America and Scientific Leadership
I
IN the United States, containing less than seven per cent of the population of the world, there are more college and university students than in all other countries put together. American institutions of higher learning have more living graduates than have similar institutions in all other parts of the globe. One great American university boasts of nearly fifty thousand alumni.
Further, the average American is possibly better educated, in the conventional sense of the term, than is the average citizen of any other country. He possesses more information about a greater number of things. That is worth while, especially in a country that upholds a system of popular government. It means a certain degree of solidarity.
It does not, however, mean leadership, or even marked progress. The average person participates in progress, but the discoveries and the impulses which are responsible for progress come from leaders, men and women who are notably above the average and who utilize their superiority for the purpose of aiding the advance of the race.
A great deal of modern progress is based on science. It is science, more than anything else, that has transformed the world in which we live. It is science that in the immediate future will still further alter the circumstances of human life, and of civilization.
With all our educational institutions, with all our university students and graduates, how do we of the United States stand in respect to scientific progress ?
In applied science we stand very high. ‘Yankee inventions,’for one thing, are proverbial and respected the world over. Our factories have attained a remarkable degree of efficiency. We have devised not only new machinery, but new processes, new methods, and new systems of management. In agriculture we have made advances that have no parallel in the history of any nation. We have accomplished our results in industry, agriculture, and other fields by applying the conclusions of fundamental research.
When we come to consider that fundamental research itself, our record is not so flattering. The awards of the Nobel prizes in science since their establishment in 1900 suggest that European nations are preëminent in this field. These prizes are awarded for outstanding achievement in physical science, in chemistry, and in medical science or physiology. Of the eighty awards made to date (November 12, 1927), American scientists won only five — three in physics, one in chemistry, and one in medicine. In 1907 A. A. Michelson received an award for his work on the length of light rays. Five years later a prize was given to Alexis Carrel in recognition of his achievements in the suture of blood vessels and the transplantation of organs. Theodore Richards received the 1914 chemistry prize for his researches on the atomic weights of elements. The most recent awards to citizens of the United States went to R. A. Millikan for isolating and measuring the electron, and to Arthur H. Compton for the discovery of the Compton Process. These achievements won physics prizes in 1923 and 1927 respectively.
The record of a number of other countries is much more impressive. For the same period, twenty-three of the eighty prizes went to Germany, twelve to Great Britain, eleven to France, six to the Netherlands, five to Sweden, four to Denmark, three to Switzerland, three to Austria, two to Russia, two to Canada, two to Italy, and one each to Belgium and Spain. On the basis of population, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland received one prize to every million inhabitants; Austria, one to every two million; Germany, one to every two and a half million; France, one to every three and a half million; Great Britain, one to every three and a half million; Canada, one to every four and a half million;Belgium,one toevery eight million; Italy, one to every twenty-one million; Spain, one to every twentytwo million; the United States, one to every twenty-three million; Russia, one to every seventy million. Among countries that won any awards, only Russia ranks below the United States.
II
These figures, of course, should not be taken as implying that no fundamental research of high quality is being carried on in the United States. Such a view would be far from the truth. There are devoted, capable scientists in this country carrying on investigations of great importance. The fact remains, however, that our nation, when it comes to scientific achievement of the highest grade, ranks below many of the nations of Europe. What is the reason for this situation?
Partly, the reason is to be found in our emphasis on the average. Our college and university courses are designed chiefly for average boys and girls. The exceptional young man or woman can obtain high grades and the prestige of scholarship with very little effort; the stimulus of competition on the part of a large number of equally gifted students is lacking. This fact, coupled with the common ideal of merely ‘getting by,’ makes for indifferent attainments on the part of a great many who under more favorable auspices might develop a really fruitful scientific interest.
This condition is not found to the same extent in the graduate school as in the undergraduate college. Even in the most reputable graduate schools, however, it exists in some degree. Moreover, the habits and ideals formed in undergraduate days are likely to be carried over into graduate work.
As I have pointed out before, I am no disbeliever in the education of the average boy or girl. The average student should obtain as sound and useful and extensive an education as he has the capacity to absorb. This does not mean, however, that he should be allowed to hold back the exceptionally able student. There are no insuperable obstacles in the way of providing the right instruction, the right competition, the right atmosphere, for the student who has the capacity and t he ambition for genuinely productive scholarship.
