Lecture II - 4

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 domestically in a whole field of critical matters. 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."

But it is upon the qualities of science as a structure of communication, of philosophy, of faith that the deepest reasons rest. Without a living science, the new countries will be denied the cultural world fraternity that the fabric of scientific understanding implies. They will be largely excluded from that particular array of lofty concepts that is the priceless heritage of the scientifically literate peoples of the world. 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, as well as one of the most practical and accessible of all standards will be denied them. Without it, they cannot well enter at a scientific level into those international combinations which, in addition to all the practical benefits they bring, can be so important in commanding the belief and the confidence and the loyalties of peoples, especially in smaller political units, and in evoking their verve and their creativeness, in cultural and scientific fields no less than in those more immediately oriented to politics and power.
I shall want to return to this same point of the importance of building viable political combinations of sufficient size and of the place of scientific concerns in cementing them in the third Lecture in yet another context -- the international role of science for the nations of western Europe.

Finally, and yet more deeply, I believe that an original science demands, as it also stimulates, those critical and creative habits of mind so essential

Lecture II - 5

to the new nations in every field -- the unfettered, flexible, empirical view
so essential to their growth and indeed to their very survival as independent
states, and still all too rare among them.

Can the new nations in fact enter upon scientific revolutions of their own,
and if so, what will be their character?

In one sense, the new countries should have a marked advantage over the
nations of western Europe in, say, 1800. They take the stage at a time when
the basis of scientific, as of technical, knowledge is obviously immeasurably
richer and more varied than ever before. To that extent we can expect their
revolutions, if successful, to be even swifter than earlier ones, and the course
to scientific maturity possibly shorter. An interesting, and I think a signifi-
cant, relation recently detected by scientific historians is that, if the rate
of growth of the volume of the scientific effort be measured by several more or
less independent criteria for western Europe, the United States, and Soviet
Russia, it is found in each case to follow an exponential curve. But while the
slope of this curve indicates roughly a doubling of the scientific effort every
fifteen years in western Europe, the corresponding figure for the United States
is about ten years and for the Soviet Union about seven years. This is con-
sistent with the successively later entries of the three nations in a major
way upon the scientific scene. It is interesting too that the corresponding
fugure for China, the most recent great-power entrant, which of course is based
upon data currently all too insecure and which also admittedly starts from a
very limited base, may be as high as a doubling every five years.

But for the new nations the hazards, also, are greater. The countries from
which the curves of scientific growth were taken are all actually or potentially
powerful, large in geographic extent and, above all, in population. Criteria
which can be properly applied to such states may not apply to smaller and weaker
ones in isolation, regardless of how similar other factors may be. The new

[LC]

Lecture II - 6

nations are faced with the formidable difficulty of achieving an autonomous, competitively viable scientific effort in a world where the range of large scale, versatile science is already immense and the scientific competition correspondingly severe. With this handicap comes also that of the formidable practical hazards inherent in their limited situations -- the difficulties of securing training for original scientific work for more than a very few in a capital- and university-scarce economy; the difficulties of retaining those trained few at home, relatively isolated in a popular climate which at the outset must view the scientific way with incomprehension or even with hostility. It is likely that the establishment of the means to train and implement even a small core of qualified scientific workers in an isolated new nation may in some cases require vision and effort sustained over a long time.

There is much, however, that we can do in detail to assist here, through channels and by means already moderately familiar, and to some extent already in use. They include aid in the overseas training of research workers, and, probably more significantly, aid in the establishment of local institutes for scientific training. They include the various patterns of contractual arrangement already evolved, and others which can be conceived, between educational institutions in the new nations and various American universities of special competence in appropriate areas of scientific knowledge and skills. They include the many possible systems by which outstanding American teachers, administrators, scholars, research scientists can represent us in the new nations. They include all the ways in which American scientific societies of eminence, notably the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, can aid/the establishment and the encouragement of corresponding scientific organizations in the new nations. It would be hard indeed to overestimate the importance of such associations as enclaves of pioneering at the beginning of a scientific revolution -- a role which, as I

[Lc]

Lecture II - 7

have already suggested, was predominantly important in the earlier stages of the
scientific revolution in western Europe, as also in both Imperial and Soviet
Russia, and presently, from what one can gather, in Communist China, as I plan
to consider in the third Lecture. In similar vein, a most important aspect
of the scientific revolution in its earlier stages is the social value attached
to scientific eminence. It can be a powerful spur to progress in the early
stages if it is accurately related to real as opposed to spurious or trivial
scientific distinction. Countries newly experiencing scientific revolutions
are not always prepared, however, to make such discriminations accurately.
Appropriate recognition in the councils of more advanced lands of real scientific
merit as it develops in the new countries can be of important and salutary in-
fluence. It is an influence which the British Royal Society, for example, has
long and skillfully wielded, with conspicuous success.

In thinking generally about these matters, I am impressed over and over
again by the significance of the concept of a "critical size" -- and this in
contexts other than the explosive mass in a fission bomb. It is clear that,
for a scientific research group to be successful, to be stable, to be continuingly
creative in its ideas and effective in their execution its membership must exceed
a minimum number -- not necessarily a very large number, to be sure, not a very
definite number, and one no doubt varying greatly with the character of the group
and of the effort -- but a number. I have come to feel that the same may be true
about
of societies which are going through, or/about to go through, a scientific revolu-
tion. It may well be that some of the new nations are below this critical
threshold -- not only in wealth and in facilities for education and research, not
only in economic or industrial level, not only in technology, but in sheer numbers,
and in sheer area from which these numbers can be drawn. So I would lay special
emphasis on the aid that we may bring in helping to consolidate natural regions
including more than one nation in a scientific and technical context. One of

Lecture II - 8

the most useful of all the "conventional" channels of scientific aid open to us
may well lie in the establishment of cross-national programs and the founding
of cross-national cooperative training centers among the new nations. The
establishment of local institutes on a regional basis, for example, designed
to train students from more than one neighboring state at established university
centers, returning them afterward to the countries of their origin, in the
general pattern which Israel has suggested in respect of various countries of
Asia and Africa, seems of special promise. I believe, indeed, that such in-
stitutes, for training and for research, may do more than provide, temporarily,
a "critical size." They may also become an important factor in conditioning
such neighboring new nations with inherently similar interests to work with
common scientific aims in the future, escaping those damaging bonds of competi-
tive national pride which can seriously impede or fatally hamper scientific
efforts undertaken wholly autonomously. My own Institution has been engaged
in a "pilot" enterprise of this kind for several years among some of the South
American nations, and in that area we feel that we are accumulating quite
definite evidence to this effect.

