SCIENCE AND THE WHOLE MAN

It is indeed carrying coals to Newcastle to repeat in Harvard College that saying of President Lowell in 1909: "The individual student ought clearly to be developed so far as possible, for the college ought to produce, not defective specialists, but men intellectually well rounded, of wide sympathies and unfettered judgment." Two successive Presidents of Harvard have constantly emphasized this and today it is even more true. It is a dictum which, I suspect, lies at the very heart of the philosophy of Phi Beta Kappa. And yet I should like to return to certain aspects of it. For if new factors have not arisen in our society in the last ten years or so which sharply affect our understanding of the place and purpose of this student in his later years, there have at least been changes of dimension which condition both profoundly. They are changes which permit—not to say demand—vigorous and repeated reexamination of the role of the rounded individual as dreamer, as creator of beauty, as innovator, as gatherer of information, as leader. In our present day society, with its high degree of technology and its enormous and increasing specialization, there is a very special challenge to the gifted individual—the individual creating, communicating, and leading. Possibly we cannot too often reexamine his role and the social need for him. This is especially true in the field of science, not only because of the technological basis of our society, but for other and yet more fundamental reasons.

Lord Beveridge has recently reviewed the old question of power and influence in the modern democracy, where such immense concentrations of power, such mass standardization, such dwarfing of the individual, are possible. He defines power as the ability to give to other men orders that are enforceable by punishments, by sanctions, by the control of rewards, through the use, especially by governments, of the instruments of fear. Influence he defines in contrast to this: the moulding of the actions of others by persuasion, by the appeal to reason resting on knowledge, and expressed primarily through the spoken or the written word. Power and influence he sets in antithesis: the first as that which appeals to the elemental drives which man shares with other organisms, the second as that

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which captivates those higher emotional and intellectual faculties peculiar, so far
as we know, to man. The first he holds to be evil; the second good. The first
must be controlled in the future in every possible way--must be contained and made
revocable. The second, insofar as possible, must be expanded at the expense of
the first.

I have oversimplified this distinction in the telling of it. Yet even in the
original it seems to contain much of the thinking of an earlier, simpler--and pos-
sibly a less basically democratic--era. And it is extraordinarily black-and-white.
No one, I think, would deny the antithesis, at the extremes of the spectrum. But
the area of overlap is extensive and important, and this Beveridge largely ignores.
If we still accept it as fundamental doctrine that, in the last analysis, a
democracy does govern with the assent and approval of the governed--however
ignorant they must be of technical points at issue in a given decision--then power
and influence coalesce, and the attributes of influence--superior imagination,
superior communicativeness and persuasion, superior judgment--do indeed remain,
as they have always been, the essential elements of leadership. And these qualities
are not, never have been, and never will be the attributes of groups of men. They
are the attributes of the gifted, the free, the *unstandardized* individual. The
role of leadership in our society still belongs to individuals of unusual temper
and cultivation, in spite of the standardization of much with which we have to deal.

Now these considerations seem to me to add a rather new and special signifi-
cance to a function of science which during and since the war has attained an
almost frightening stature and importance and character—the service of science in
government. As a phenomenon, the service of science in government is not new, and
in the earliest days of our history was performed by some of our greatest national
leaders. Franklin of course comes to mind at once. Perhaps it requires more
reflection to recall that it was Thomas Jefferson who, while ambassador to France
and at the risk of his reputation and indeed his life, smuggled rice from Piedmont
to establish a new American agriculture. Or that it was Jefferson who as Secretary

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of State in 1790 submitted a "Report . . . on the Subject of Establishing the Uniformity of the Weights, Measures, and Coins of the United States." Or that Jeffer son, upon the recommendation of the American Philosophical Society, transmitted to the Congress a proposal for the establishment of a United States Coast Survey, which was set up in the Treasury Department seventeen years later. And it was John Quincy Adams, when he was Secretary of State, who personally prepared for the Congress a similar report upon weights and measures.

John Quincy Adams was the last officer of cabinet rank to undertake any such specialized technical task as this in the national service, but the intimate link between science and government had just begun. There was the classic case of the committee of the Franklin Institute under the chairmanship of Alexander Dallas Bache, a great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin, which in 1832 with the help of a special appropriation of Congress and from the Treasury of $1500 investigated the reasons for explosive boiler failures in steamboats. The report of that committee, made in 1836, resulted not so much in the improvement of steamboat boilers as in the establishment of the first federal authority to regulate business--the Steamship Inspection Service--a quite unforeseen outcome! Then there are all the later milestones, well known to you--the scientific departments of the federal and state governments, with their ramifying functions and structure and personnel and their extensive achievements, the agricultural and mechanical colleges of the Nation, the special technical departments such as the Weather Bureau and the Bureau of Mines, and the hosts of ancillary government laboratories bringing science to government service in a thousand different ways. Overshadowing these in magnitude, and often in immediate if not in eventual importance, have been the quasi- or fully governmental scientific bodies first established to bring emergency aid to the Nation in time of military danger--the National Academy of Sciences first established by Lincoln as a defense advisory body in the Civil War, the National Research Council, a product of World War I, the Office of Scientific Research and Development in the second World War, which, unlike most of the others, was terminated with the close of the emergency.

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And now, since the second World War, we have yet another phase in this long
development. It is marked by acute public consciousness of the role of technical
research in our technical society. It is marked by a great public desire, now,
to develop science to its fullest extent in the national service, both for internal
development and for defense, financed by the national purse and under national
control. It is marked by great generosity and by very large spending on the part
of many federal groups in an attempt to purchase the service of science en masse,
as it were. It has resulted in enterprises which are relative giants of public
research—the research departments of the armed services, the Atomic Energy Com-
mission, the now tremendous research programs of public health and of agriculture,
and to a somewhat lesser degree and in a somewhat different way, the newly arrived
National Science Foundation. The advances in applied science have been enormous.
The effect on the universities, and on the training of scientists in the uni-
versities, has been profound. It has been a period of titanic change, of great
restlessness, often of considerable uncertainty.

There has been something peculiarly American about this development--some-
thing boundlessly optimistic, a firm faith in the virtues of energy that have
carried us forward since before we were a Nation, an expression of our national
genius for engineering application and for industrial organization, for the
mass-scale conduct of the applied sciences which through all our history has
been one of our most heart-warming interests--reaching now peaks such as those
that even our gifted forefathers could hardly have dreamed.

But I fear that with all this there has also come a certain degree of blind-
ness, of which today we are only gradually and dimly becoming aware—blindness
to the real nature of science, and of innovation, and of the nature of the indi-
vidual and of leadership in all the societies of man.

This is not surprising. We are spurred by the optimism and the genius for
large-scale application which has always been one of our most prominent—and our
most successful—attributes. We know by long experience that mass-production

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pays. We are spurred by the first experience we have had since the day of the Pilgrims of living without natural protecting barriers, exposed now once again to the untempered winds of the world. Why should we not conclude that research too--science in the service of government, and indeed science itself--will yield benefit and protection in direct proportion to volume? Science is obviously a national asset, now become one of the important ones. Why not treat it like any other asset--mass-produce it, organize it, streamline it, specialize and departmentalize it, and you have a titanic, producing machine? The theory surely works for industry--and we, as Americans, have demonstrated that as it has never been remotely demonstrated before in history.

There is nothing basically wrong with this concept, perhaps, so far as it relates to the further development of the already known in science. When it enters the realm of the new, the untried, the unknown, however, when it demands true innovation, when it seeks for leadership of the highest order, it runs directly counter to the very nature of science itself, and of the phenomenon of leadership in human society. It is time, I think, that as a Nation we turn our most serious attention to this essential contradiction.

Beveridge, in the book I quoted earlier, has much to say of the mechanical aspects of government administration, and there can be no doubt that in our modern society this is a technical factor of major importance to the Nation. But I think we must distinguish very clearly between the kind of effort which "tidies" and "herds" an endeavor along a more or less pre-determined course, and that which visualizes new channels and occupies them, gaining public assent and approval at least for the main features of the course.

In a society as firmly technically based as our own, this function must often require men to whom the mode of the scientific approach, if not the substance of the special questions themselves, has long been familiar. But basically, of course, the function is one of leadership as we normally understand it, quite apart from its technical content. It demands both imagination and technical competence of a

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high order. But it demands more than that. It demands the fullest exercise of "influence" in the Beveridge sense—influence which is a dynamic, not a static thing, as professional associations, scientific and other, all too often forget, influence that means constant persuasion, the constant winning of assent. This, overwhelmingly, is a function of communication. And communication of this sort is and must ever remain an individual affair. Moreover it is a function—and more supremely an important function in our present-day society, it seems to me, than ever before—of the gifted, the well-prepared, the well-rounded, but, above all, the *unstandardized* individual.

There can be no denying the fact, I think, that the difficulties of communication for this unstandardized, this creative and unorthodox man grow greater with the years, as mechanized orthodoxy threatens us ever further. It is poignantly evident in those arts whose followers must ever be complete individualists because of the very nature of their craft, if they are to remain faithful to it; where any effort at mass standardization ruins its quality and deeply frustrates its purpose. But it is no less true for that first cousin of the artist, the unorthodox scientist. The difficulties of communication are great—yet however great they are, real communication and real leadership in either discipline in any forward-looking sense comes only through such individual men.

No one will dispute, of course, that the great ideas of science, the new mutations that have led human thinking into truly novel channels and have ultimately had immeasurable effect on human society as a whole, have been the product of great and unorthodox individuals—the Galileos, the Keplers, the Newtons, the Darwins, the Einsteins. But to the layman whose primary interest is not in science this truth is much less evident today than it is in the arts and letters. Perhaps it is less evident today than it has ever been. There are several reasons for this, I think, some of which inhere in the structure of science itself. Primary among them is the "cumulative" nature of science, where, in sharp distinction to arts or letters or even to philosophy, the achievements

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of every man must necessarily rest intimately upon the base established by hundreds or by thousands of fellow workers before his time, and can never be an achievement of his alone in the same obvious manner as with the artist. Here the scientific innovator is as dependent upon the human matrix with which he works as a messenger bee upon its swarm. But too often we confuse the swarm with its messenger, and imagine that it is the swarm, not the messenger, that makes the truly new discoveries. Further, in science when great and individual innovations are made, they are--and often must be--brought to fruition by great efforts which are also science--or something very like it--yet which, in a subtle and essential way, are vastly different. These mass efforts represent the completion, not the beginning, of the cycle, and from them, I believe, equally great innovations are unlikely to come, by the very nature of the enterprise. The distinctions between innovation and development in science--between "pure" and "applied" science if you will, between "science" and "engineering" if you will--are not easy to make, even by scientists. It is not easy to distinguish between the kind of effort that led, in the hands of a few gifted, inconspicuous individuals scattered widely over the world, to an understanding of nuclear reactions that ultimately made fission and fusion a possibility, before the war, and the kind of effort that makes huge teams and great government organizations in this field so effective and important to our national safety and well-being today. There is a great temptation to assume that, if only the money and the teams had been assembled before the war, the early phase of discovery and innovation by unorthodox individual genius might have been vastly accelerated, or indeed eliminated altogether.

There is a great temptation, not only to the general public but even to some scientists, to think today that great innovation is simply proportional to the money and the manpower expended. This, I am convinced, simply is not true. It is confusing the end with the beginning, the means of development with the essence of discovery. The essence of discovery, in science as elsewhere, in our present mechanized society no less than in the agricultural nation of Jefferson's time,

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still lies with the gifted, the rounded, the uncommitted, the unorthodox individual—more indispensable today than he has ever been.

The kind of massive scientific approach that is being architected today by many great organizations, and most of all by government, is tremendously useful and tremendously important, in the proper context. It is undoubtedly with us to stay. To be sure, it has its own very acute dangers, which I shall not attempt to talk about today. Instead, I would ask the one question about it which seems to me most relevant: Is it enough? Is it indeed other than an ancillary—a late ancillary—in the work of the gifted individual?

Let us consider this question for a moment in the context of national service itself. If we say that it is enough, we say in effect that the contribution which we seek from science to government lies primarily in terms of the kinds of technical data which can be supplied only by the expert, and on a mass basis. Now the need of modern government for technical data of this sort—for reams of it in very many areas—is all too obvious. What effective decision of military strategy can be made today without including a comprehensive array of scientific and technical findings—or in matters of national health, or welfare, or a dozen others? But what we may forget is that information of this kind, which can be supplied by great teams of experts, is in several respects both limited and static. It deals with measurable things, with questions of fact alone. It deals with the state of the art at the time that the information is given—only rarely, in ordinary circumstances, does it seek to extrapolate that information to the time and the circumstances where it will be most relevant. And above all, it cannot, by its very nature, reconcile its own field of information with the thousand and one elements that are vital in any real situation—the impact of other fields, the adjustment to other and quite different conflicting claims, the cogency of the information to particular sets of circumstances.