After all. however, our emphatic desire to serve the average boy or girl does not constitute the most important cause for our relatively low position in fundamental science. Our practice of valuing everything according to the amount of money it will bring is a more significant factor. Not only is the youth urged to enter occupations that afford opportunities for immense profits, but the view is constantly held before him that success in any occupation can be measured in economic terms. The price which a painting brings on the market, the probable financial saving to be obtained through a scientific discovery, the amount of money which a university president adds to the endowment fund of his institution, are emphasized by press and public as measures of real success. Some of the very men engaged in these supposedly noncommercial occupations lay stress on such financial achievements in the autobiographical sketches which they submit to Who’s Who in America and similar publications. It is not surprising that even such young people as are looking forward to intellectual careers are turned in the direction of an economic evaluation of success.
When the young man gets into his career, the economic motive is even more powerfully presented to him. Specifically, the young scientist, if he has shown ability and promise, will be strongly tempted by offers from great corporations, or from organizations supported by great corporations, for industrial research. The National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences lists nine hundred and ninety-nine industrial research laboratories in the United States. What these institutions want, for the most part, is immediate, or near-immediate, returns. Which, from the commercial standpoint, is proper enough. The application of science to immediate industrial ends possesses undoubted value. The point is, it should not be confused with something altogether different — namely, fundamental research.
Not as much as this can be said for those corporations and organizations which profess to engage in fundamental research, while in reality they simply are collecting data for advertising and propaganda. In such institutions a scientist seldom is given opportunity to carry on research to a scientifically sound point. The effort, moreover, is not to discover, but to prove something already believed — the negation of true research.
A further reason for the failure of the United States to make in pure science the same progress that it has made in applied science is that this is a relatively new country. In any new country there are immediate demands for applying science in opening up undeveloped lands and other resources. Moreover, the concentration necessary for fundamental research is favored by a stabilized condition of society. In the past the constant influx of immigrants from abroad, the great shifts in the population, and the common changes of occupation have produced the opposite of stabilization.
No doubt there are some who will say, ‘What of it? What good does this fundamental research do ? Have n’t we got more money, more automobiles, larger factories, bigger newspapers and magazines, than any of these countries that waste their time on what you call fundamental research ?'
Persons who raise these questions are actuated in their thinking by strictly economic motives, and the only answer that will convince them is a strictly economic answer. Such an answer can readily be given.
Every application of science is dependent on science available to be applied. For example, the law of gravitation is basic to many modern inventions. The law of gravitation, itself a discovery in pure science, is in turn dependent upon other discoveries in pure science going back ultimately to Apollonius of Pergæus, who lived in the third century before Christ. Apollonius worked out the laws of conic sections solely as a contribution to pure mathematics. Indeed, for nearly two thousand years the curves which were the subject of his study were merely objects of mathematical curiosity. Suddenly they became of the utmost importance to our knowledge of the universe when Kepler identified them with the orbits of the planets. On Kepler’s discoveries Newton based his determination of the law of gravitation.
The purification of water supplies by chemical means, resulting in the saving of untold millions of dollars and countless human lives, dates back to a discovery made by Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli in his studies in pure botany. In studying the life processes of Spirogyra, he found that one part of copper in fifty million parts of water was sufficient to cause the death of the cells. This phenomenon, which he described as the oligodynamic effect of copper on Spirogyra, opened the field of the selective physiological effect of dilute poisons, on which the modern processes of destroying bacteria and other organisms by means of copper or chlorine solutions are based.
A more modern example of a discovery in pure science, the applications of which have paid large economic returns, is the phase rule, enunciated by Dr. J. Willard Gibbs. This rule enables one to ascertain what conditions of temperature, pressure, and volume determine the solid, liquid, and gaseous phases of matter.
The rule is applied industrially in a vast number of ways, since all the operations of chemistry concern states of matter in solid, liquid, or gaseous phases. Among processes in which the rule is applied are the manufacture of metallic alloys, the separation of mixtures of various liquids (such as gasoline, kerosene, and other products of the petroleum industry) by fractional distillation, the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen, the crystallization of potash salts from complicated mixtures for use as fertilizer, the manufacture of soap, and the vulcanization of rubber. Innumerable industrial processes are thus simplified and improved. Were it not for this rule, the effect of changing temperature, pressure, or concentration in heterogeneous systems would have to be considered a special industrial problem for every system investigated.