Now all this is excellent -- indeed, it is crucially important. And yet,
in a way, it all represents simply an extension, an elaboration, a making more
ingenious and, one hopes, more effective, of what is after all a basically con-
ventional framework of thinking and action. We need it badly. But I cannot
help feeling that we also need something larger and more original.

In the last analysis, I think, we shall need a far deeper understanding
than we now possess of the whole nature of a scientific revolution in a society
newly awakened to scientific values. In no other or easier way can we attain to
the real wisdom required to render genuinely significant and lasting assistance.
It is true that in its details a scientific revolution must differ in each period
when it occurs, and with each nation where it takes place. Yet there are certain

Lecture II - 9

important characteristics that are likely to be common, which earlier scientific revolutions vividly illustrate, and which we shall surely do well to bear in mind. The most significant, perhaps, is their truly cataclysmic nature. Though it is very evident that scientific revolutions can be long in the making, and that they are typically initiated by the efforts and the accomplishments of a gifted few, the final period when the change affects a whole nation -- the period of its supreme significance -- is characteristically amazingly short. In the west it was not the theories of Copernicus or the observations of Galileo or the reasoning of Francis Bacon that ushered in the general revolution, though they were critical in igniting it. It was, rather, the years following Newton -- the years, indeed, of the British Restoration -- when the visions which had compelled the pioneers, and the broader implications of the newer ideas -- and especially of their syntheses -- suddently infected a much wider public. As I remarked in the first Lecture, it is hard indeed at this remove to visualize the consuming hold of the Newtonian revolution when it captured the imagination of a whole people. Some of the new countries may well stand today on the similar threshold of another scientific revolution, built around such recent intellectual concepts as those of relativity and chance.

When such revolutions culminate, it is not only that they may come with explosive speed. Internally, the seismic social shifts which they entail must affect a nation deeply, gravely threatening that precious margin of redundancy in general, and traditional societies upon which societies/most of all, depend so heavily for their coherence and their inner vitality, rending the generations, separating father from son in what may amount to completely different worlds.

During such critical periods the new nations must be at their most vulnerable in their external relationships as well as in their internal situations. Then above all other times they will have to protect themselves vigilantly against

[LC]

Lecture II - 10

subtle as much as against overt destruction or domination. It will not always
be easy for them to do this. In many cases, the critical apprehensions in
scientific and technical matters, which only the experience of having lived
with and through, and having survived and profited by a scientific revolution
can fully provide, will not be adequately developed; and this just when they
are most needed to implement wise decisions at the multifarious choice-points
which the revolution will inevitably impose. And yet the courses chosen at
such times of profound upheaval may well have fundamental and lasting signifi-
cance. The consequences of wrong choices will not be easily undone. And should
such a scientific revolution fail at the critical point, widely held expectations
are bound to be dashed. In the bitter disillusionment which must follow, political
attitudes too cannot but be dangerously affected.

At no stage in its development will a new state need advice and wisdom more --
wisdom to enable it to pass through the period of maximum change as rapidly as
possible, wisdom to handle itself as effectively as may be during the trying
times. One of the profoundest and the most important questions that we can ask
ourselves in the whole context of scientific aid to the new nations is: "Will
we be prepared with such wisdom when and where it is needed; will we be prepared
to lend it with real effectiveness and at the right time to any new countries
facing the trials of this transition when they may truly wish it from us?"
It is among the most poignant questions that we can ask in terms of the common
humanity of the world. It is also one of the most vital in terms of the very
survival of the free way. For I would remind you of Walt Rostow's vivid and
prescient characterization of Mr. Khrushchev as "the scavenger of the transition."

We probably have to answer that we are very poorly prepared at present. Yet
the assistance which we could provide through effective analysis and understanding
alone, if it were truly far-seeing and genuinely relevant, could probably be more
critical at such a juncture than any material aid that we could bring to the new

[LC]

Lecture II - 11

nations or than any detailed measures to forward their scientific progress that we could devise. In the final analysis, we probably know far less about the real nature of scientific revolutions than we do of the nature of the economic and industrial revolutions with which they are apt to be associated. Like those movements, it is clear that scientific revolutions are enormously complex and that they rest upon a multitude of prerequisite social and material conditions, many of which, surely, cannot be apparent at the present level of our understanding. There is far more to the nature of scientific revolutions than the substance of the science which they embody.

Perhaps there is no more significant means by which the United States could become prepared, over the long term, to render scientific aid to the new nations of the world at a deeper and more meaningful level than we have hitherto been able to do than by the constitution of one or more advisory groups, preferably formally outside government but in constant and close touch with it and responsive to its needs, dedicated to a continuing major effort to understand scientific revolutions as social phenomena and to give policy counsel concerning them. Such a group or groups should include representatives of many disciplines relating to those multifarious facets of social change of which a scientific revolution is but one aspect. Such a group, or such groups, moreover, should be prepared for long-continued work. The efforts to understand must be systematic and persistent. It may be expected, I think, that the need for the advice of such a group or groups will continue acute through many years to come, as new nations successively approach the thresholds of their scientific revolutions, as the store of experience accumulates and acuity of analysis and judgment improve, as the deeper common denominators of experience are sifted from more detailed aspects.

Such an enterprise does not present an easy prospect. The disciplines and viewpoints which must be comprehended are so various and divergent that communication

Lecture II - 12

itself will not be easy and can only be developed gradually. At the very best, years may be required to show substantial real accomplishment. Yet we are not without models around which such an undertaking could well be built, as in the atmosphere of at least one university center dedicated to international affairs. Never will such understanding be more important than in the coming age, of which not only space exploration but a comprehension of new scientific and technical phenomena, on a much wider scale, and a new order of their control, will inevitably be the symbols.