This sort of mass production of technical information is one kind of service of science to government. But I doubt if it conforms very closely to the concept

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of Jefferson or John Quincy Adams. Those other and more vital tasks of science in government, so important in illumining public policy in highly technical situations, cannot be the work of the narrowly trained specialist and they cannot be the work of teams. These are the functions of leadership, not of craft, even though that leadership must be effectively craft-trained. They demand individuals who are natively gifted and highly rounded and scientifically trained, and of men with native endowment for effective communication.

Science and technology, like the law before it, has now come to provide out of its accumulated knowledge many of the sinews that knit our society. Both professions have highly specialized methods and techniques which are extremely relevant to the contemporary scene. But each must be aware that, however massive in numbers, however complex and tight knit in organizational terms each profession may become, it is only through the media of great judgments, great imaginations, great personalities, given and developed as individuals that wisdom, and true innovation, can be coined and effectively imparted to the Nation. The lawyers knew this long before the beginning of our country, and the public has long recognized the essential individuality and the essential non-conformity of their great names in the public service. It is only in very recent years that the contributions of science in the public service have reached major dimensions. It is only slowly that it can be explicitly recognized, even within the ranks of science, that the highest public contributions can only be made by men who are not only impeccably trained in their own fields but who can weigh and balance component against component, value against value, in an immensely complex and shifting scene, and can communicate the result of that weighing effectively to those who must make the final decisions. It is not yet fully realized that this function, which is quite distinct from that of the supply of information, and in the last analysis is of a higher order and of greater importance, can only be the function of the individual, and of the individual trained to leadership.

I have made a plea this morning for the gifted, the rounded, the unorthodox,

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the unregimented individual in science, protected and encouraged in the face of
the mass organization of things scientific, as well as of other elements of our
national life, which we must face today. I have made it primarily in terms of the
unique function which only he can perform in placing science at the service of the
Nation, primarily through the channels of government. I have used that frame of
reference because it seems to me one of overweening practical importance, and one
which needs more attention than it is getting today.

But of course this is only the meanest reason for the defense of the inde-
pendent, the unorthodox, the highly original worker in the scientific, as in any
other creative field. The greatest, and the truest, and the most compelling, lies
in the very nature of science and scientific research itself. For the whole
stature—the very life—of our culture, our very appreciation of the world and
our harmony with it, rest with him and his fellow creators in the arts and liter-
ature and philosophy and religion. It is the gifted, unorthodox individual in the
laboratory or the study or the walk by the river at twilight who has always brought
to us, and must continue to bring to us, all the basic resources by which we live.
Let us guard and honor his position and his profession with every resource that we
can muster. Amid the turmoil of the superhighways and the organization and the
standardization and the mass approaches with which we must live now and in the
future, we must seek more than ever to find and nourish and appropriately train,
and to protect and cherish, that irreplaceable element of our society, the indi-
vidual, unorthodox, explorer.

As we began, so may we conclude in Lowell's words:

"Man cannot set a limit to his thought. Man cannot conceive
of a boundary to space, or a time that began and will end because
he cannot fetter the processes of his own mind. He was made for
infinite conceptions of which he is to partake. Only at infinity
can the vision be finished and the end complete."

FINIS

CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON

1530 P STREET, NORTHWEST
WASHINGTON 5, D. C.

OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT

January 24, 1962

Dear Henry,

Here are some bits of paper that I wanted you to have!
I hope you will forgive the crudeness of format of the Root
Lectures. They are being held in this form pending a
projected enlargement to book form, hopefully this summer.

With every best wish, and in anticipation of February 15,

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger,
Center of International Affairs,
Harvard University,
6 Divinity Avenue,
Cambridge 38, Massachusetts.

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FOREIGN AFFAIRS
AN AMERICAN QUARTERLY REVIEW

January 1962

The Reform of NATO .................... Alastair Buchan
Khrushchev's Party Congress ............ Philip E. Mosely
Judgment and Control in Modern Warfare

Sir Solly Zuckerman

Where the Italian Socialists Stand ............ Pietro Nenni
Technology, Science and American Foreign Policy

Caryl P. Haskins

Toward a New Diplomacy .................... Chester Bowles
Planning Through the Market: The Jugoslav Experience

Janez Stanovnik

Unconventional Warfare .................... Franklin A. Lindsay

Iran in Continuing Crisis .................... T. Cuyler Young

The New African Profile .................... Chief H. O. Davies

American Policy in Africa .................... Rupert Emerson

Recent Books on International Relations ... Henry L. Roberts

Source Material ............................ Donald Wasson

HAMILTON FISH ARMSTRONG
*Editor*

PHILIP W. QUIGG
*Managing Editor*

Editorial Advisory Board

ALLEN W. DULLES
ALFRED M. GRUENTHER
GEORGE F. KENNAN

WILLIAM L. LANGER
JOHN J. McCLOY

PHILIP E. MOSELY
ISIDOR I. RABI
HENRY M. WRISTON

58 East 68th Street • New York 21, N. Y.
Subscriptions, $6.00 a year, post free to any address.

Copyright, 1961, Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
PRINTED IN U. S. A.

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# TECHNOLOGY, SCIENCE AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

By Caryl P. Haskins

ON August 6, 1961, Major Gherman Stepanovitch Titov circled the earth 17 times, traveling at 18,000 miles an hour in an elliptical course which took him at maximum altitude about 160 miles into the stratosphere. For 25 hours and 18 minutes he traveled in regions until then unfathomed. In considerable discomfort he endured a prolonged state of weightlessness, hitherto known in all of human history only as a relatively fleeting experience to a handful of men. When Titov finally ejected himself from his four-and-one-half-ton vehicle and parachuted to earth he had set an all-time high mark in exploration.

There were a number of things of particular interest about the flight of Vostok II beyond the human daring and impressive technical ingenuity demanded for its accomplishment. One was its timing. A week later came the sealing of the border of East Berlin; 25 days later, on August 31, the Soviets announced their resumption of nuclear testing; 26 days later, on September 1, the conference of "nonaligned" nations convened in Belgrade. On that day, also, Major Titov, speaking to a large crowd of citizens of East Berlin on the Marx-Engels Platz, less than a mile from the border of West Berlin, pointedly remarked that the Soviet rockets that had propelled him into outer space could likewise deliver nuclear warheads to any point on the globe. Further, as almost his last action before being closed into his spaceship, Major Titov had dedicated his flight to the Twenty-second Congress of the Communist Party scheduled for October.

This constellation of events underlines with fresh immediacy the lessons already brought home by the history of Soviet space achievement since October 1957 when the first space satellite was placed in orbit. It gives force to the observation that outstanding technical achievements can be extraordinarily powerful in cementing a people's sense of solidarity, in augmenting its confidence, in reinforcing its pride, its verve, its sense of national identity. It also emphasizes anew how closely and skillfully the knot may be drawn between impressive technical organization, accomplishment and initiative in exploration on the one hand and a grand design of power on the other. It demonstrates how

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effectively in Soviet hands a spectacular technology may be made to implement a many-sided psychological offensive, ranging from cajolery to indirect blackmail to direct threat, all added to and at the same time detracting from the genuine excitement and admiration which the feat should alone have inspired. The dispatches from London, Paris, Bonn, New Delhi, Tokyo on the following day left no doubt that the event had been fully appreciated by the free world in its various significant aspects.

Further evidence of how closely linked technical and political planning can be in the Soviet Union, and of how excellence in a special, appropriate technology may be oriented to serve the political offensive, is suggested by a comparison of Soviet and American programs over the past several years in space research as distinct from large-scale space engineering. Since the beginning of the space age, the United States has placed in orbit some 45 satellites designed primarily for the gathering of scientific data about conditions in outer space. Some 13 have been launched by the Soviet Union. It would appear that such neglect of the scientific investigation of space, implied by this relative inattention to research satellites, could, in the long run, seriously hamper development; American satellites are producing information of the highest value, pertaining among other things to levels of radiation in space—information which must be essential in the planning of any manned space travel in the future. Such a conclusion may well be mistaken, however, for at least two reasons. The first is the impressive capability of the Soviet Union to marshall resources for research in very many areas and with excellent efficiency once it is decided that it is more economical, in terms of the objectives sought, to do such research than to borrow from abroad. Again, Soviet inattention to research in favor of an apparent concentration on more conspicuous technology has a familiar historical ring in some other areas of development—for example, the earlier history of Russian aeronautics after A. N. Tupolev and N. Y. Zhukovsky joined forces in 1918 to launch the Central Aerodynamics Research Institute (TSAGI) and the Zhukovsky Air Academy. In initiating the first consistent and relatively large-scale programs in the field of flight, they, too, demonstrated how much an ability to keep abreast of technical developments in other countries, to adapt them effectively and dynamically to specific ends, to plan over long periods with endurance, tenacity and singleness of purpose may compensate

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SCIENCE AND FOREIGN POLICY

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over the short run for the comparative neglect of disinterested research. On the other hand, all experience suggests—and we shall do well to bear this continually in mind as a cardinal principle—that such a pattern can be productive only in the short run, and that we could emulate it only at inadmissible cost, not only to our own progress but to our whole pattern of scientific and technical well-being, self-confidence and self-respect.

This contrast of approach, indeed, must drive home with special force one of at least three great lessons taught anew by the flight of Vostok II and the circumstances surrounding it. It is the lesson that there are few things more precious to us than our autonomy, our balance, our pluralism—in technology and science no less than in other aspects of our national being. There could be no more fatal error than to suppose that, because the U.S.S.R. has grown in an extraordinarily short time from a technically backward society to a technically very powerful state, the attitudes and operating patterns by which this was accomplished have *per se* a special validity for ourselves. To imagine, moreover, that the most exciting, vital and enduring aspects of our own scientific effort necessarily have any pragmatic bearing whatever upon affairs economic or military, or should necessarily even be undertaken in their service, would be to abandon one of our precious avenues of growth—to negate, indeed, one of our major sources of spiritual strength. It will take wisdom and tenacity, in the face of the threats that beset us, to remember, and constantly to act upon, such cardinal truths.

But to maintain faith in our own way is not enough. To emphasize the importance of cultivating one's own garden in one's own pattern is not to be fully satisfied with the effectiveness of the garden or its crop. And we can never forget the none-too-subtle coupling of science and technology with military power, to which Major Titov called specific attention in Berlin, and which the circumstances surrounding his flight have emphasized.

Sputnik I stimulated a noteworthy series of innovations and improvements in the organization of science within the American Government—the most important, probably, which had occurred since World War II. Among them were the strengthening of the President's Science Advisory Committee and its reconstitution within the White House; the creation of the post of the President's Science Adviser and its subsequent increase in significance, especially in the current Administration; the establish-

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ment of the Federal Council of Science and Technology; the in-
creased scope and significance of the Federal support of research,
as in the National Science Foundation, and in the conduct of re-
search within the Federal agencies, as in the National Institutes
of Health, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Space Agency.

But problems concerning the organization, appreciation and
use of science and technology at the Federal level remain, and
Vostok II has given them new emphasis. Further developments
in the structure, the range of duties, the modes of work of the
President's Science Advisory Committee are clearly called for,
and indeed are inevitable. The position of the President's Special
Assistant for Science and Technology itself may need some re-
defining to increase its scope. Further improvements are urgent
to equip the Departments to deal with scientific and technical
matters. The creation of the Office of the Director of Defense
Research in the Department of Defense has been most encourag-
ing. Despite recent innovations, it may be fairly said that within
the Department of State there is still a less-than-satisfactory
level of scientific competence. The problems are especially urgent
and complex in the foreign-aid agencies, which have still some
distance to go in exploiting the tools which science and technol-
ogy could bring to their planning and operations.

Finally, one of the most critical and difficult issues of domestic
policy in the field of science and technology will be posed in the
implementation of the expanded Project Apollo, which aims to
put a man on the moon by the close of the decade. Much of the
basic strength and symmetry of the national scientific effort over
the next few years may depend upon the way in which the claims
of concentrated programs in a vast but specialized technical field
can be balanced against the broader requirements of research and
training which are vital to the continuing scientific health and
growth of the nation. For Project Apollo will be even more de-
manding of highly trained manpower than it will be of funds.
The issue, moreover, is critical beyond the arena of domestic
policy; it is also deeply involved with aspects of foreign policy,
in ways to be considered.

## II

A second lesson posed by the flight of Major Titov and all its
attendant circumstances is that of the vital importance of the
scientific and technical health and growth and solidarity of the

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SCIENCE AND FOREIGN POLICY

5

community of Western Europe as an absolute condition of survival over the coming decades. The challenge is indeed to the vigor and quality of research within each nation. Even more, however, it is to their combined and coordinated capacity and to the confidence and sense of capability that such capacity can bring to the community itself. For regardless of energy and will, it is clear that no one member alone in the coming years can muster the strength or command the universality to meet the challenge independently. Nowhere, indeed, is the charge on both the wisdom and the coherence of the free world more severe than in the area of its combined science and technology.