III
The examples which I have presented are, of course, only a few out of a vast number. Fundamental research has been going on since man first began to display intelligent curiosity, and the progress of our civilization, at least so far as material accomplishments go, is based on the scientific discoveries that have been made. Stop fundamental research, and you stop material progress. A striking recognition of the economic importance of such research is found in the fact that a committee under the auspices of the League of Nations is now endeavoring to work out a plan whereby the discoverer of a scientific principle shall have rights to his discovery comparable to the privileges bestowed by patent and copyright.
From the standpoint of the highest interests of the race, however, research in pure science requires no economic justification. These interests are intellectual and spiritual interests — the broadening of our horizons, the banishment of superstition and fear; the mastery of ourselves and our mental environment; freedom and happiness for our spirits. The attainment of knowledge itself is an intense satisfaction to the enlightened, civilized man. Indeed, no nation can rightly call itself enlightened unless it is concerned with additions to the sum of human knowledge.
Primitive man is governed primarily by his fears. A long list of taboos, based not on knowledge but on ignorance, determines his conduct. An individual of a primitive tribe might be persuaded to live in a modern house, to drive an automobile, to make use of all sorts of inventions, but his fundamental attitude toward himself and toward the world might be changed comparatively little. We are superior to primitive man, not chiefly because we have better material surroundings, but because we have a sounder understanding of ourselves and our environment. We are governed less by fear and more by confidence in our ability to control our own destiny. This comes largely from our increased knowledge of fundamental facts in the sciences. These facts are applied, on the one hand, to improve our economic welfare; on the other, to enlarge, clarify, and intensify our mental life. Both are important, but the latter ranks higher.
Manifestly, progress in fundamental research is essential to the economic and spiritual welfare of the world. We cannot properly, we cannot honorably, refrain from contributing our share, as a nation, to this all-important work.
The problem of extending fundamental research in the United States has two sides. On the one hand, there must be adequate physical opportunity for the research worker. There must be better financial support for research that has no industrial connections. Research in pure science must be put on so solid a foundation as to dispel completely the common feeling on the part of investigators that practical applications must be shown in order to ensure the continuance of the work.
This adequate physical opportunity means laboratories and other equipment. It includes the necessary funds for carrying on the research. It involves sufficient salaries for the investigators. The true scientist is not interested to any great extent in money, but he does expect adequate support for himself and his family. Further, a suitable physical environment for the scientist embodies freedom from duties that distract from his main interest. Teaching is to many, though not all, research scholars a distracting obligation. Executive work is such to practically all genuine scientists. There are few customs more absurd than the practice, common both to universities and to commercial organizations, of rewarding success in research by promotion to executive positions in which research is no longer possible.
That the physical opportunity necessary to the growth of fundamental research in the United States is impossible of attainment I do not for a moment believe. I believe that, living in an industrial age, we have jumped too readily to the conclusion that interest in other than industrial matters does not exist or cannot be developed. Increasing sums of money are being devoted to encouragement of the creative arts, from which no economic return is expected. This is the result of education in the significance of the arts to civilization. Similar education in the importance of pure science will provide both the funds and the point of view which are essential elements in a favorable environment for fundamental research.
The second part of the problem of extending research is the human side. The right environment for research is useless without competent scientists to work in it. Such scientists cannot be provided by modern methods of mass production. These methods turn out flour, soap, automobiles; they may perhaps be applied in education to the extent of turning out standardized accountants, printers, salesmen. When applied to the problem of supplying research workers, mass methods are a total loss. Certain inborn qualities — notably curiosity and imagination — are essential to the real scientist. All that education can do is to develop and utilize these qualities. As I suggested earlier in this paper, American education should provide a better competitive environment for boys and girls who give promise of achievement in science, just as it should for those who give promise of achievement in other fields of great human importance. Also, it should uphold more vigorously than it now does the ideal of intellectual and spiritual, as distinguished from financial, attainments. In referring to education, I mean not merely the schools, but the homes, the press, the Church—in short, every institution which has an educational influence on the thinking of our youth.
The problem of fundamental research in the United States is thus at bottom a question of our point of view. The only thing that will provide either adequate environment or adequate personnel for investigations in pure science is the development of a conviction, not merely a conventional theory, that intellectual progress is at least as important as economic advancement and that in intellectual progress pure science plays an essential part.