Let me now turn to the second group of nations in the classification that I outlined at the beginning of the Lectures -- those societies whose own historical experience has directly comprehended the scientific revolution. They form a group which varies widely in other aspects of the life and being of a state -- in population, in area, in wealth, in level of economic, technical, and industrial development, in geographic location. In scientific and technical sophistication they range from Great Britain, with its original fashioning of both the scientific and the industrial revolutions, to such a nation as Pakistan whose own scientific revolution, genuine and deep, is none the less recent, and though carried forward autonomously since political independence, finds its essential roots in more remote colonial experience. In some ways this appears to be a highly artificial class of states. And yet, as I said earlier, the experience of a scientific revolution in the life of a society seems to me so profound as to make it a distinguishing parameter.

In many respects, the most interesting and the most critical phases of the scientific revolution are those currently being experienced by the nations at what we might call the "nearer" end of this spectrum. Such nations, located predominantly in eastern Europe, along the Mediterranean littoral, in the Near and Middle East, on the Indian peninsula, in parts of South America, are already

[d]

Lecture II - 13

culturally integral parts of the modern world, with essentially modern views of
the whole scientific "style" of the universe. Their economies, by and large, are
still modest, with a low *per capita* income. The situation, however, is not in
the near-desperate position of some of the new nations. A number, indeed, are
on the threshold of sustained economic growth. They are likely still to be
markedly "tight" in respect of technically trained personnel, but in most cases
patterns of training at the secondary level are well established, and a strong
tendency to strengthen them further is often evident. The pool of already skilled
persons may be large enough, or almost large enough, to be autonomous, both for
training new cadres and for undertaking fairly ambitious developments. Our
technical aid to these countries must be particularly sensitively appraised.
For it is desirable that every possible effort be made to stimulate autonomy,
supplying only such assistance in the *adaptation and use* of technical aid as
helps to achieve this end in the most vigorous and effective manner.

Substantively, the range of relevant technical help is not dissimilar to
that for the newest countries, but it is, naturally, somewhat broader in scope.
The technologies of food production and disease control are still of primary
importance. But such technologies as those of geophysics, mineral prospecting
and assay, soil prospecting and assay, the basic techniques of ore and petroleum
processing, water planning and water use, the planning and use of other renewable
resources, the exploration and development of new sources of power, architecture,
the development and uses of new materials, and urban planning, all are relevant.
The deficiencies are likely to reside not so much in a sophisticated appreciation
of technology -- which is apt, indeed, to be high -- as in scarcity of manpower,
insufficient or only marginally sufficient development capital, and a small and
relatively lowly organized industrial structure. Perhaps more needed than any-
thing else are the knowledge and skills of organization -- the means to link
technology effectively to an infant industry on the one hand and, frequently,
to an infant science on the other.

Lecture II - 14

These features suggest at once some special avenues of technical aid open to us that may be particularly useful for the "middle" countries. They surely include wider provisions than we have at present for the overseas training of technical personnel, especially in institutes and industries in this country, and aid in setting up technological training centers in the countries themselves, again with special emphasis on those designed to serve more than one country in a given region. We should bear in mind especially the crucial need for training in the techniques of the organization and use of technical knowledge and in establishing the facilities for putting them into effect. The opportunities, which I mentioned earlier in the context of the new nations, for industrial firms located overseas to deliberately aid in the technical education of the country by training a somewhat larger corps of personnel than they estimate will be permanently required as employees can be of special significance for the middle nations of the world.

One of the most exciting things about that revolution in the development and use of technology on the edge of which so many of the developing societies are poised today is the flexibility and originality for which its very newness provides scope. As an especially interesting case in point, consider the objectives of the current and recently-announced Pakistan Five-Year Plan. It aims at an annual investment in technology of 10 to 15 per cent of national income, with 3 to 4 per cent in foreign exchange coming from the advanced countries as long-term loans or gifts. It visualizes the establishment of an indigenous heavy industry, especially in the area of steel manufacture, where an annual output of 400,000 tons is projected. It aims at the local manufacture of fertilizers to replace present imports, thus implementing some of the features of the planning of Dr. Mahalanobis for India to which I referred in the last Lecture. Finally, and perhaps most significant, it envisions an extensive training program, with a planned output, ultimately, of 7000 technicians per year.

[Lc]

Lecture II - 15

Undoubtedly not all of these goals will be reached. But they are impressive in an Asian nation whose very official existence spans less than fifteen years. And there is no doubting the verve and dynamism that can characterize such developments, once fairly begun. I shall never forget my own astonishment at this dynamism a few years ago. I had the good fortune to visit Pakistan at a time when its government technical laboratories, conceived in the general pattern of the British Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, were just getting under way. The head was a distinguished Indian biochemist, recently arrived from the Muslim University of Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh. He and two or three assistants constituted the entire organization, housed in two small Quonset huts set in the blowing sands of the Desert of Sind outside Karachi. Three years later I was in Karachi again. Now I found the new organization housed in well-built brick laboratory buildings, and comprehending some three hundred workers, engaged in perhaps a dozen technical research programs of major import.

But it is in the area of science, I think, that this group of "middle" nations is at the most exciting stage of development. Since the scientific view of the world is well established in virtually all of them and for many represents a long inheritance, they characteristically possess a "scientific elite," holding sophisticated views and not seldom distinguished in both training and accomplishment. The ranks of this elite, however, are distressingly thin. They are in constant peril of being thinned further by systematic losses of their best members to more industrially advanced nations, in the absence of suitable opportunities at home. Because of this paucity of their numbers, moreover, the members of the scientific elite in a dynamically developing middle country are likely to be cruelly overloaded both in the volume and the diversity of their obligations, as they are even today in Pakistan, and this represents a special danger.