Of special interest in this connection are the recent appeals by highly placed European officials for an integration of some major Western European technological concerns within the structure of NATO and the formation of an agency empowered to contract for research and development projects throughout the area. Whatever its specific nature, an important focus of such coordination and institutional strengthening might well lie in the office of the Science Adviser to NATO. A core has been developed here in recent years from which a significant structure of adequate size and character could well evolve. Currently the North Atlantic Council of NATO, with its Science Committee, is empowered to award grants for scientific research in the member nations on the order of a million dollars annually. This small but significant sum permits the office of the Science Adviser to act, in effect, as an international science foundation. In 1960, the NATO Science Fellowship Program was provided with $1,750,000 in international funds, and a NATO Advanced Study Institute Program has made a start with about $200,000.

Such developments are obviously minuscule, yet they represent a beginning in forwarding close cooperation in the fields of science and technology among the nations of Western Europe. Upon this, much could conceivably be built. In so doing great strength may be derived from the very existence of such "working" structures of international science as the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland (CERN), currently operating on a budget of almost 68,000,000 Swiss francs and conducting a flourishing program in high-energy physics which could well be expanded further; and by such technical groups as the Training Center for Experimental Aerodynamics (TCEA) in Belgium, which has made available to all the NATO nations

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equipment for research and facilities for education on a consid-
erable scale.

Not to be forgotten, either, are various efforts and plans for
the establishment of international universities: the University of
the Middle East in Turkey, aided with financial support from the
United Nations; the European University which has been under
study by the Community of Six; and an Atlantic Institute of
Science and Technology, which has been suggested as an inter-
national scientific university comparable in scope and quality
with the best in the United States. These are ambitious and in-
herently difficult undertakings. Yet they need not reach the im-
pressive goals set for them in order to be important. Even a small
institution could have significance if planned and conducted
with vision, administered in a way to avoid conflicts with impor-
tant national interests, and designed to strengthen rather than
compete with the best national programs of education. Also, stu-
dents must be encouraged to return to their own countries at the
end of their terms of residence, and, if the institution does not
seem promising after a reasonable trial, then the venture should
be terminated.

Last but by no means least, the newly established Organiza-
tion for Economic Coöoperation and Development may have an
important contribution to make to the scientific unity of Western
Europe, especially in relation to technical and scientific assistance
to the new nations.

The ultimate strength of such coördinated structures of science
and technology must depend on the quality of its components,
and that will be strongly conditioned by patterns of scientific and
technical education. In many Western European nations, pro-
grams of scientific education are of high quality in a substantive
sense. But some of them are quite inadequate to the requirements
of modern competitive technology. There is clearly a particular
need to further improve scientific secondary education, despite
encouraging progress in recent years, and often to extend it in
time. In many European nations there is still a serious shortage
of qualified teachers of science and technology, especially at the
secondary level. A variety of specific conditions needs to be rem-
edied. In France, for example, a high proportion of gifted students
who enter the national schools of engineering because of the at-
tractive careers to which such training leads graduate thence
into engineering positions where their talents may be perma-

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SCIENCE AND FOREIGN POLICY

7

nently lost to science and technology. In the Netherlands and in Italy it may be fairly said that professorial salaries are too low. The West German system of education nourishes outstanding individuals, but still makes inadequate provision for team research.

In the last ten years, the output of trained scientists and engineers in many countries has expanded by 25 to 50 percent. This apparently promising increase, however, is quite insufficient for the competitive conditions of the contemporary world. In the United States the annual rate for the production of engineers, tallied without reference to quality, is about 200 per million of population. The Soviet Union produces about twice as many. But the output of the European Economic Community has averaged only about 70 per million per year—a figure that is far too low, and should surely be corrected.

A part of the answer to these deficiencies—though clearly only a part—is economic. Both Great Britain and the United States currently invest about 2 percent of the Gross National Product in the fields of science and technology, generally defined, and devote about a tenth of this sum to fundamental research. Experience suggests that these are desirable goals of expenditure provided that the human and material resources for scientific and technical education, research and development are adequate to use the funds effectively.

There is undoubtedly much that the nations of Western Europe can do to strengthen their own scientific resources, both individually and in combination. There are abundant opportunities here for effective American aid if it can be given with a proper sense of the sharp limitations of our own vision and capacity. We must constantly keep in mind that a true internationalism in science and technology among the industrial nations of the West means far more than a simple exchange of information, far more than coördination of research programs in international administrative bodies, far more, even, than the training of scientists from many nations in international universities, or their subsequent careers in international research centers or engineering establishments. All these activities, important as they are, can serve only as means to promote a working expression of the internationalism that is an inherent substantive quality of science—a quality upon which the structures of scientific knowledge itself are founded. Failures of communication among peoples inheriting a

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8

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

common scientific tradition must perforce be reckoned as failures
in the very processes of scientific understanding, and, at a yet
deeper level, as failures in realizing an essential quality of sci-
entific verity. So the only final goal of coöoperation among the
nations of Western Europe which can have real meaning in terms
of scientific understanding, as well as of the pragmatic challenges
of the day, must be of a more profound kind. It must involve an
interpenetration of scientific concerns at a very deep, substantive
level along those multifarious frontiers of knowledge which today
make the pursuit of science one of the most compelling of all intel-
lectual pursuits—visual and radio astronomy, high-energy phys-
ics, geology and geophysics, communication theory, the mecha-
nisms of heredity and of the differentiation and coordination of
cells in the living body, and all the rest of those fascinating ave-
nues of inquiry which reach far beyond the confining boundaries
of human organization.

In no potential field of overseas assistance must scientific plan-
ning be more carefully meshed with educational, technical, eco-
nomic and social considerations if the aid is to be truly effective
and not merely a temporary stimulus, accepted at the risk of
grave long-term imbalances.

III

A third lesson driven home by Vostok II was almost new in
our experience. It was implicit, to be sure—yet hardly more than
an implication—in the days of the first satellite launching four
years earlier. The approximately 500,000,000 people included in
the free nations of Western lineage, comprising perhaps a sixth
of the world's population, constitute a fraction that is critical in
terms of science and technology, far beyond its numerical pro-
portions. It is a fraction, moreover, bonded together in funda-
mental ways by the historical sharing of the cultural experience
symbolized by the scientific revolution from Copernicus to New-
ton to our own day. These nations hold the formal precepts of
that revolution in common and, beyond that, share its concepts
of the essential nature of the universe.

But it was probably not to this sixth of the world's population
that the flight of Vostok II and the intense and highly coördi-
nated publicity that accompanied it were primarily directed.
Titov also spoke to the substantial portion of the remaining five-
sixths of the world's population represented by the new nations.

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SCIENCE AND FOREIGN POLICY

9

These are nationally conscious of their acute material needs and of the power of technology in the fulfillment of those needs, though without, in many cases, yet fully understanding the means or the requirements of technological or of scientific development. Titov could influence a tremendous audience which simply was not reckoned significant in the scales of world power in the First or Second World Wars, or in any adequate sense even later.

In 1945, 52 states had signed the Charter of the United Nations. By the autumn of 1961 the membership had risen to 103. A majority of the new nations are underdeveloped and their needs are starkly practical. The control of hunger, the conquest of epidemic disease, the elementary development of natural resources are obviously imperative for any adequate realization of their potentialities. They stand in acute need of appropriate and developed technologies. Today their demands on science must be addressed almost wholly to its pragmatic side. But it is not to be forgotten that tomorrow they will surely wish to participate in the continuing scientific revolution of the wider world outside their borders. As that time arrives, the problem of providing effective scientific and technical aid may become more subtle, and also, perhaps, more critical.

We are well placed to aid the new nations of the world with appropriate technologies to strengthen their economies, and few areas in the whole field of foreign aid can be more important in their implications. In this respect the matter seems relatively straightforward in principle, however massive and complex in practice. In fact, however, basic questions are involved which relate as much to underlying concepts as to matters of execution. Some of the most formidable of these cluster around judgments as to what constitutes true relevance in the technologies that are sought by the new nations or that we seek to bring them. Clearly, the simpler and more elementary fields are likely to be most relevant. We should generally be wary of complex and striking technologies which may promise more than they can accomplish, bringing an initial rise in expectations to be followed by disappointments which can be disillusioning and dangerous. Techniques claiming the highest priority will be those bearing upon food production, including agronomy and crop and animal improvement and soil science; those for estimating, prospecting and extracting minerals and renewable resources; those for civil engi-

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10

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

neering, urban planning and the development of appropriate and
available energy sources.

But there are other important criteria of relevance. The scarcity of capital in the new countries demands that technologies in any field carry the lowest capital and development costs consistent with their effectiveness, and that, moreover, they require the shortest possible span between investment and return. The characteristic abundance of manpower relative to capital in the new nations requires that relevant technologies maximize the productiveness of existing manpower rather than conserving it by replacing manpower with machines. Thus in food production, for example, technologies should be directed particularly toward securing an increase in yield per acre rather than in output per man.

The knowledge on which these relevant technologies are based
clearly does not lie at the frontiers of Western scientific advance.
Indeed, there is probably more basic information appropriate to
the needs of the new nations presently available than can effec-
tively be put to use for many years to come. The problem here is
not of research, but in a sense one more formidable. It is a prob-
lem of discovery, of sensible and sensitive selection, and, above all,
of adaptation to the peculiar and individual requirements of each
nation, people and region.

In most of the new nations there will be at least a few men gen-
erally familiar with technical matters who can seize upon the
world's store of technical knowledge, can with some assistance
abstract appropriate elements from it, and, under favorable cir-
cumstances, can adapt such elements successfully to the needs of
their countries. Where the corps of such men is adequate in num-
bers and relatively sophisticated in outlook, the task of aid may
be primarily to make sure that the appropriate information and
the means for implementing it are at their command and that
any advice which may be helpful and welcome is provided. This
is a serious undertaking in itself, and calls for a high order of skill
and subtlety. But it is not, basically, an unfamiliar task.

In far too many cases, however, technically sophisticated per-
sonnel are still extremely rare in the new nations. It is of the high-
est importance that their numbers be augmented as rapidly as
possible through appropriate secondary training, bearing always
in mind the great importance of breadth in training and the
dangers of narrow specialization. So vital is this objective that it

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SCIENCE AND FOREIGN POLICY

II

must be achieved even, if necessary, at the cost of short-term
sacrifices in education at the primary and the university levels,
and even at the cost of postponing the goal of universal literacy.

Where adequately trained manpower is wholly lacking, the
challenges upon us to provide effective technological aid are
grave indeed. For then a preponderant share of the burden of
selection, adaptation and introduction must rest upon the donor,
and the effectiveness with which these things are done will largely
determine the success of the enterprise. There is an acute need
for improving the quality of our technical assistance, and most
particularly the caliber and training of those associated with its
ministration. For lack of skill and of effective effort can spell dis-
aster more serious than if the effort had never been undertaken.

We are not at present sufficiently equipped or practiced to be
at all certain of meeting this demand well, and it is of great im-
portance that we become so. Few challenges to the whole pattern
of our foreign aid will be more severe than this. The field bristles
with practical pitfalls. There is not only the danger of offering
too advanced, too glittering, or otherwise poorly adapted tech-
nologies. There is the equally grave danger of forgetting that in
all programs of technical aid an indispensable element must be
the social will of the recipients to develop their own technical
frontiers. Without it, without a tolerant and helpful political
climate, technical aid is all too likely to bring in its train the same
hazards that we have come to associate with monetary aid simi-
larly applied. It is important to recall in this connection that
among present or past political leaders of the new countries only
those of India and of Israel have had extensive scientific training.

Finally, we must keep in mind the relatively high capital costs
involved in the development and application of even simple tech-
nologies. Often enough such capital expenditures, of the most
legitimate and indeed essential kind, will fall hopelessly beyond
the economic capacities of the less developed countries. They are,
moreover, bound to continue over a considerable period, which
requires assurance of continuity at the outset if they are to ap-
pear acceptable to responsible statesmen. Now as already noted,
the advanced technologies which the industrial nations may ex-
pect to evolve at ever-mounting pace over the coming years are
not likely to be of great assistance to the newer countries until
these have themselves achieved a roughly comparable technical,
scientific and industrial civilization, with its broadened economic

12

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

base. Until then, such technologies may actually widen rather than narrow existing economic gaps. Failure on either side to remember this can easily lead to dangerous errors and bitter disillusionment. This is one of the strongest arguments for the requests for the authorization of large-scale—and most importantly for long-term—aid funds at low interest rates recently sought and in part secured by the Administration.

Besides abounding in hazards, this aspect of foreign technical aid also poses squarely some far-reaching questions of internal policy. How, for example, does it bear upon the distribution of our internal technical effort? The implications reach quite as far as our own plans for the conquest of space. Which will ultimately be more impressive and useful to the new states—leadership on vast and spectacular and sophisticated frontiers of exploration and power, or demonstrated leadership in technologies more relevant to their own practical needs, coupled with genuine willingness and care and insight in making them available? Clearly there can never be a simple answer. Even the judgment of how we shall partition our efforts between such disparate extremes must vary with circumstances, and from year to year. But the flight of Vostok II has emphasized once again how constantly such matters must be kept in mind. We must continually remind ourselves that our scientific and technical resources are no more unlimited than our economic ones—that, indeed, they are far more limited and far slower and more difficult to build. For, comparatively wealthy as we are in both, we are not wealthy enough to do simultaneously all things well on the vast scale that the contemporary world demands.

