows
everything about nothing? How avoid, in Short
the danger of being smothered by the avalanche
of freshly discovered factS-facts that need to
be correlated, facts that accumulate too fast
for human beings either to understand or to
use wisely?
In his address to the Medical Society, DR..
Bush has been at pains to emphasize that there
are no easy answers to such questions. At the
same time, however, he has suggested a few
steps that scientists might take to guard against
being lost in a wilderness of ever-growing but
unintegrated knowledge about humans and the
universe Among other things he would resort
to electronic and kindred devices to bring about
better cataloguing of existing information and to
make it easier to find sought-after data in the
tremendous accumulation of material available in
libraries and elsewhere Above all, depending in
the last analysis on man himself rather than on
machines, he would encourage specially endowed
individuals to become the "integrators and inter-
preters" of the great flood of significant but
disconnected facts now pouring in on the world,