[Lc]

Lecture II - 16

Though there is likely still to be considerable mass indifference to the acquisition of scientific learning, there may also be a high general respect for it. Possibly because of the sparse distribution of the intellectually trained elements in the population as a whole, there is apt to be an especially high regard for *individual* learning and a strong focus upon *individual* attainment. The weakness of this strength, of course, is that in science, as also in technology, concepts and skills relating to the organization of knowledge itself are apt to fairly rudimentary. One of the fascinating aspects of this group of nations is that, among those of its members which are still at a preindustrial or an early industrial level, there seems more than a suspicion of that situation to which I alluded earlier -- more than a suspicion that the conditions for a scientific revolution may resemble in some significant features those in Great Britain in the period, say, of the founding of the Royal Society.

These conditions suggest some outlines of relevant areas of scientific aid for the "intermediate" countries. Roughly, they fall into two general categories -- aid in the means of *obtaining* and *developing* new knowledge, and aid in the *organization* of knowledge. The first, as always, is primarily a problem of higher education at home and abroad -- and is most importantly a problem of university structure. The ratio of students to educational staff in the "middle" nations may range as high as twenty-five per instructor -- clearly too high for very advanced teaching. It should be lowered as soon and as much as the resources of money and of trained manpower will allow. Again, scientific training in the universities tends, naturally enough, still to be organized along preindustrial lines, frequently allowing insufficient opportunity for numbers of potentially excellent research workers and teachers, especially in the lower academic ranks. The correction of this situation is, by its very nature, an excessively complex and difficult problem, especially for the countries themselves. All the aid which the advanced nations can provide here, particularly in the tactics and the logistics, as it were, of scientific training for industrial economies, will be greatly needed.

[Lc]

Lecture II - 17

The area of the organization of knowledge is an especially fascinating one. Here facilities for communication -- in the strictly physical sense, in the sense of opportunities for personal scientific intercourse, in the sense of the constant exchange of information via books, periodicals, frequent and per- vading scientific meetings -- are critical. And all too often, for a variety of reasons, such facilities are still elementary. In our advanced scientific civilization we are apt to forget that so apparently simple a thing as the device of the scientific paper was invented in our own society only two hundred years ago. Without that apparently simple but singular device by which the knowledge of science can be made cumulative, it is fairly certain that the scientific revolution could never have occurred. Too many of the "middle" nations are still on the farther slope of this watershed.

Few more important devices in the early organization of knowledge can be conceived than that of the scientific society. I have already stressed the importance of its role in providing an enclave and a communications-center in the early phases of a scientific revolution. But it does more than provide an enclave. It also serves as an arbiter of standards, as a maker and a conserver of prestige, as a fountainhead of proper rewards. I have already stressed the importance of recognizing and encouraging such societies officially, and of establishing interchange with them, in connection with the new nations. I think it doubly important in the case of the middle groups. There is a large role and task here for our national scientific societies, and it is one to which, happily, they have begun in recent years to address themselves aggressively. I can never forget the tremendous stimulus which was so obviously brought to the new scientific associations of Pakistan a few years ago -- to the Pakistan National Academy of Sciences, itself a very new organization, and the Pakistan Association for the Advancement of Science -- as its contacts with the scientific societies of the United States were advanced and consolidated. There are few more powerful avenues of scientific aid for countries at this stage of evolution.

[LC]

Lecture II - 18

Before finally leaving this arena of the middle countries, I might recapitulate what seem to me to be among the important avenues of aid open to us in respect of their scientific development. Aid in the organization of their educational systems to meet the industrial challenges of the modern world is of first importance. So also is aid in the fundamental techniques of organizing and communicating scientific knowledge. Aid in establishing training centers, indigenously and abroad, with special attention to regional centers, and evolving well-adapted curricula for them, is of equal import. The avenues of aid in the supplying of appropriate "scientific emissaries" to the new countries in the form of research exchange scholars and visiting lecturers of our own who are of scientific distinction; further aid in the provision for visits here of key scientific personnel of the middle nations; aid in fellowship training; and, last but not least, aid at the level of government sponsorship in the holding and facilitating of international scientific meetings in this country -- an area where we have traditionally been weak -- are not to be neglected. Lastly, I would stress once again the importance of doing all that we can to aid in the establishment and the growth of scientific societies in the middle countries, and in maintaining maximum possible communication with them.

With this I should like to leave the new and the intermediate countries of the world. For the remainder of the Lectures I shall be touching on the scientific scene in western Europe, in our own country, in Russia, and in China. With the single exception of China, these are all nations of such advanced industrial and technical status that it becomes very difficult any longer to distinguish boundaries in the close-knit, almost seamless entity of scientific-technology, as it were, through which the advanced nations live. So I shall have very little to say in these contexts about technology *per se*, and shall no longer make distinctions between, as it were, science pure and science applied.

Lecture II - 19

So far I have been stressing areas which are basically academic, for it seems
to me that they underlie so deeply all else in our scientific and technical society,
and this is nowhere more critically true than in the "middle" nations of the world.
Next week I shall have a somewhat different emphasis. Though problems of scientific
training still must claim prominent attention, in speaking of the nations of
western Europe, of our own country, of the U.S.S.R., and China, I shall also be
concerned with matters bearing more immediately upon the overt power structure
of the world, now and in the future.

Lecture III

(December 11, 1961)

WESTERN SCIENCE AND THE IRON CURTAIN

On August 6, 1961, Major Gherman Titov circled the earth seventeen times, traveling at 16,000 miles an hour in an elliptical course which took him at minimum altitude some 111 miles into the stratosphere and at a maximum about 160 miles. For twenty-five hours and eighteen minutes he voyaged in regions until then unfathomed, and endured a prolonged state of weightlessness, apparently with considerable discomfort, hitherto known only as a relatively fleeting experience to a handful of men in all of human history. When Titov finally ejected himself from his four-and-one-half ton vehicle and parachuted to earth he had set a high mark in exploration for his time.