## IV

Vital as relevant technologies are for the new nations, in the end they will not be enough. In the long run, some, if not all, of the new nations will need an indigenous, living science of their own, however limited it may be in volume or in scope.

There are many reasons for this. The most practical and perhaps the least fundamental is that, as demonstrated by the whole history of the scientific revolution, technology cannot remain a vital and a growing thing in the modern world without continuing nourishment from the wellsprings of a living science. Without an indigenous science a new country must depend heavily and indefinitely upon borrowing if its technology is not to stagnate.

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SCIENCE AND FOREIGN POLICY

13

Furthermore, since none can understand so well the subtle re-
quirements and the new opportunities for technology within a
particular country as the peoples who must actually employ it
and live with its consequences, the effective adaptation even of
borrowed technology to local use requires, in the most pragmatic
sense, both a living and a practical indigenous science. It is prob-
ably no overstatement that, in the long run, a nation can be
reckoned truly strong only if it possesses both a vital technology
and a vital science in appropriate balance.

In a different vein, the ability to make independent, original
contributions to the world's store of scientific knowledge has
come to be a mark of progressiveness, and even fulfillment of na-
tional identity. The new nations are proud. They are entering a
world where an indigenous science, however limited its scope, is
a part of national greatness, an emblem of self-respect. How true
this is has several times been demonstrated in Western Europe.
Some technically and scientifically advanced nations have re-
cently found themselves in positions where it would clearly have
been more immediately economical to live on technology bor-
rowed from outside—technology developed in many instances
from scientific advances for which they themselves were origi-
nally responsible. Yet, they have decided, as a matter of policy,
that to follow this easy and apparently frugal course would be to
sacrifice elements of national morale, national self-respect and,
in the long run, national autonomy. Many exceedingly interest-
ing examples of this situation might be quoted—for instance,
the British attitude toward continuing research in the field of
plastics (polythene itself was a British invention) or in solid-
state physics, despite the fact that the whole technical know-how
of transistors is just as available to England as it is to the United
States, where the device was invented—and at substantial sav-
ings in research costs. The emerging nations may be wise to take
note of such experiences and decisions.

But in one sense these are all relatively shallow considerations.
To assess those that are deeper and more compelling, it is neces-
sary to review certain facets of the history of technology and of
science. Modern historical research has demonstrated that many
of our technologies are immensely old. It has revealed the striking
and important fact that, closely as science and technology seem
interwoven today, their origins were actually separated in place
and time, and probably were of widely different character. The

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FOREIGN AFFAIRS

great initial developments in technology antedated the scientific
revolution by several millennia, and, long before the first begin-
nings of a scientific revolution, some technologies had attained a
remarkably modern cast. A genuine technological revolution, in
fact, probably occurred coeval with the great prehistoric urban
centers of Asia and Africa. The astonishing technical inventions
of China between the first and eighth centuries A.D.—including
paper, seismoscopes, wind gauges, the magnetic compass, explo-
sives, printing with movable type—leave no doubt of the heights
attained by Asian technical skill and inventiveness at a time
when comparable European achievements were still of the most
primitive kind. It seems probable, indeed, that the basis for a
large share of European technical development was imported
from the East.

Yet the scientific revolution in a proper sense, when it finally
came, was peculiarly a phenomenon of Western Europe. At its
outset, it hardly touched the East at all. Why this should have
been true is one of the enigmas of history, for which many tenta-
tive hypotheses have been advanced. Its consequences for the
modern day, and especially for the problems of the new nations,
however, are wide and deep.

One obvious and highly relevant consequence is the fact that
while the process of technological revolution is familiar every-
where, and the values and the essence of technology are gener-
ally understood, the historical experience of a scientific revolu-
tion is one from which virtually all the new nations of the eastern
and southern hemispheres of the globe have until quite recently
stood apart. Indeed, in large measure they have been spectators
rather than participants in this strange phenomenon which has
done so much to alter the whole cast of human experience. Now
they are poised upon the edge of that transformation. Neither
they nor we can predict precisely what it will mean. But there can
be no doubting the depth and force it is bound to have. Moreover,
since intellectual revolutions in general must be highly individual
in all societies, it must be assumed that in no two nations will a
scientific revolution take precisely the same form.

Certain features, however, adduced from the earlier scientific
history of Western Europe, may be characteristic of science
wherever it comes into being. One of these is the important fact
that, closely linked as science is with both technology and with
industry, and important as the partnership is in the modern in-

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SCIENCE AND FOREIGN POLICY

15

dustrial nations, much of importance in science has always been essentially separate and independent of both. In its origins, science was closely linked with technology, and technology suggested many of the areas of its deepest concern. Yet for the first hundred years of its life there was relatively little of a practical nature that it could contribute to technologies already highly developed through centuries of practical experience. Science none the less flourished during this period, nourished by emotional and intellectual elements extending far beyond the sphere of practical concern. Its historical independence of industry is yet more marked. It is worth noting that in Great Britain, where the scientific revolution may be said to have first occurred, it antedated the industrial revolution by many years. The major steps in the transformation of the world view in British society from an essentially Ptolemaic concept of the universe to a Newtonian one came in the main—and very swiftly—between 1660 and 1700. The period of industrial “takeoff” in England, on the other hand, can be referred to the decades between 1783 and 1803, about a hundred years after the publication of Newton’s “Principia.” It is clearly not essential for a society to have attained a stage of considerable industrial or even of technical development in order to experience, and be profoundly affected by, a scientific revolution.

From these and similar considerations follow a number of less obvious reasons why the new nations must develop an independent science. Without some structure of indigenous, living science, they are likely to experience great difficulty in developing standards of judgment by which to apprehend the whole scientific “style” of the natural world. To distinguish between what is credible and possible and what is not, and to discriminate between the scientifically genuine and the scientifically deceptive, require continuing direct experience for their perfection. Without the capacity for making such judgments, a new nation must remain highly vulnerable in its contacts with the outer world. It will be vulnerable, indeed, even in its acceptance of technological aid proffered in the most disinterested spirit. But the greater danger is internal, for without such a sense of the world’s scientific “style” informed judgments cannot be made in a whole field of critical matters at home. It was not idly that Solomon Caulker of Sierra Leone remarked during the recent Rehovoth Conference, “What we want from science is not prestige projects but the answers to our own witch doctors.”

16

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

But it is in the qualities of science as a structure of communication, of philosophy, of faith that we find the deepest reasons. Without a living science, the new countries will have no access to the cultural world fraternity that the fabric of scientific understanding implies. They will not share in the lofty concepts that form the priceless heritage of the scientifically literate peoples. They will be denied access to one of the significant assurances that there is an inherent logic, an underlying stability, unifying the currents of scientific and technical change that so alarmingly threaten to engulf them. In the politically bipolar world which they enter late as nations, the new countries stand in sore need of independent standards to which they may repair. Without a living science, one of the most fundamental, practical and accessible of those standards will be denied them. Without it, they are in some measure excluded from those international combinations, well exemplified in Western Europe, which in addition to all their practical benefits are so important in commanding the belief and confidence of peoples—especially those in smaller political units —and in evoking their verve and creativeness. Finally, an original science demands, as it also stimulates, the development of the critical and creative habits of mind that are essential to the leadership of the new nations in every field—the unfettered, flexible, empirical view so essential if the nations they lead are to survive and grow.

In one sense, the new countries should have a marked advantage as they enter upon their scientific and technical revolutions. They take the stage at a time when the basis of world scientific and technical knowledge is richer and more varied than ever before. To that extent we can properly expect their revolutions, if successful, to be even swifter than earlier ones, and the course to scientific maturity shorter. But the hazards, too, are greater. The new nations face the formidable difficulty of achieving an autonomous scientific effort of the first class in a world where the range of first-class scientific effort is already bewilderingly immense and the scientific competition cruelly severe. In addition, there are formidable obstacles of a practical sort—the difficulties of securing training for original scientific work where capital and institutions of higher learning are scarce, and of retaining the trained few at home, isolated as they must be among popular attitudes which at the outset may be uncomprehending of or even downright hostile to the scientific way. It is quite possible

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SCIENCE AND FOREIGN POLICY

17

that in some cases it will take a generation to establish the means for training even a small core of qualified scientific workers. To establish international scientific programs and cooperative training centers among the new nations will demand similar energy and pertinacity.

There is much that we can do in detail to assist here, by means already moderately familiar, including aid in the overseas training of research workers and, probably more significantly, in establishing local institutes for scientific training. Institutes organized on a regional basis, to train students from neighboring countries, promise to be especially fruitful. We can assist also by expanding contractual arrangements between educational institutions in the new nations and American universities having special competence in appropriate areas. In addition, outstanding American teachers, administrators, scholars and research scientists can represent us in the new nations. And in various ways American scientific societies, notably the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, can aid in establishing corresponding scientific organizations in the new nations. It would be hard indeed to overestimate the importance of such associations in promoting the earlier stages of a scientific revolution—a role in which they were predominantly important in the earlier stages of the scientific revolution in Western Europe. In similar vein, a *sine qua non* of a scientific revolution in its earlier stages is the social value attached to scientific eminence. This can be greatly enhanced by suitable international recognition of real scientific distinction wherever it may appear in the new nations. Traditionally the British Royal Society has played this role with discernment and skill. There is a great potential here.

v

But in the last analysis we shall need a far deeper understanding than we now possess of the essential nature of a scientific revolution in a nation newly awakened to scientific values. In no easier way can we attain to the wisdom required to render genuinely significant assistance.

It is true that in its details a scientific revolution must differ in each period when it occurs, and with each nation. Yet there are certain important characteristics that are likely to be constant, as earlier scientific revolutions vividly illustrate. The first is its

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cataclysmic nature. Though history makes evident that scientific revolutions are long in the making, and that typically they are initiated by a gifted few, the final period when the change affects a whole nation—the period of its greatest significance—is characteristically amazingly short. In the West it was not the theories of Copernicus nor the observations of Galileo nor the reasoning of Bacon that heralded the revolution, though they were critical in igniting it. It was, rather, the years following Newton, the years of the British Restoration, when the vision which had compelled the pioneers and the broader implications of their new ideas and attitudes suddenly infected a much wider public. It is hard indeed, at this remove, to comprehend the consuming hold of the Newtonian revolution when it suddenly took firm hold upon the imagination of a whole people. Within 40 years the outlook of an entire nation underwent a transformation more profound than wars or drastic political changes might have wrought. The fact that in less than a generation a people's world view was radically transformed seems especially significant for the new nations of today.

It may of course be properly asked whether a scientific revolution in a new country can ever have an impact comparable with that of the first revolution, when the whole scientific view of the world was new. The question must by its nature remain perpetually moot. But several considerations suggest that the impact today may not be too dissimilar. Many of the new countries may still be sufficiently insulated from the wider ranges of the new scientific knowledge so that its weight may not unduly dim their enthusiasm. Again, although the level of world scientific knowledge is high today, it is a serious question whether it is higher in relation to the challenges for the new nations than was the state of European technology in relation to early science in the days of the classical revolution.

Scientific revolutions may be long in the making—though of this we can by no means be sure—and it seems probable that they will be initiated by a rather small number of intellectuals who are apt to be young men. But when such revolutions culminate, they are likely to do so rapidly and with overwhelming effect. Internally, the social shifts which they entail must affect a nation deeply, destroying for the time being the precious margin of redundancy upon which societies in general, and traditional societies most of all, depend so heavily for their coherence.

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SCIENCE AND FOREIGN POLICY

19

ence and health, separating father from son in what will amount
to different worlds.

During such times the new nations must be at their most vul-
nerable in their external relations as well as in their internal
structures. Then especially they will need to guard against subtle
as well as overt destruction or domination. And this will not
always be easy, as guideposts will be at a minimum. In many
cases, the critical apprehensions in scientific and technical mat-
ters, which only the experience of living through such a revolu-
tion can fully provide, will not have been adequately developed
at the time they are most needed in making the hard choices
which the revolution will inevitably impose. And yet the courses
chosen at such times of upheaval may well have fundamental
and lasting effects. The consequences of wrong choices will not
be easily undone. And should such a scientific revolution fail at
its critical point, widespread expectations are bound to be dashed
and political attitudes may be dangerously affected.

At no point in its development will a new state need advice and
wisdom more than at such a juncture, to enable it to pass through
the turbulent period of maximum change as rapidly as possible
and to handle itself as effectively as may be during the trying
times. Will we be equipped with such wise advice? Will we be
prepared to lend it with real effectiveness to any new countries
truly seeking it?

We probably have to answer that we are very poorly prepared
at present to serve in this way. Yet the assistance which we could
provide simply through efforts to analyze and to understand
would probably be more critical at such a juncture than any ma-
terial technical aid that we could bring the new nations or than
any detailed specific measures to forward scientific progress. In
the final analysis, we probably know far less about the real nature
of scientific revolutions even than we do of the nature of the eco-
nomic or the industrial revolutions with which they are likely to
be so closely associated. Like those movements, it is clear that
scientific revolutions are enormously complex and that they rest
upon a multitude of social and material prerequisites, many of
which are not apparent in the present state of our understanding.
Like economic and industrial revolutions, they are intimately
interwoven with other qualities of societies to form a balanced,
organic whole. There is far more to the nature of scientific revo-
lutions than the substance of the science which they embody.