There were a number of things of particular interest about the flight of Vostok II, however, beyond the high human daring and the impressive technical ingenuity and power demanded for its accomplishment. One was its timing. A week later came the sealing of the border of East Berlin on August 13; twenty-five days later, on August 31, the Soviets announced their resumption of nuclear testing; twenty-six days later, on September 1, the conference of "nonaligned" nations convened in Belgrade. On that day also Major Titov, speaking to a large crowd in 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 part of the globe. Finally, as almost his last action before being closed into his space ship, Major Titov dedicated his coming flight to the twenty-second Congress of the Communist Party projected for October.

Such coincidences underline with fresh immediacy lessons already brought home by the earlier history of Soviet space achievement. Specifically they underline with what intense practicality the Soviet State treats its technology and its science.

Lecture III - 2

They also emphasize anew how closely and skillfully the Soviet knot can be drawn between technical organization and accomplishment and initiative in exploration and on the one hand / a grand design of power on the other. They demonstrate with special drama how effectively in Soviet hands a spectacular technology may implement a many-sided psychological offensive, ranging from cajolery to indirect black-mail to direct threat. The dispatches from London, Paris, Bonn, New Delhi, Tokyo on the following day left no doubt that the event had been fully appreciated in its various significant aspects in the Free World; those from East Germany, from Warsaw, from Prague, and the recurrent editorials in the press of mainland China made clear its impact within the Soviet bloc.

Further interesting evidence of how closely linked technical and political planning may be in the Soviet Union, and of how much, in the arenas of power, excellence in a special, appropriate technology may be oriented to serve as an important element of the political offensive, is suggested by a comparison of one aspect 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 in the neighborhood of fifty satellites designed primarily for the gathering of scientific data about conditions in outer space.

Perhaps fifteen have been launched by the Soviet Union. It would appear on the face of it that the neglect of the scientific investigation of space implied by this relative inattention to research could, in the long run, seriously hamper Soviet development. This may well be true. For research satellites in American hands 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. Yet the practical implications of such a conclusion must, I think, be treated with extreme caution. Such apparent inattention to research in favor of concentration on conspicuous technology has a familiar historical

[LC]

Lecture III - 3

ring in some other areas of Societ development which have, on the whole, been extremely successful. The earlier history of Russian aeronautics, for example, through those first decades after Tupolev and Zhukovsky joined forces in 1918 to launch the Central Aerodynamics Research Institute and the Zhukovsky Air Academy and initiate the first consistent development programs in the field of military aircraft gives vivid evidence of how much an extraordinary ability to keep continuously abreast of technical developments in other countries, to adapt them effectively and dynamically to specific ends, to plan over long periods with enormous endurance, tenacity, and singleness of purpose may compensate for the comparative neglect of research. Parenthetically I should say, of course, that I have no intention of implying the lack of programs of pure research in the Soviet Union distributed over a wide subject-range of science. I shall have more to say of them later. But I cite this instance of the pressing of a single technology into maximum possible service in terms of power on many fronts in the U.S.S.R. to emphasize both how typical it is, and, at the same time, how deceptive it can be to us who view it from outside. We may need to remind ourselves from time to time that we could emulate such a course in our own society only at a completely inadmissible cost, not only to our own progress, but to our whole scientific and technical ethic.

Indeed, 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 Soviet Union has grown from the status of a technically less-developed society to a technically and scientifically vastly powerful state in an extraordinarily short time the operating patterns by which this was accomplished have any special validity for ourselves, or that the national "sense" of the primary values of science and technology are like our own. To require that the most vital and enduring aspects of our own scientific effort necessarily have any immediate practical bearing upon affairs economic or military would be to deny one of our most precious avenues of growth -- in

[Lc]

Lecture III - 4

fact, actually to negate one of our major spiritual fortresses. It takes strength and wisdom, in the face of the threats that beset us, to remember such cardinal truths.

But to maintain faith in our own way is not enough. Sputnik I brought in its train, and clearly in part as a consequence of its stimulus, a series of innovations and improvements of special note in the organization of science within our own government -- the most important, probably, which occurred since World War II. 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 Advisor and the special position and significance to which it has attained, the establishment of the Federal Council of Science and Technology, the increased scope and significance of the federal support of research, as in the National Science Foundation, and in the conduct of research within the Federal agencies, as in the National Institutes of Health, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Space Agency, all are notable.

But problems of the 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 inevitable. The position of the President's Special Assistant for Science and Technology itself may need some redefining to maximize its scope and stability. Further improvements in dealing with scientific and technical matters at the level of the Departments are indicated. In this connection, the advent of the Office of the Director of Defense Research in the Department of Defense is most encouraging, and the creation of the post of a scientific advisor in the Department of the Interior is of considerable interest. In the Department of State it may be fairly said, I think, that despite recent notable innovations, the level of in-house competence could still be improved. The problems are especially urgent and complex in the foreign aid agencies, as I emphasized earlier. A special -- and a most important --

[LC]

Lecture III - 5

aspect of this whole question of research in government, of course, centers about
the problems of organizing research inside or outside normal operating governmental
structure, with all the special questions of salary and opportunity that it raises.
Finally, one of the most difficult kinds of scientific policy questions at home will
continue to be posed in the implementation of such major efforts as the expanded Pro-
ject Apollo program called for by President Kennedy last May, with its objective of
putting a man on the moon by the close of the decade, the facilities for which are
just now being shaped and the major strategies debated. For it may be no exaggera-
tion to predict that much of the basic strength and symmetry of the national scientif-
ic effort over the next few years could depend importantly upon the effectiveness
with which the claims of concentrated programs in individual vast but specialized
technical fields can be balanced against those broader requirements of research and
training so vital to the continuing scientific health and growth of the nation.

But another and an absolute conditon for the health and even the survival of
the Free World over the coming decades was emphasized anew by the flight of Major
Titov. Even more pressing than the maintenance of our own balance and autonomy is
the continuing scientific and technical soundness and growth and solidarity of the
community of western Europe. The challenge here, first and indispensably, is to
scientific vigor and quality *within* each nation. But it is yet more to their *com*
*bined* and *coordinated* capacity and to the sense of capability that such capacity can
bring within the community itself. For regardless of energy and will, it is clear
that no one member of the western European community in the coming years can muster
the strength or command the universality to meet the challenge independently.

This matter, indeed, goes far beyond the material capacity and strength re-
quired for a strong and unified European science and technology. It also involves
those vastly important matters of loyalty, confidence, belief in a political sense
to which I referred, in connection with the new nations, in the second Lecture. For
coming generation, the final greatest genius of Jean Monet may well appear as his

[Lc]

Lecture III - 6

prescient knowledge that in the modern world there is a practical minimum of size, of strength, of cohesion in political units. Above that minimum, citizens can find true meaning in their societies, can bring to them their best in loyalty and talent, can securely identify themselves. Below it, regardless of devotion and intent, such identification may be very difficult. In this context a closely coordinated technology, a closely woven scientific effort among the nations of western Europe may well provide a powerful tie to reinforce economic and political bonds in the winning of functional unity. It may be persuasively argued, indeed, that nowhere is the charge to the coherence of the Free World likely to be heavier or more important than in it combined science and technology.

Recent appeals by highly placed European officials, conspicuous among them one made not long ago at the Council by a member of the West German Government, for a consolidation of some major western European technological concerns within the structure of NATO, accompanied by the evolution of a program of coordinated research and development and by the establishment of an agency empowered to contract for research and development projects throughout the NATO area, take on special interest in this connection. Whatever its specific nature, an important focus of such coordination and such institutional strengthening might well lie in the office of the Science Advisor to NATO. An important core has been developed here in recent years. 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 Advisor 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 Advance Study Institute Program has made a start with about $200,000.

In absolute magnitude, such developments are obviously still modest. But they represent a beginning upon which much could conceivably be built. They will be greatly strengthened by the existence, and by the growth which may reasonably be

[Lc]

Lecture III - 8

countries there are specific conditions of unbalance which could with profit be
remedied. In France, for example, a high proportion of gifted students enter the
national schools of engineering because of the attractive careers to which such train-
ing leads, and graduate thence into engineering positions, where their talents may
be permanently lost to science. 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 may still make 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 per cent. This apparently promising increase,
however, is actually quite insufficient for the competitive conditions of the con-
temporary world. The annual rate for the production of engineers, tallied without
special reference to quality, is about 200 per million of population in the United
States. The Soviet Union produces about twice as many, taken again without special
reference to individual quality. But the output of the European Economic Community
has averaged only about 70 per million per year -- a figure that is far too low.

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 per
cent of their Gross National Product in the fields of science and technology,
generally defined, and devote about a tenth of this to what might be called funda-
mental research. France is not far from matching the 2 per cent level. Experience
suggests that these are desirable goals if the human and material resources for scien-
tific and technical education, research, and development are adequate to carry the
burden.

There is undoubtedly much that the nations of western Europe can do to strengthen
their own scientific resources, individually as in combination. There are also abun-
dant opportunities for effective American aid, if it can be brought with that abiding

Lecture III - 9

sense of the sharp limitations of our own vision and capacity that the least modicum
of wisdom compels. We must recognize that these limitations are quite as great
in respect of the advanced industrial nations of the world as they are in the context
of the new states. But they are of a different kind. A cardinal element in that
wisdom involves the continuing awareness that a true internationalism in science and
technology among the industrial nations of the west must mean far more than mere
coordination of research programs through international administrative bodies, far
more than even the training of scientists at international universities or than their
subsequent careers in international research centers and engineering establishments,
important though these be. All these activities can only serve as the organizational
expression -- at best a superficial thing -- of internationalism at the level of sub-
stance that is an inherent quality of science. Failures of communication among peoples
inheriting a 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 scientific verity. So the final goal of coopera-
tion among the nations of western Europe must involve an interpenetration of scientific
concerns at a profound level along the frontiers of substantive knowledge with which
modern science is so deeply involved -- visual and radio astronomy, high-energy physics,
geology and geophysics, communication theory, the study of behaving systems among liv-
ing things, of the mechanisms of heredity, of the differentiation and coordination of
cells in the living body, and all the rest of those avenues of inquiry the compulsion
of whose fascination reaches far beyond the confines of the most comprehensive frame
of organization.

The demands and responsibilities which such considerations must place upon any
nation -- and especially our own -- presuming to aid in the strengthening of science
and technology in western Europe as a whole are immense. In no area of potential
overseas assistance must scientific planning be more carefully meshed with educa-
tional, economic, and social considerations if the aid is to be truly effective,
and not merely a temporary stimulus.

[LC]

Lecture III - 10

Now, in my remaining few moments, I should like to return to the Russian scientific and technical scene, this time emphasizing the scientific over the technical, and considering both it and Chinese science in a particular context to which I alluded in the earlier Lectures. Perhaps I can best define this context in two hypothetical questions. The first part of the first question might run: "Since the scientific revolution was so uniquely a product of the liberal enlightenment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century western Europe, and was so closely entwined with it, does not the very structure of science embody, as an essential part of its nature, these same elements of liberalism?" As you will guess, my own answer here is decidedly positive. This then leads to the second half of that question, almost the converse of the first: "It science then likely to be a liberalizing element in any society of which it is a part?" Here again I believe the answer to be positive and extremely significant, especially, as I have already indicated, in relation to the new nations. This brings me to my second question, on which I would like to focus: "If these things are so, does it not follow that a true science is unlikely to emerge in a country of totalitarian political philosophy, or if it does emerge, is unlikely to develop a strength comparable with that of science in the Free World?" And the final, consequent query: "Does this not mean that in the Iron Curtain countries, and most particularly in the U.S.S.R., we may expect science, and ultimately its derivative technology, to be retarded, and over the long run to be unable to competitively match western achievements?" A clear answer to this last question would obviously be of the highest practical importance. But it is not a simple question, and simple answers and assumptions based upon such answers can be very dangerous.