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FOREIGN AFFAIRS

To increase our ability to render scientific aid to the new na-
tions the United States might constitute one or more advisory
groups, preferably outside government but constantly in close
touch with it and responsive to its needs, dedicated to a continu-
ing major effort to understand such scientific revolutions as social
phenomena and to give policy counsel concerning them. Such a
group or groups should include representatives of many disciplines
which can contribute to an understanding of the multifarious
kinds of social change of which a scientific revolution is but one
aspect, though an overwhelmingly important one. Moreover,
they should be prepared for a long existence. The efforts to un-
derstand must be systematic and persistent, continually sifting
the basic common denominators of experience from the more
detailed aspects of less encompassing generality. The need for
the advice of such a group or groups, if it can be effectively for-
mulated, will continue to be acute through many years to come,
as new nations approach the thresholds of their respective sci-
entific revolutions and as the store of knowledge accumulates
and analysis and judgment become more acute. The disciplines
and the viewpoints comprehended in these studies are so various
and divergent that communication itself will not be easy and
can be developed only gradually.

An enterprise of this kind does not promise to be easy. At best,
it is likely to require the passage of years to show substantial
accomplishment. Yet we are not without models around which
such an undertaking could be built, in the atmosphere of a uni-
versity center dedicated to international affairs. Success would
markedly increase our resources for comprehending forces which
may well affect the configuration of world power in the years
ahead. Never has such understanding been more vital than in
the coming age, symbolized inevitably not only by space explora-
tion but by an unparalleled depth and breadth of understanding
of natural phenomena and a new order in their control. If in the
end it should prove that the flight of Vostok II has stimulated
these things among us, as that of Sputnik I stimulated our organ-
ization of scientific and technological concerns within our gov-
ernment, this might well, in the light of history, be reckoned its
most significant contribution.

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PROCEEDINGS
of the
American Philosophical Society

Contents of Volume 105, Number 4

In Need of a Consensus. (Penrose Memorial Lecture)

J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT 349

The Kingdom of Corsica and the Science of History. ROBERT R. PALMER 354

The Geneva Folio Reprinting of the Encyclopédie. GEORGE B. WATTS 361

Gods in Uniform. ERNST H. KANTOROWICZ 368

Somatology of the Ayom Pygmies of New Guinea. MARTIN GUSINDE 394

The Controversy over the Site of Heat Production in the Body.

EVERETT MENDELSOHN 412

Systematic and Ecological Relations of *Peromyscus oreas* and *P. maniculatus*.

WALTER SHEPPE, JR. 421

Shoran—A Precision Five Hundred Mile Yardstick.

STUART WILLIAM SEELEY 447

A Flower Where the Roads Divide.

CARYL P. HASKINS 452

Price for complete number one dollar

AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

INDEPENDENCE SQUARE

PHILADELPHIA 6, PA.

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# A FLOWER WHERE THE ROADS DIVIDE

CARYL P. HASKINS

President, Carnegie Institution of Washington

(Dinner Address, April 21, 1961)

My title this evening comes from a book for children written long ago by one who in his youth had been a transport rider in the South African veldt in the days of the Boer War. He was a frontier politician, too, and an acquaintance and sometimes a combative critic of that dashing subaltern and penetrating reporter Winston Churchill. The full sentence that I would quote from him runs: "A flower in the hedgerow where the roads divide will mark the spot in one's mind forever; and yet a million more, before and after, and all as beautiful, are passed unseen." And to this innocent expression I would join one very different—Pasternak's burning phrase: "Immortality is only a stronger word for life."

I bring these tributes to innovation and to dynamic immortality to introduce a subject that I believe to be profoundly involved with both. It concerns the origin and the nature and especially the contemporary tasks of a very particular human institution, one, I think, of special significance for our time. Let me cite some familiar examples of it. I may begin with that Accademia dei Lincei, the Italian Academy of the Lynxes, of which Galileo was the sixth member. I may proceed to a scientific society which met privately in Paris from about 1630, for which no specific name seems to have survived, but of which Descartes and Pascal, Desargues and Fermat, were members. Again I may cite a group of Englishmen who about 1645 gathered around the lens-maker Jonathan Goddard and the mathematician John Wallis, to whose treatise *Arithmetica Infinitorum* Newton himself was so greatly indebted. It met regularly for several years, first at Dr. Goddard's lodgings in London, and then, in Wallis' words, at "the Mitre in Wood Street hard by," and finally at Gresham College, which had been founded in 1598 by that same merchant who gave his name to Gresham's Law. And it was at Gresham College that the immortal descendant of this group was born in 1660—the association later to be chartered by Charles the Second as the Royal Society of London for Im-

proving Knowledge, of which John Winthrop, the Governor of Connecticut Colony, was to be a charter member. And finally one must not forget another great contemporary—the French Académie Royale des Sciences, where Christian Huygens was the first secretary.

Then there was another, rather distinct, cluster of similar associations which I would likewise cite. It includes the Manchester Philosophical Society, where the weaver's son John Dalton grew to the stature of a great chemist. It includes the Lunar Society of Birmingham, fired by the active mind of Matthew Boulton, partner of James Watt, which was named from its club rule of calling meetings on nights when the moon was full, so that the members could find their several ways home afterward over the atrocious roads. It includes, again, the Royal Society of Arts and Manufactures, founded in London in 1754.

Divergent as these bodies were in geography and time, and in many of their outward aspects, they shared some characteristics which, I think, are worth close scrutiny. All were formed during a major intellectual revolution, and in milieux of almost explosive expansion in man's practical knowledge of the world. All of them were voluntary associations of mature men, often of widely divergent interests and backgrounds and occupations, but sharing fine minds, daring minds, catholic minds, often truly incandescent minds. Yet more significant, they shared a common passion to explore intellectual frontiers, to initiate, to strike sparks from one another. Each group held as a prime objective the development of an intellectual "crossroads"—a mobile, independent, versatile, sparkling communications center for the life of the mind in its age and for those practical concerns that depended on the intellect. Their members were characteristically of independent temper. It has been estimated that, of a sample of about seventy early Fellows of the Royal Society, more than half were of Puritan affiliation. All the early societies except the

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Académie des Sciences were independent of their governments, even in financial matters, and were plagued with fiscal complications, of which the early difficulties of the Royal Society are a vivid example. For all of them, the natural sciences and technology were of prominent concern, but their interests ranged vividly over a wide spectrum in the arts and the humanities and the sciences, and admitted few impassable barriers among them.

It is interesting to notice, too, what these societies clearly were not. None included formal teaching among its functions. They all stressed the inclusion of vigorous young men within their councils, often in positions of important influence. But maturity was required: the very young, in the sense of those whose primary need was for instruction, were not among their members. Thus, in a very deep sense they were not universities. Indeed, they had little in common, in their origins, in the patterns of growth, or in their basic functions, even with those medieval primordia of the universities—Corbie or St. Gall or Bobbio, Bec or Cluny, Salerno or Bologna, Paris or Montpellier or Oxford, Chartres or Rheims. Theirs was a different task.

It is revealing, I think, to tabulate the dates of founding of some of these societies. The Accademia dei Lincei, oldest of the first group, probably originated somewhat before 1611—we know that Galileo joined it then, two years after he had built his first telescope. The Royal Society, of course, received its charter in July of 1662, though it had been meeting as a society two years before that. The Académie des Sciences was established in 1666. Thus all the societies in this first group appeared within an interval of about a half-century. The second group shows a similarly compact distribution in dates of origin. The Royal Society of Arts and Manufactures, as I mentioned, was formally constituted in 1754. The Lunar Society came together sometime before 1770; the Manchester Philosophical Society appeared in the 1780's. They all were founded within about thirty years.

Yet a century lay between the brackets of the first group and the second. The compactness of the periods suggests that in each there existed a specific and an imperative cultural demand in response to which these separate clusters of societies were formed. The long interval between the two periods emphasizes both the specificity and the difference of the demands in these two eras. The matter is evidently of great historical

interest in its bearing on the nature of the times that called forth the societies, on the nature of the societies themselves, and especially on the nature of the cultural tasks that they performed. But I believe that this interest is more than historical. I believe that it is highly relevant to our own day.

The most striking thing about the span of founding dates of the first cluster of societies is how accurately it included the most explosive phase of the Copernican intellectual revolution, that epoch which embraced the years from Galileo to Newton. The magnitude of that revolution is commonplace. And yet I think it is easy to forget how utterly extraordinary it was. Throughout a whole preceding age, the measure of "truth" in observation had been in large part the success with which impressions of the world could be selected and organized around accepted images. It must have been a titanic achievement to reach the view that investigation itself might determine man's concepts of his world—a revolution vividly symbolized, as Lewis Mumford has sensitively observed, by the general introduction into men's homes of clear glass, replacing the great stained windows of medieval architecture.

That revolution, of course, had begun at least as early as the publication of Copernicus' *De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium* in 1543, and the work of Tycho Brahe and Johann Kepler. Already, truth for a very few men had come to rest on the quantified, verifiable description of observed phenomena. But these men were clearly most exceptional. By the later seventeenth century, however, when the first societies were well under way, two revolutions had ripened with explosive speed. The philosophy itself had been expanded and had taken on an essentially modern form. A structure of cause and effect had been defined which, as Newton emphasized, should be "kept free of occult influences." Three centuries of intellectual advance were to be built about this revolution of point of view in which, from the days of Newton and Descartes and Hobbes, notions of cause and effect were to be a centrally important feature.

At the same time the social impact of the new philosophy had tremendously widened and deepened, and in good part had become a permanent feature of the culture. It is hard, indeed, to comprehend fully the consuming effects that the Age of Newton had upon culture at large when its basic concepts became truly felt. Trevelyan's memorial to the Age of Queen Anne applied in even greater measure to the years of the Restora-

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tion—from which period, indeed, he borrowed
no less than three of its giants:

A nation of five and a half million that had Wren
for its architect, Newton for its scientist, Locke for
its philosopher, Bentley for its scholar, Pope for its
satirist, Addison for its essayist, Bolingbroke for its
orator, Swift for its pamphleteer, and Marlborough
to win its battles, had the recipe for genius.

Between the early years of Queen Elizabeth and
those of Charles II there clearly occurred in
British society as a whole the most profound
change in ways of looking at the world and at
man. Donne and Dryden seem separated by
far more than the half-century that historical
chronology allots. It seems clear that the early
Elizabethan "reasoned" with his entire mind,
including in the process faith, intuition, feeling,
as well as ratiocination. For the men on the far
side of this intellectual watershed, on the contrary,
reason and faith were strictly separated. The
new pattern took for its model a combination of
mathematical deduction with quantitative in-
ductive reasoning. For the post-Restoration
writer, the scientific world became the real world.
The cosmic view of the Elizabethans, with its
accompanying habits of mind, all but disappeared
from English literature.

We are indebted particularly, I think, to G. R.
Cragg for detecting another highly significant
aspect of this revolution. Not only did the whole
world outlook of the leaders of a nation undergo
a transformation more profound than any that
wars or drastic political changes might have her-
alded during the forty years between the restora-
tion of Charles II and the end of the seventeenth
century. The transformation in fact reached far
beyond its rare leaders of Newtonian stamp, in
scope and in power. So thoroughly did it mold
its age that, as Cragg has pointed out, during
this period multifarious literary and religious
works which were of the second rank nonetheless
collectively delineate with accuracy these vast
changes of first importance.

This was the kind of social change in which the
great societies found and carried out their primary
missions. The most obvious initial stimulus to
their founding came in the new ideas themselves:
in their power and in that high romance which,
as Whitehead once remarked, kindles in the first
apprehension of major liberating concepts. But
the great years, the years when the societies rose
to true social significance, were those when the
whole culture was already in ferment. Then it was
indeed that the chances came to cultivate the

flowers that mark the road's divide, to enhance
their brilliance, to win their permanence.

This, however, is only half the story. For
without the technical revolution that preceded
and accompanied the intellectual one inspired by
Newtonian concepts of the world the general
transformation ignited by these concepts could
never have come about. That practical strain,
indeed, had long exercised a very deep substantive
influence on the intellectual revolution itself. It
had surely been no accident that the development
of mathematics was greatly stimulated in the later
Renaissance years, when the commerce of a pre-
dominantly Italian trading culture was expanding
so rapidly. It was surely no accident, again,
that the years when the primitive arts of navi-
gation served a primary frontier were also the
years when the first telescopes were designed,
and when the study of optics and hydraulics and
the building of clocks pre-empted men's enthusi-
asms and preoccupied their minds.

This practical technology was as important as
the great concepts themselves in the climate to
which the new societies were addressed. And the
societies were acutely conscious of this. At the
Académie des Sciences, Huygens was deeply in-
volved in investigating the pendulum as a practical
device of clockwork, and was making significant
contributions to the design of the balance spring.
It has been estimated that nearly sixty per cent
of the problems handled by the Royal Society in
the first thirty years of its existence were inspired
by the practical needs of public use. Robert
Hooke, appointed in 1662 as Curator of the So-
ciety, was assigned the formidable duty of bringing
in three or four new technical experiments at
each meeting.

How fundamental was this practical element
in the function of the societies is yet more vividly
emphasized in the original purposes of all the
members of the second group. The Royal Society
of Arts and Manufactures was founded explicitly
to encourage practical and applied science. The
Manchester Philosophical Society originated in
a group of practical men who had been students
at Warrington Academy, where Joseph Priestley,
originally a teacher of English and languages, was
to become the greatest chemist of his day. The
Lunar Society was built by men like Matthew
Boulton, the partner of James Watt in the build-
ing of steam engines, and John Roebuck, a pioneer
in the chemical industry who took a share in
Watt's patent rights, and Josiah Wedgwood.
Their practical aims, in fact, were no different

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from the early ones of the Académie des Sciences and the Royal Society. Why, then, did these new societies appear at all when their far more distinguished predecessors still occupied the field?

There must be many answers to that question. Two speculations that intrigue me are suggested by the clustering of the founding dates of the societies and the long separation between the times of appearance of the first and second groups to which I have referred.

The first speculation concerns possible developments within the earlier societies themselves, responding to subtle changes in the science of that time. There is much to indicate that, though Newton himself was of eminently practical as well as theoretical bent, the very comprehensiveness of his ideas, and especially the power of their formulation, inspired widespread efforts to similarly order and systematize other branches of scientific inquiry still in the empirical and descriptive stage. Some of those branches were not ready for such treatment, and their growth could only be retarded by it. There is a suggestion that by the time of Newton's death, in part perhaps because of the very prestige that his methods of inquiry had achieved, the work of the inventor and the empirical experimenter may have been considered less central to scientific advance than it had earlier been. For a relatively brief but highly critical period, despite the fact that James Watt, for example, was a Fellow, the Royal Society itself may well have verged on an academic position that it had eloquently scored in Oxford and Cambridge a century earlier. Now the dates of founding of the new societies roughly match this period. So there is a suggestion that practical men, perhaps responding to a climate, were stimulated to form associations of their own.

But the second aspect is to me more interesting. The earlier group of societies came into being in a preindustrial culture, living largely by trade. The later group entered a milieu already shaped by the first Industrial Revolution. One imagines that the tasks of assimilating an intellectual and a practical revolution to these two kinds of society may have differed in important and subtle ways. It may well be that the older Societies could not adapt at once with full effectiveness to the new environment. The most immediately effective response to the radically new demand may well have been the younger societies, born into the culture that they served.

Let me now come closer to our day. It is revealing to reflect how many of these societies

have persisted to the present, through all the turbulence and change of two or three centuries. On the whole, moreover, they have greater vitality today, and fill more dynamic roles, than ever before. The Accademia dei Lincei is the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, a scientific body of stature and importance. The Académie Française has if possible increased its prestige. The Manchester Society and the Lunar Society have been transformed, but the Royal Society of Arts carries on with undiminished vigor in its beautiful London quarters in John Adam Street. And of the Royal Society, in its three hundred and first year, one can say nought further. That dynamic immortality has been achieved which, at last, is but a stronger word for life.

What does this say about the deepest currents of our own times, flowing beneath the immense shifts of direction and of scale that have preoccupied our culture in these three centuries? What does it say about the societies themselves; about their relevance for the present and the future?

When the British Queen ascended the throne in 1952, a sentiment was widely voiced in England that there was marked the beginning of a second Elizabethan age. The flaws of detail in such a generalized comparison were quickly recognized. But in a far more universal sense, I think, it conveyed a vivid truth. For beyond doubt we are living once again through a comparatively tremendous shift in science and philosophy. Like the earlier revolution, its core lies in radical changes in fundamental ideas, in radical readjustments of man's basic concepts of the world—the most profound, indeed, in the last three hundred years. As in Newton's day, it was set off by liberating new ideas, by those revolutionary physical concepts that now permeate our lives—the ideas of relativity and of uncertainty. Central in that revolution, too, are the new concepts of chance, which, as Bronowski has suggested, may ultimately prove as great a unifying principle for the diverse branches of science as were the concepts of causality in the days of Newton and Descartes and Hobbes. No better example of this, perhaps, can be offered than the quantitative and statistical studies of population genetics and population structure that in recent years have so illumined our understanding of assemblages of living things.

There are of course many far-ranging aspects of the current intellectual revolution which are of poignant social import, paralleling in their impact

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those of Newton's day. If the Newtonian revolu-
tion, for instance, established the concept of the
detached, confirmable individual observation as a
criterion of truth in nature, a truth from which
the observer could be set apart, we must master
the far more subtle concept of the interaction of
nature and of observer as parts of one coherent
system. Again, we still tend to conceive the
ultimate task of science as the search for "truth"
in its earlier definition, in terms of individually
verifiable "absolute" observations. Perhaps we
must redefine that task in more comprehensive
ways. Perhaps, following a suggestion of Martin
Johnson made a number of years ago, we will
come to think of scientific truth primarily as a
measure of communicability and coherence of
systems of thought, as a property of interchange-
ability, as it were, between observers on the one
hand and scientific propositions on the other.
There can be few more practical testaments, in-
deed, to the concept that all scientific knowledge
forms a close-woven nexus than the rich history
of parallel scientific discoveries and insights
attained by workers far apart, who have not been
directly in communication.

There is every evidence, then, that this intel-
lectual revolution of our day will be at least as
far-reaching in its social consequences as that
which confronted the men of the Restoration.
And there is another important parallel between
our times and theirs. As in that period, the
practical technology of our age is likewise in a
revolution hitherto unparalleled. One need hardly
mention the well-worn subject of space explora-
tion, stimulating the imagination of a whole
generation as much as did Galileo's telescopes.
Nearer home, the physical power that we have
won from nature in our day is evidently of a
wholly different order from anything we have
known before. With that conquest, the practical
tasks of technology have in some measure subtly
shifted emphasis from the discovery of new
sources of power in nature to yet more challenging
domains—to the organization and modulation
and control of that power, to new modes of com-
munication in the transmission, but more espe-
cially in the generation and the analysis of mes-
sages, and, as in the processes of life and of mind
themselves, to ways of predicting the future.

I come to a final point of convergence between
our times and the periods when the societies
were founded which seems to me most note-
worthy. As I have said, there is much to suggest
that the greatest of all the contributions of the

societies at their beginnings were made not so
much in the initiation of intellectual or technical
revolutions as in the performance of a yet more
awesome function—that of pioneering in the vast
cultural tranformations that winged so swiftly as
the revolutions took hold. Now it seems evident
that once again we are midstream in wide cul-
tural changes, consequent once more on intellec-
tual and technical revolutions—those revolutions
of the first half of the twentieth century which
have been as profound as any that faced the men
of the Restoration, and have come with compa-
rably explosive speed and power.

So the processes of change which brought forth
the societies, and which confront them with their
greatest tasks today, converge at levels that are
at once subtle and highly significant. Today is
clearly critical. What then of the future? Such
was the power of the Newtonian concepts and
their impress upon Western thought that three
centuries of intellectual and practical advance
were supported by their vast potential. Will our
contemporary revolution support our verve as
long as did the first? Can we extrapolate from
that earlier period? Will the challenges of, say,
the 1980's for the societies bear any resemblance
to those, say, of the 1880's?

In some respects, I think, there may be common
denominators, though of a relative kind and likely
to have quite different implications. We think,
for instance, of the expansion of scientific effort
in our day as explosive—a doubling every ten
to fifteen years. Yet one recalls that this *rate*
has in fact remained fairly constant since the days
of Newton—and wonders rather what will happen
in our culture if the nature of population growth
itself may eventually retard that rate. We are
concerned about the ever-intensifying problems
of communication between scientific and non-
scientific fields, and among the scientific disci-
plines themselves, and sometimes almost despair
at their complexity and magnitude and difficulty.
Yet it is worth remembering that these same prob-
lems vexed the men of Newton's age—and indeed
one of the great tasks of the societies was precisely
that of alleviating them. We are concerned with
such problems as the "over-ordering" of branches
of science not yet ready for the discipline and the
confines that we would like to put upon them—
such premature order, for instance, as retarded
and deflected early approaches to the subject of
genetic recombination in our own time. It is
easy to forget that just such over-ordering on
a far grander scale probably contributed impor-

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CARYL P. HASKINS

[PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC.]

tantly to the very situation in eighteenth-century science which the younger group of societies were formed in part to rectify.

Such problems, and the challenges that they pose today, clearly have a continuity with those of the past. But it would be dangerous to forget that major qualitative differences accompany major changes of scale, in intellectual and social realms no less than in those of technology. Consider, for instance, the problems that must surely follow from the unexampled secularization of knowledge which dominates our time, and especially scientific and technical discovery. I use that term broadly and loosely, for want of a better, to mean the organization and the systematization and the taking-for-granted of knowledge won which so typically accompanies its integration into an advanced society. What happens to the compelling quality of a comprehensive new system of ideas, or great new conquests of nature, or great new inventions, as the concerns primarily related to their social integration replace those of discovery with its early wonder? What happens not only to quality, but to standards of quality?

We have many historical examples of secularization in this sense on a grand scale, vividly illustrating its opposing significances for a culture. Consider, for instance, the secularization of the art of writing, still going forward in some newly literate societies: the thrill in the fact of writing itself, the emphasis on penmanship, the special position of the amanuensis, comparable to that of the reckoner in figures in cultures where elementary arithmetic was or still is a great accomplishment. Contrast these with the attitudes of more sophisticated cultures toward innovation in the same arts, where the arts themselves have already virtually transformed the cultures. Think, again, of the invention of block printing and of movable type—of the vital foundation that it laid for the modern cultural revolution, which yet was accompanied by a contemporary apprehension so serious that printing seems to have been banned in certain monasteries in dread of the loss of quality which it must bring in the copyist's art. Think, in our day, of the similar dichotomy in the explosive secularization of literature achieved through the medium of the paperback book.

The challenge is important. For perhaps it is deeply characteristic of the human mind that as the systematization and the organization of knowledge and of technical power progress the vividness and the color and the style that initially surround

them become progressively harder to maintain. Yet it is just at this point that these qualities are most vitally important. For verve and style and romance and deep individual involvement are indeed inseparable from quality, not only of the effort itself, but of the very culture which it serves.

This was not a basically new problem for the societies in the mid-nineteenth century. It was not a new prospective problem for the Linnean Society when the Darwin and Wallace papers were read before it in 1858, though the Society was apparently largely unaware of it at the time. Think, indeed, of the successive stages in the social adoption of the ideas surrounding Darwinian evolution, and how magnificently they illustrate these difficulties—the early white-hot flame of cognition, the later occlusion of communication and failures of understanding that not even a Huxley could rectify, the mistaken interpretations, the curious distortions, and finally the incorporation of a revolutionary body of ideas so deeply into the culture that the dissection of their original sources becomes a futile as well as a fruitless exercise.

But if this challenge to the societies is not new in principle, it is today radically different in scale and difficulty. In their early days the societies were greatly aided by the fact that the whole basis of scientific knowledge was still, in large part, in a fresh stage of appreciation. Such appreciation persists today, of course, for a body of knowledge which, in absolute terms, is far greater. But it is no longer written on a virgin slate. Now it is projected in the context of a vast background already at the stage of systematization, already at the stage where the ends of the investigation or the development, however exciting and unexpected they must be in detail, are in their essence really known. This poses quite new problems for the maintenance of wonder and of verve. It is a curious and possibly a relevant illustration that, as Dennis Gabor has observed, despite the incomparably exciting future that is surely a most likely prospect of our age, Utopian literature has been dead for at least thirty years.

Trevelyan's environment which had the recipe for genius and in which the new societies began was a nation of five and a half million. What shall we say of the challenges from a nation of one hundred and eighty million, from a world of perhaps two billion nine hundred million, with at least as high a proportion of potential genius in

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their make-up? What shall we say of the challenge in a generation in which possibly ninety per cent of all the scientific minds that have existed since the Newtonian revolution contemporarily carry on their work?

But quite apart from these more detailed questions—though of course indissolubly linked with them—what of the primary role of the societies in our time, and especially in the future? Here, I think, the answer is simpler, and clear, and unequivocal.

The great role that challenges the societies today, and will fall to them tomorrow, is surely of a dynamic immortality. For our own culture, it may perhaps best be summed as the maintenance, in a vast and explosively growing and changing milieu, of all that is most essential and most poignant in the tradition of the individual, innovating Liberal—in the tradition, really, of the profoundly unconforming man. Not easiest, but among the most significant, responsibilities accompanying such a mission will be the maintaining and the widening of opportunities for the constant growth and the continuing perfectibility of that individual in a culture that is by its very nature, and, most significantly, by its very need, profoundly affected by all the forces of intense organization.