There is a good deal of evidence, to be sure -- and especially recent evidence -- to suggest an affirmative judgment. Despite the brilliance of the technology of the Sputniks and the Vostoks, there is much to suggest that Soviet science and technology, taken as a whole, may be considerably behind our own, both in volume and sophistication. This was the impression of Dr. John Turkevich of Princeton on return from his

Lecture III - 11

tour of duty as the United States scientific attaché in Moscow. It seems, indeed, to be a frank assessment of Khrushchev himself. Thus when Turkevich once remarked to Khrushchev that Americans would eventually pass the Soviets in their launching capabilities for space travel, Khruschev responded, "America is powerful and strong. If Americans put their mind to beating us, they can do it."

Recent changes in the Soviet Academy of Sciences, indeed, seem to imply a Russian dissatisfaction with both their scientific and technical progress. They also reflect in a most interesting way that wholly pragmatic orientation which accompanies the drive to impress science in its every aspect into the service of military and political power so characteristic of Soviet philosophy. The rather sudden retirement of Alexander Nesmeyanov, since 1951 the President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, in May of this year, and his replacement by Matislav Keldysh may well have been correlated with a new Kremlin program to speed up the conversion of research results into practical application. Perhaps more striking evidence was offered in April in the creation of a new agency above the Academy, charged with the control of all scientific work in the country as well as of all the Soviet Union's international scientific contacts. This State Committee for Coordination of Scientific Research has the significant charge, among other things, of supervising the quickest possible introduction into the economy of scientific and technical discoveries by all Soviet agencies. It is interesting that it was headed by Lieutenant General M. V. Krunichev, former head of Soviet aircraft production, and more recently the First Deputy Chairman of the State Planning Committee. One can hardly imagine an organizational arrangement more inimical to a creative national science as we understand it.

All these things may hint that scientific effort in the Soviet Union could have difficulty, over the long run, in remaining competitive with that of the Free World. This may very well be correct. And yet I think it could be most dangerous to accept the implications of such a conclusion uncritically. In a purely practical

[LC]

Lecture III - 12

sense, there is of course the opposing point which I made earlier. The Russian genius for planning purposefully and pursuing objectives with an unparalleled dogged single-mindedness, coupled with their vigilance and effectiveness in keeping abreast of and effectively using research results obtained elsewhere, can go far to compensate for a hypothetically inferior domestic research effort. But I think there is a deeper opposing point as well. For among the complex cross-currents which characterize Soviet science, there appear elements of a genuine liberalism, tenaciously inherited from another time. Though the severity of the opposing political climate in which it works apparently fluctuates widely in time and place and with respect to subject matter, much of Soviet science appears able to maintain at least a half-liberal cast despite the political pressures to which it is subject. This surviving strain of liberalism at the level of some working scientists, and its possible consequences, are of serious account, I believe, now and for the future.

For when all is said and done, there is an impressive body of scientific work in Russia, powered by some remarkable contributors. This body and tradition of science are far from new. They are also historically alien. Immediately, they represent an inheritance from Czarist Russia. But it is important to bear in mind that Czarist Russia in turn inherited the corpus directly from eighteenth-century western Europe. However much Soviet science has been distorted in some areas in recent years -- most conspicuously perhaps but by no means exclusively in the fields of genetics -- the best Russian science is Western in form and content. It dates only from the time of Peter the Great.

On his various trips to western Europe, and as part of his program of westernization, Peter assembled a collection of European physical and chemical apparatus which he deposited in the Kuntskamera, a museum in St. Petersburg, which became in effect the first demonstration laboratory in Russia. Late in his life Peter planned an Imperial Academy of Sciences, and it was organized by his successor Catherine after his death in 1724. The plans for both the Berlin and the St. Petersburg Academies

[LC]

Lecture III - 13

of Science were drawn by the great German mathematician Liebnitz. Swiss, French, and German scholars were invited to St. Petersburg, were made members of the Imperial Academy, and were asked to select and train Russian students. Among the western scholars of high distinction who responded were two members of the great Bernoulli family and the Swiss Leonhard Euler, one of the most prolific mathematicians of all times. Euler's whole active life, indeed, was spent as a member of the Berlin and the St. Petersburg Academies of Science. Thus the tradition of western science completely dominated the form and structure of the Academy at its inception, and German influence was especially strong. Western influence was equally important in the early Russian universities -- the University of Moscow, founded by Michael Lomonosov in 1755, and the Universities of St. Petersburg, Kazan, and Kharkov somewhat later.

Until 1917 postgraduate study in western European universities was considered an essential part of Russian scientific training. During that century and a half the broadly based western science of Russia came to boast a considerable number of prominent names. Some, like the chemist Mendeleev or the psychologist Pavlov, are known to virtually every scientific scholar. The work of the greater number, like that of the zoologist and pathologist Mechnikov, is known to a more limited audience, but much of it was genuinely pioneering and of high quality.

A science firmly established in these traditions cannot readily be wholly destroyed or wholly perverted. Peter the Great was probably as sensitive as Khrushchev of the extent to which the pragmatic aspects of scientific development can be made to contribute to the technical might -- and especially the military might -- of the state, and it was undoubtedly for this that he valued them. He was probably as little aware, or as little caring, as was Stalin of the aspects and values of science that are so vital to us and of the requirements of science for a climate of liberal freedom. This has not been true of the Pasternaks of science, of whom there have been many. But their difficulties may well have equalled those of Pasternak himself.

[LC]

Lecture III - 15

These questions are of far more than academic interest. They demand continu-
ing exploration at a very deep level. Such exploration, like that of the nature of
scientific revolutions in the new nations, will demand the coordination and the con-
certed focusing of minds of many disciplines.

I would only emphasize here that the whole picture of the position and the
future of science in Russia is immensely complex. I would reiterate that sweeping
predictions or incautious deductions in the present state of our knowledge can be
deceptive and dangerous. There seems little question, as Khrushchev says, that
American science and technology can keep abreast of, and probably outstrip, their
Soviet counterparts if we bend our minds to them. But this constant bending of the
mind is surely an essential factor.