And there is a related subtle and powerful responsibility of guidance for which all the experience of the societies has peculiarly prepared them. Long history has demonstrated that a nation will be great in those areas where it recognizes, cultivates, and demands greatness. This proposition can also be framed in its converse: "Where greatness is perceived, demanded, cultivated, rewarded, there will a society be great."

This also is a definition of the mission within the context of our culture.

But the challenges, of course, are also of world proportions. There is a profound and solemn truth in the observation that the power to inspire men with tolerance faces its most acid test in a world of more than one competing great intolerance. The world of competing great intolerances is the one in which we live. This formidable dilemma, at last, poses the greatest of all the subtle and difficult tasks to which the great societies are heir.

Now I have been speaking this evening about a class of human institutions in very general terms, and in the context of history. I have taken my examples from remote periods and from European settings because they offer such fine laboratories of inquiry. But my inner thoughts have settled nearer home, in geography and time. They could not but center on a body formed in 1743—neatly within the distribution of founding dates of the second group of British societies that I have cited—founded by that journeyman printer from Boston who while working in London in 1725 had written with a characteristic mixture of enterprise and humility and pecuniary shrewdness to Sir Hans Sloane of the Royal Society, offering to sell him a purse made of asbestos—a successful sale, it should be noted. Of course my thoughts are dominated by the luminous past and the infinitely challenging present and future of Franklin's band of "virtuosi or ingenious men," that lineal descendant of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, the American Philosophical Society, Held at Philadelphia, for Promoting Useful Knowledge.

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Lecture I
(November 27, 1961)

**TECHNOLOGY, SCIENCE, AND THE NEW NATIONS:**

**DIMENSIONS AND PARAMETERS**

It is my particular fortune to address these Lectures to an area of American foreign policy which so little as a quarter of a century ago might still have been deemed of minor importance -- the impact upon our foreign affairs of the forces of world science and world technology. After the experience of three great wars dominated by military technology and a Cold War dominated by thinking in the technical sphere it appears far from minor today. Yet so new is it in our experience, and so manifold and commanding in its present proportions, that we are still, in a literal sense, groping in our efforts to come to grips with it. It is a special adventure for a lecturer to try to enter a realm of this kind.

The worlds of science and technology and of foreign policy seem superficially far apart. The kinds of understanding involved in each are often widely different, the skills required seem disparate, the training and the temperament to implement them have traditionally appeared distinct. And so it is not always easy to recognize their points of junction and of coincidence.

Yet one hundred and thirty years ago, in the presidency of John Quincy Adams, it already seemed wholly natural to us to couple the waxing internal strength of the country with the contemporary lusty growth of a still primitive American technology and science. John Quincy Adams himself when Secretary of State saw nothing incongruous in personally preparing for the Congress his *Report Upon Weights and Measures*, uniting with the responsibilities of statesmanship a deep and abiding personal interest in science. Through all the following years to the present we have continued to take it for granted that in essential elements of our *domestic* political philosophy and of the administrative structure of our government, no less than in our intellectual orientation and in the sinews of our internal material strength, we

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Lecture I - 2

are deeply committed and indebted to the technical and the scientific way. The whole history and pattern of our domestic institutions, indeed, vividly reflects the scientific and the technical element. Correspondingly, our mechanisms of government for organizing and channeling the forces of science and technology in the service of our internal strength, while often enough they creak and grind, are none the less extensive, sophisticated, and on the whole vigorous. They have had a long evolution.

Yet even so late as the second World War we did not sense anything like so obvious and deep a connection between the *foreign policy* of the United States and the provinces of science and technology. But with that war, and ever since, the most fearsome military aspects of such connections have been thrust upon us with steadily increasing emphasis. From wartime radar to napalm incendiary bombs to low-power nuclear weapons to the fifty megaton Soviet blast over Novaya Zemlya on October third, from Whittle engines to modern jet aircraft to high pay-load space-range rocketry, from long-range warships to nuclear-powered submarines, the awesome technical tools of the military art have advanced, never for a moment in recent years leaving us unheeding of this sinister facet of the relation of technology and science to foreign affairs and to world power. Though this keen awareness is still barely twenty years old, our experience has been intensive, and we have already achieved some remarkable devices of government organization in its service, following the example and the tradition of the Office of Scientific Research and Development of World War II.
Perhaps this is why the scientific offices of the military services overseas still rank among the most effective of our peacetime efforts in the liaison of scientific and technical knowledge with foreign affairs.

But there is a further aspect of the impact of science and technology on American foreign affairs which has not been generally considered until very recently. It is possible, indeed, that at no earlier point in our history than this last year could an American Secretary of State, with any real hope of general attention and understanding, have used the words of Dean Rusk on April 7 at the Centennial

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Lecture I - 3

Celebration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

> ... It seems to me rather curious at the present moment, and perhaps it is just a moment, that the nations and peoples of the earth seem to be pinning their hopes on the possibilities of scientific and technical development for the satisfaction of basic human needs. ... It may be that we have a chance for a time to get a job done which will implant that idea deeply into the consciousness of man and put us into a position to give up the temptations of predatory seizure of resources elsewhere. But if these expectations are not satisfied, and we cannot make tolerable advances, one can see down the road the renewal of pressures for more lands, more resources, and great hazards to the peace of the world.

There are complex reasons why our appreciation of this aspect of the role of science and technology in foreign affairs has lagged so significantly behind our keen apprehension of the domestic and the military facets. Some of them, clearly, lie within ourselves and follow from the very state of our society. But others relate to the massive changes which have occurred in recent years in the whole topography of the world itself. For it is literally true that major patterns of power and frameworks of strategy and decision against which American policies were set in the periods of the first and second World Wars, and even of the opening phases of the Cold War era, no longer exist. They have been replaced in part by some quite different patterns which are likely, I think, given a world spared from nuclear holocaust, to endure in general outline for many years to come. Understanding these arenas, and formulating effective action with respect to them are, I believe, among the very central challenges of our time. And at present we are still all too ill equipped to deal with them sensitively and firmly and generally effectively at the level of government.

So I plan to focus my concerns rather specifically in these Lectures, and in doing so to impose some limitations upon them. I shall not attempt to consider those problems of nuclear military strategy and their converse, problems of nuclear inspection and all the broader and terribly difficult matters involved in the general limitation and control of armaments -- now, after the resumption of the Soviet nuclear

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brought, and may now bring again elsewhere, the real conviction that not only can
significant aspects of the laws of nature be understood, but that, properly under-
stood, they can be effectively used for man's practical gain. This seems obvious
to us today, with our long scientific history and our scientific sophistication.
Yet it is the precise opposite of the pre-Renaissance view in western Europe. Before
the scientific revolution the basic view of the European alchemist and astrologer
was that power over nature was to be obtained by contradicting and outwitting her,
not by understanding her laws and working cooperatively with them. I think that the
vast shift of philosophy that the Renaissance brought to the west is still far from
obvious in some parts of the world, and that it is easy to underestimate the excite-
ment and the release that such a reversal of conviction can bring.

My other bias is that, closely woven and closely interdependent as science
and technology are today, they are significantly different both in origin and nature,
and that it is important to bear this fact in mind, especially when considering the
new nations.

So I shall categorize as "new" those nations of the world which, throughout
all but their most recent history, have stood largely apart from the currents of
the scientific revolution of the west. It is certainly more than accidental that
the nations which are "new" by this criterion are also, in general, underdeveloped.
But the relationship is complex, and the converse is by no means always true.

Then, beginning midway of the second Lecture, I should like to consider science
and technology in relation to the nations now on the far side of the historical water-
shed of the scientific revolution. That category will include all those peoples who,
either from direct experience or through a relatively early and fairly continuous
secondary exposure, have understood and have come largely to take for granted the
deeper implications of the scientific revolution. In other respects this class will
have a wide and varied membership. It will include the "intermediate" nations in the

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technical, economic, and political senses, such as various of the South American countries. It will include, in some aspects of their scientific climate and scientific needs, the countries of western Europe. It will include some aspects of the "climate" and needs of our own country. And I shall consider too some scientific and technical matters as factors for international solidarity among the countries of western Europe.

Finally, in the third Lecture I should like to turn to a most controversial and vexing, but a fascinating, question: the nature and position of science and technology in the totalitarian countries, and the significance which this may have for the western world and, to a degree, for science itself. As you can see, I shall be speculative and conjectural throughout -- but here I expect to reach a peak of speculation and conjecture.

With this general *precis*, then, let me turn to my first subject -- the new nations and the *technologies* relevant to their needs.

In 1945 fifty-one states had set their hand to the Charter of the United Nations. By September of this year the century mark of membership in the U.N. was attained with the admission of Sierra Leone, and Tunisia has yet more recently constituted the one hundred and first. This precipitate growth bears as dramatic witness as anything could to the political dynamism and weight of the new nations in the world, now and for the future. Today the less developed nations comprehend approximately two-fifths of the population of the globe. Their lands include approximately a third of its surface. In population, in territory, in potential political influence over the years to come, they represent one of the most significant elements among the world's peoples. The average *per capita* income of the approximately one billion people who live within these lands may range from approximately $50 to little more than $100 per year, contrasting with the condition of the approximately four hundred million people living in the industrial world of Europe and America, Australia, and the more advanced portions of South America and South Africa, with an average *per capita* income of perhaps $1000 annually.

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But there are vitally important criteria of relevance beyond those of substance. The scarcity of capital in the new countries demands that technologies in any field carry the lowest practicable investment and development costs. The abundance of unskilled manpower relative to capital so characteristic of many of the new nations requires that relevant technologies maximize the productiveness of existing human resources rather than conserving those resources by replacing manpower with machines. In food production, for example, technologies in such nations should be directed primarily toward securing an increase in yield per acre rather than in output per man. On the other hand, in underpopulated new nations, like some of those in Africa, the challenge may be the very opposite. Once more, each nation must constitute a special case, requiring special analysis.

Again, the scarcity of capital dictates very special adaptations of technology, and in devising and effecting these adaptations may lie one of the richest fields for western technical aid to the new nations. Taking the example of grain production in India, for instance, the establishment of a single large fertilizer plant would almost certainly lie well beyond the capital capacity of many of the new nations. But it may sometimes be true that efficient smaller plants to achieve the same ends will come within the capital range of the private entrepreneur, inside or outside the country. In some of the new nations small plants, tailor-made to local conditions, might well be able to accomplish feats of food production which would otherwise be quite impossible. In general, it will be important both for us and for the new nations to recognize that they should enter the technological field at a stage corresponding to an earlier period in the industrial revolution of the west -- a period when, likewise, small plants were the rule. The requirements then were very different from the huge capital-intensive plants which are frequently most economical in an advanced industrial society.

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You will observe that in all this discussion I have made no mention of the "peaceful atom" in relation to the new nations. I have avoided the subject deliberately. In the context of the intermediate nations, with their needs for relatively sophisticated research and research training, or in the context of the hoped-for needs of the new nations some years hence, radioisotopes and research reactors clearly have their place, and it may be a significant one. But in the context of the current practical technical needs of the emerging countries, the situation is quite different. I think it is easy to see today -- by hindsight -- that the atoms for peace program which we heralded with such enthusiasm in 1954 may on balance actually have rendered a disservice to the new nations. First, it had the effect of focusing attention unduly on one special sector of technology which, in the absence of serious research and evaluation of its special applicability for their needs, could not be anything like as relevant for them as some other areas. Second, and perhaps more important, our own enthusiasm was bound to raise hopes which, at the present stage, could only be disappointed,

There is an important corollary of these considerations that we are all too
apt to miss in the perspective of our own advanced technical, scientific, and indus-
trial background. Both we and the new nations must understand that in general the
powerful advanced novel technologies which we may expect from the industrial nations
in ever-mounting volume over the years to come are not necessarily likely to be of
immediate significance to the newer countries. For the present, such technologies
may actually widen rather than narrow existing economic gaps. This prospect need not
be distressing in itself, but failure on either side to remember it can easily lead
to dangerous efforts and bitter disillusionment.

Such definitions of relevance in the technologies most urgent to the new nations
do not suggest that the knowledge to implement them lies at the frontiers of scientific
advance in the industrial nations of the west. Indeed, it is likely that more basic

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information appropriate to the needs of the new nations is presently available in the stores of the industrial countries than can be effectively put to use for many years to come. The problem here is not one of research. But in a sense it is yet more formidable. It is a problem of discovery, of sensible and sensitive selection, and, above all, of adaptation to the peculiar and individual requirements of each nation, each people, each region. In most of the new countries there will be at least a few men generally familiar with technical matters who can seize upon the world's store of such knowledge, can with some assistance abstract appropriately from it, and, under favorable circumstances, can adapt such elements successfully to the needs of their countries. Where the corps of such men is adequate in numbers and relatively sophisticated in outlook the task of aid may resolve itself primarily to placing a general store of the appropriate information and the means for implementing it at their command and providing any advice which may be welcome in its adaptation. This is a serious and a subtle enough undertaking in itself, requiring a high order of skill and devotion, as well as of quality and training, among those responsible for it. But it is not, basically, an unfamiliar task.