When we come to Chinese science, the picture is yet more fascinating. Because
it is so much more primitive, and there is so much less information accessible about
it, it is even harder to delineate or to predict. No long-established tradition of
western science is to be found here. Until at least the middle of the nineteenth
century, and in a really significant way probably not until the first decade of the
twentieth, western science was unfamiliar to China, and Chinese technology, as I
noted earlier, had developed largely in isolation from the west. But the substantive
basis of modern Chinese science is indeed western. At the same time, the organiza-
tional structure of current Chinese science seems to have been patterned almost
literally on the Soviet model.

On January 25, 1956, Mao Tse-Tung announced at a meeting of the State Supreme
Council that there should be a "long-range plan for the elimination of backwardness
in the economic, scientific, and cultural fields." Thereupon the State Council, at
the direction of the Communist Party's Central Committee, established a Planning
Committee for Scientific Development, headed by one Marshal Ch'en I, which was charged
with drawing up a Twelve-Year Science Plan. A draft was prepared over the next seven

[LC]

Lecture III - 16

months by some two hundred Chinese scientists assisted by seventeen scientists from the U.S.S.R. It was presented to the Eighth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in September and was endorsed a year later. Thereupon it went to the Soviet Union for review by more than six hundred Soviet scientists. Shortly thereafter a delegation of no less than a hundred and twenty Chinese scientists discussed the Plan further in Moscow. This seems to have signalled a Chinese determination to expand their scientific base rapidly, essentially in the Soviet pattern. There is evidence that in the single year 1955-1956 the sums officially budgeted for scientific activity were increased six fold.

Earlier, the organizational structure of Chinese science had also faithfully reflected the Russian pattern and influence at a more specific level. Immediately after 1949, exhaustive inquiries were made by the Chinese Communist government into the structure of the U.S.S.R. Academy and its role in organizing and controlling science and regimenting it as a state enterprise. On this basis, a Communist Chinese Academy was established, whose first president, Mo-Jo, immediately visited the Soviet Union for further discussions on scientific organization. At that time there seem to have been approximately ten thousand scientists in China holding degrees in the natural sciences, another ten thousand in agriculture, possibly twenty-five thousand in engineering, and some seven thousand in medicine and health. In all fields combined, perhaps two thousand of those Chinese who received advanced degrees prior to 1949 are still in mainland China today. This seems a small number. But it is critically distributed. Of the approximately two hundred physical and natural scientists who are at present members of the Department Committees of the Communist Chinese Academy, nearly all were leaders in science and rising research scientists prior to 1949. About one hundred and fifty of these are known to have received training abroad, some eighty in the United States, and the rest in Europe and Japan. They are clearly influential far beyond their numbers in the development of Chinese science. In fact, they seem to be roughly the equivalent of Soviet Academicians.

[Lc]

Lecture III - 17

From 1949 to 1956 this Communist Academy functioned as the agency of government charged with official responsibility for the national administration of science.

The 1957 reorganization, not wholly unreminiscent of the current one on the Soviet scene, replaced it by the standing committee of the State Council which I mentioned as the "national organ for policy making" in scientific matters, charged with very broad responsibilities. Operating on the "principle of subservience of scientific research to the requirements of the State" the Communist Party decreed that scientific research must henceforth be conducted entirely according to plan, and not in response to personal interests of the scientists involved. But there is some evidence that a strong feeling still persists among the scientists that they should be permitted to direct their efforts to research on basic theoretical problems and to raising the standards of scientific education. The whole seething debate of the emphasis to be given essentially uncommitted versus wholly committed and applied research, indeed, came briefly to the surface in the angry discussions of the period of the Hundred Flowers. Here again the typical ambivalences in the struggle between a liberal western scientific tradition and the Communist philosophy appear in intensified form.

The connections with Russian science have clearly remained close. In the last few years the Chinese have had access to the nuclear research center near Dubna, close to Moscow. In fact, China currently contributes about a fifth of the operating expenses of the Dubna center -- three times the amount of any other bloc nation. In 1957 a major agreement was signed providing for cooperation with the Soviet Union on a large scale in various research projects over the five year period from 1958 to 1962.

The Russians have provided a 10-megawatt nuclear reactor to the Institute of Atomic Energy at Peking, as well as a cyclotron. But the Chinese reactor utilizes uranium fuel enriched only to 2 per cent, in comparison with the reactors supplied to most of the other bloc nations, which utilize up to 10 per cent enriched uranium -- possibly a significant commentary on the attitude of the U.S.S.R. toward potential

Lecture III - 18

Chinese development of nuclear weapons. The Chinese have themselves built a high-tension multiplier and several small accelerators.

So it may be a fair guess that the position of science in Communist China today is much like that in the Soviet Union, but at a more primitive level. There is clearly an acute shortage of manpower. There is evidence that the quality of scientific training is uncertain and uneven, and the quality of research, for what little one can find of it, exhibits a wild unevenness perhaps surpassing its most unstable periods in the Soviet Union. It seems unlikely that Chinese science will attain striking proportions in the immediate future.

But it is not to be dismissed. The substantive cast of modern Chinese science is clearly western. It is still intimately mixed with traditional eastern elements, which break the surface from time to time, as in the recent reintroduction into official medical training of the ancient Chinese techniques of acupuncture. But the will to develop is there. There is evidence that since 1956 the Chinese budget for science has represented about 1 per cent of the total national budget, and in 1960 it apparently reached about $440 million, calculated on the basis of nonofficial exchange rates. In the two years of 1956 and 1957, the Chinese reported that they had spent over nine million dollars in British sterling in the purchase of scientific literature from non-Communist countries. The whole picture will bear most careful watching in the years to come.

So I come to the end of these Lectures. In closing them on the note of the course and the fate of science behind the Iron and the Bamboo Curtain, I seem to have traveled a long way from the themes with which I began. And yet I do not think that I really have. For the fate which a once liberal and still struggling science suffers in those lands will be of extraordinary practical consequence in the years to come. We can make no clear-cut predictions about it. Let me only say that the

Lecture III - 19

picture which the coming decades unfold will be of intense practical, but also of
more than practical, import. It will also have a profound significance for the
whole range of our thinking about science itself, as well as about the competitive
position of technology, throughout all the Free World.