In far too many cases, however, technically sophisticated personnel are still extremely rare in the new nations. It is of the highest importance that their numbers be augmented as rapidly as possible through appropriate secondary training, bearing always in mind the dangers of too-narrow specialization. So vital is the matter that radical measures should probably be taken in this direction by local governments even, when necessary, at the cost of short-term sacrifices in education at the primary and the university levels, and even at the cost of some postponement of the exciting goal of universal national literacy.

In this connection there is already available in a number of the new nations an important potential source of auxiliary technical training which should not be overlooked. Corporations from advanced industrial nations operating in these countries may well find it to their own long-term interest, as it will certainly be to the

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countries themselves, to undertake what has been called a "planned wastage" of personnel. Such companies must inherently be centers of technical education to some extent. If they are willing deliberately to undertake the technical training of a somewhat larger cadre of workers than they can use directly, anticipating that these trainees will go elsewhere, the costs need not be large but the proportionate increase of technical knowledge in the new countries where they work can be most significant. It is both refreshing and revealing, I think, to recall that it was not in formal training institutes that the men of western Europe gained the technical knowledge that propelled the Industrial Revolution. It was not in such an environment that Josiah Wedgwood carved upon the bench of a careless potter, "This work will not do for J. Wedgwood." It was on the floors of small factories, and in the environments of modest production plants. Here again, the new countries may be wise in attempting to re-tread some of the earlier roads of the technical evolution of western Europe.

But under the present circumstances of the new nations a preponderant share of the burden of selection, adaptation, and introduction must inevitably rest with the donor, and the effectiveness with which these things are done will largely determine the success of the enterprise. For lack of skill and of effective effort may involve more than simple inefficiency; there is the real risk that it could spell disaster far more serious than if the effort had never been undertaken at all. Few stronger arguments could be advanced for the organization within the Development Assistance Program currently being shaped of an effective Division of Research and Development, charged with a continuing professional concern for identification of needs and wants, the adaptation of knowledge and techniques, the conduct of appropriate experiments, the education and training of United States field personnel in the programs related to the needs of the new nations.

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Few challenges to the whole pattern of our foreign aid are more severe than this. There is not only the danger of offering too-advanced, too-glittering, or otherwise poorly adapted technologies. There is the equally grave danger of forgetting that in all programs of technical aid an indispensable complement to success must be the internal will of the recipients to develop their own technical frontiers. Without such will, without a political climate which is at least tolerant to its expression and disposed to implement it, technical aid may bring in its train the same hazards that we have learned in latter years to associate in the economic field with monetary aid uncritically applied. And it must be remembered, in this connection, that among past or present political leaders of the new countries only those of India and Israel have had extensive scientific training in their educational backgrounds.

This aspect of foreign technical aid must inherently bring severe problems of organization and administration at the level of the federal government. It is quite possible that they do not all belong there. The interesting suggestion has recently been made that there may be profitable regions to explore in the design and administration of technical aid programs for some of the new nations directly at state level. It is significant, indeed, that in many ways the technical problems in the new nations often match the problems of American state governments more closely than they do those of the Federal establishment.

But the whole issue does pose squarely some inescapable questions relating to general Federal policy. For example, how does it bear upon the total distribution of the Federal technical effort? The implications reach quite as far as our own plans for the conquest of space. For one significant query to which we should pay careful attention might run: "In the vision of those new countries that view the bipolar world upon which they are entering with interest and from backgrounds often quite different from our own, is it leadership on vast and spectacular and sophisticated frontiers of exploration and power that will be most useful and impressive to them,

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or is it demonstrated leadership in technologies more relevant to their own practical needs, coupled with genuine and evident willingness and care and insight in making them available?" Clearly there can never be a simple answer. Even the judgment of how we partition our efforts between these vastly disparate extremes must vary with circumstances, and from year to year. But it will be important to keep the grave significances of such choices constantly in our thinking, and to remind ourselves frequently that our own technological resources are no more unlimited than our economic ones. Relatively they are in fact more limited because slower and harder to augment. Comparatively wealthy as we are in them, we are not wealthy enough simultaneously to do all things well on the vast scale that the contemporary world demands.

But vital as relevant technologies are for the new nations, in the end they will not be enough. The new nations will need an indigenous, living science of their own, however limited in volume or in scope. This is admittedly a controversial proposition. There can be few more dangerous misconceptions in the whole field of technical and scientific aid to the new nations, indeed, than the idea of science as a magic wand which, waved over them, will cure ills whose basis lies in a complex of social, economic, and industrial factors of which science is just an additional element. I am quite sensitive to this. And yet it is a proposition in which I deeply believe, for reasons which I hope will become apparent.

This proposition takes as its basis an important distinction between the nature of technology and of science. It implies that closely interlocked as they are in the modern life of industrial peoples, they nonetheless differ in important ways relevant to the present context -- a judgment reflecting the second personal bias to which I earlier referred. That bias, like my first one, conditions a good deal of what I shall now have to say, and so it surely requires both verification and illustration. Before proceeding with my main theme therefore, I would like, if I may, to introduce

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Why this should have been so, why an Asiatic scientific revolution never came,
must stand among the great and important enigmas of history. Such a fundamental
question emphasizes our basic lack of understanding both of the processes of scientific
revolution and of the underlying requirements for it. But pointed observations can
be drawn from the events themselves. Significant among them are the long separation
in time between the technological and scientific revolutions in the world, amounting
to three thousand years or more, and the fact that, whereas the technological revolution
takes its deepest roots from the east and can therefore be expected to be a familiar
phenomenon the world over, the scientific revolution, in its original form, never
touched the east at all.

This distinctness of the scientific from the technological revolution in both
time and geography applies significantly, I think, to the scientific requirements of
the new nations. It is equally important to remember that in Europe, and in Europe
uniquely, science and technology were early associated and interdependent. It can
have been no accident that the years of conquest and of rapidly expanding oceanic
trade were also the years when the first telescopes were designed and the scientific
study of optics and hydraulics preoccupied men's minds and so greatly influenced the
course of their natural philosophy. It was no accident, surely, that the mathematics
of insurance and the computation of rates of interest underwent a great development
in the later years of the Renaissance, when the commerce of the city-states was ex-
panding so rapidly. But though the European scientific revolution was thus so firmly
rooted in the earlier technical one, and though the early European scientific societies
were explicitly dedicated to improvements in the practical arts, science and technology
nevertheless remained distinct in a very fundamental sense. From the outset, the
motives of scientific investigation appear on the whole to have resided less in its
pragmatic implications than in the sheer inspiration of intellectual discovery. And
as the Newtonian revolution expanded, so also did the concept of a science pursued

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in considering the circumstances and needs of the new nations in the field of science
that the Newtonian revolution took place in a largely preindustrial society.

And it was not only the careers of a few great individual scientific explorers
that were lived independently of an industrial environment. The major steps in the
transformation of world view in British society as a whole from an essentially Ptolemaic
concept of the universe to a Newtonian one came, in the main, between 1660 and 1700 --
approximately eighty years before the great period of British industrial growth. And
it is hard, at this remove, to fully comprehend how consuming was its effect on society
as a whole. Not only did the outlook of a whole nation during no more than forty
years suddenly undergo a transformation more profound than any that wars or drastic
political changes might have wrought; even more prodigiously -- and in the context of
the new nations, even more significantly, I believe -- the fever and the excitement
of the change were truly universal in the society, reaching far out beyond its rare
leaders of Newtonian stamp. This astonishing movement opened windows for the intellect
onto vistas so universal and compelling that in less than a generation the vision of
a whole people was intellectually transformed.

Of such stuff was a scientific revolution made in its original setting. That
setting, of course, may never be reproduced today. It may be that a revolution of
such intensity and scope can never sweep over a new society again. One must never
forget the long centuries of special experience that underlay that historic and heady
time. And yet some of the new countries have until recently been little more affected
by the currents of world science than the European nations were in the time of the
original scientific revolution. The gaps of development between science and technology
in the new nations, moreover, are matched by the similar gaps that faced the early
European men of science. It is by no means impossible to imagine that in another guise
such a revolution could be repeated in much of its earlier intensity and dynamism in
societies which at present are in a stage of technical and scientific development in
certain ways comparable to that of western Europe in 1770.

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This has been a long digression into history. I undertook it only because I think it does have a real bearing upon this central question of the needs of the new nations for a living science, which I want to explore further in the next Lecture. And it bears too upon one of the most important aspects of our role in bringing scientific and technical aid to the new nations -- the understanding, at least in some measure, of the tremendous and fascinating complex of conditions which "spark" a scientific revolution. This too I shall want to explore next Monday before turning to the next division of my subject -- American foreign policy and the forces of science and technology in those nations of the world for which the scientific revolution has been an inherited tradition.

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## Lecture II
(December 4, 1961)

### BEYOND THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

You will recall that at the beginning of the Lecture last Monday I made a limiting choice of subject, addressing areas other than those terribly difficult problems of arms limitation, of nuclear test inspection, of disarmament with which we are all so much concerned.

But I was also acting out of a conviction that the problems surrounding the emergence of the new nations to mature status in the modern world, and the evolution of unions of free states into larger effective entities also represent central concerns of our time, and that technology and science by their very attributes, have important parts to play in both developments.

In the last Lecture, you remember, I discussed some of the challenges which the tenchnological needs of the new nations place on American foreign policy, laying particular emphasis on various requirements of relevance in those technologies and the complex questions of substance and administration which their selection and adaptation raise for us. I then advanced the proposition that, however vital they may be for the new nations, such technologies alone cannot satisfy their needs. For this a living science will also be required, however limited its volume or its scope.

This proposition implies some basic distinctions between science and technology, and further involves the assumption that, given other requisite conditions, a scientific revolution can occur in a preindustrial society. I then subjected you to a considerable historical digression. I did this both because a similar digression had illustrated both these points so convincingly for me, and because it had also suggested some things about the characteristics of scientific revolutions in general which may be applicable in considering the likely future courses of the new nations in scientific fields. I shall come back to the last point very shortly.

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Let me now return for a moment to this question of the need of the new nations for a science of their own. Many factors, I think, point to such a need. The first, the most practical, and perhaps the least fundamental is that, as the whole history of the scientific revolution has demonstrated so vividly, technology cannot remain a vital and a growing thing in the modern world without continuing nourishment from the wellsprings of a living science. Without a living, indigenous science a new country must depend heavily and indefinitely upon constant borrowing if its growing technology is not to stagnate. Permanent dependence upon borrowed technology can be politically as well as technically and economically dangerous for a new country. For if the management and development of the technologies which it borrows tax its resources of understanding and innovation too heavily, technical dependence can easily lead and reinforce dependence in economic and political spheres. The Soviet policy of pushing production machinery vigorously in its programs of technical aid to the new countries, thus permanently "entwining" Soviet technology with the industrial development of an emerging nation, is instructive here. Furthermore, since no country can understand so well the subtle requirements and the new opportunities for technology within its own lands as the peoples who actually employ it and must live with its consequences, the effective adaption of technology to local use requires, in the most pragmatic sense, both a living and a practical indigenous science. It is no overstatement that, in the long run, a nation can be reckoned truly strong and independent only if it possesses both a vital technology and a vital science in appropriate balance.

In a different vein, the ability to make independent, original contributions to the world's store of scientific knowledge has come to be a mark of progressive-ness, and even of successful national identity, in the modern world. How true this is has several times been demonstrated in western Europe. Some technically

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and scientifically advanced nations have recently found themselves in positions
with respect to some of the very new research fields where it would clearly
have been more immediately economical to live on a technology borrowed from
outside -- a technology often enough developed elsewhere from scientific ad-
vances for which they themselves were originally responsible. In this connection
I think of Great Britain and the fields of the organic chemistry of polymers and
the physics of semiconductors. Polythene was invented in Great Britain, nylon
in the United States. Transistors are an American contribution. The tech-
nologies of both fields are well known and everywhere available at the relatively
modest cost of royalties. But the very practical opportunity of living on them
indefinitely at moderate expense has not diminished British activity in theoretical
research in polymer chemistry or in the physics of the solid state. It is a
characteristic judgment of technically advanced nations that to follow the easy
and apparently frugal course of continued technical borrowing as a substitute
for original research is to sacrifice elements of national morale, national
self-respect, and, in the long run, national autonomy far more precious than the
price to be paid for them. Both the emerging nations and we ourselves will be
wise to take careful note of such experiences and decisions.

But these are all rather shallow reasons. Deeper ones follow upon some of
the historical considerations mentioned in the last Lecture. Without some structure
of indigenous, living science the new nations are likely to have great difficulty
in developing standards of judgment by which to apprehend the whole scientific
"style" of the natural world. The instinct of what is credible and what is not,
that fine sense of the scientifically genuine and the scientifically deceptive,
require continuing direct experience for their perfection. Without the capacity
for making such judgments a new nation must remain in a position where, in a
practical sense, it will be highly vulnerable in its contacts with the outer
world. It will be vulnerable, indeed, even in its acceptance of technical aid