RESEARCH LOUIS P . ΗΑΜΛΛΕΤΓ^ Columbia University, New York, Ν. Y.
A human right is a privilege which m a n retains only if he accepts the responsi bility of protecting it, and that man's right to the search for knowledge is no exception. A great responsibility to defend this right lies on all of us
Rights and Responsibilities In the Search
Χ ο A scientist knowledge is much more nearly a way of finding out things than it is a collection of things that have been found out. At the very least knowledge is fluid, constantly changing, always growing but always subject to revision even though the re vision sometimes involve? he abandon ment of firmly held opinions. Conse quently, to me as a scientist, man's right to knowledge necessarily implies man's right to that search for knowledge which we call research; it is at least as much man's right to t h e laboratory as it is his right to the library. It is the right to strive for a continually grow ing understanding of nature and for a continually increasing ability to con trol the processes of nature. To a scien tist a body of knowledge which has ceased to grow is not only dull, it is a barrier opposed to that incessant growth which is the very essence of science. Branches of science which have petrified in this way have again and again delayed advance in science in much the same ways as taboos and fetishes have delayed man's general progress. For a taboo is nothing more 1462
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than a code of action b a s e d upon a body of knowledge or supposed knowl edge which, has ceased to grow and which is no longer subject to revision. Rights Are Won by Struggle
Every human right worth having has had to be won by h i t m a n struggle against the forces of nature or against the forces of evil within man. N o human right once won lias ever con tinued to exist for long without a n un ceasing effort to maintain and t o de fend it. A human right is a privilege which man retains only if h e accepts the responsibility of protecting it. Man's right to the search for kmowledge is n o exception. I t is a dearly won privilege for which men h a v e h a d to sacrifice comfort and property a n d life itself in the past, and it is a privilege which is more or less openly u n d e r attack now and even here. I n Russia, man's right to knowledge is a d m i t t e d as a right to seek for, to find, a n d to r e p o r t only such knowledge a s is agreeable t o the con sidered desires and event to the unin formed whims of a dictator. Even in our own country one need C H E M I C A L
only look at the picture of idiocy by which the cartoonist usually symbolizes the university professor to realize that many of our fellow citizens resent and dislike the man of specialized knowl edge. To people to whom this symbol seems a reasonable and proper one tiie scientist, like his colleagues in other in tellectual fields, is a dull fellow in the important affairs of life. Even worse, he is by nature an impertinent meddler with things that had better b e left alone. The scientist is perhaps more bearable than the economist and soci ologist because he is useful in t h e de velopment of new gadgets and new materials, but there is no reason why he should be indulged in his propen sity for irresponsible and expensive pas times. To a large extent this attitude can be attributed to a common failure to realize one fact and one probability. The fact is that a very large part of the material benefits w e enjoy today can be traced back to discoveries m a d e by scientists who were merely indulg ing their curiosity and had no idea at all what might be the eventual prac tical results of their investigations. T h e AND
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probability is that discoveries as revolutionary as nuclear fission, antibiotics, or moldable plastics remain to be made. I don't lcnow any way to predict the future except in terms of the past, and the facts of the past are that there has been a continuing sequence of great and unexpected discoveries, and that men have always thought after each of them that it was the last upheaval of this kind to be expected. Right to Knowledge Under Attack
We are concerned therefore with a right which is under attack, which can easily disappear all over the world if it is not defended. How worthy of our best efforts in its defense is this right? In terms of the individual scientist the answer is easy, for to him there is no greater personal satisfaction than that found in the search for and the occasional discovery of a new concept or a new generalization which increases our understanding of the world around us. I can think of no cause for which I would willingly make greater sacrifices than the preservation of this privilege for those who follow me. But I recognize that for society as a whole this is a motive of limited appeal. Let lis therefore examine the reasons why men generally ought to recognize that the right to a living, growing knowledge is nearly equivalent to the right to survive. Let us recognize that we live in a world in which the mutations of viruses and bacteria continually threaten to overcome the protections which w e have built up over the years, a world in which each new drug must soon be replaced by another if we are not to fall behind in the struggle. We live in a world in which we are usually able to stave off mass starvation b y developing new strains of food plants or new insecticides just a little ahead of the appearance of new strains. We live in a world in which overpopulation continually poses the threat of reducing us all to a common level of misery. These are not idle
threats conjured up from a pleasure in frightening people or from die selfish motive of gaining support for the activities of scientists; they are situations which anyone who reads the record with an open mind must recognize as dangers to our survival as a race, and there is no defense against them except an active pursuit of a deeper understanding of nature. As Americans you and I are vastly privileged people, materially, morally, and intellectually, and we live in a world in which we and people like us aie outnumbered by peoples who are taught by their rulers to hate and to envy us and desperately to desire to rob us of our possessions, our lives, and our liberties. The depth of hatred for Americans which is revealed by the things that have happened in Czechoslovakia, i n Hungary, in Russia, in China, above all in Korea, demonstrates this all too clearly. These threats cannot be met by individual heroism alone, or by tactical and strategical skill, indispensible as all these are. Importance of M i l i t a r y Superiority
W e must have superiority in weapons. There is a misapprehension that we should now have unquestionable superiority if there had not been treasonable betrayal of military secrets in the past, and that we can maintain such superiority as we now have by multiplying our precautions against betrayal in the future. I do not argue against the precautions, but I think their value is overestimated because of underestimation of potentialities of research. It does no good to preserve one's own secrets if the enemy's technical advances make the secrets obsolete, especially if our own advance is hampered by hysterical rather than by wise enforcement of precautions. It would certainly be plaving the part of the ostrich to suppose that our enemies are technically incompetent if, as Vice President Nixon reported the other day, they gained only from three to five
Louis P. Hammeft, now head of the chemistry department, has spent his entire teaching career at Columbia. Student of Staudinger, he did military researdi during both World Wars but gave it up each time to return to teaching, which he liked better, because he found he couldn't do both. Well known as author of "Solutions of Electrolytes" and several physical chemistry texts, Hammett introduced the term, H0, as symbol of acidity based on indicator measurements. He has cultivated the borderline field between organic and physical chemistry with emphasis on catalysis by ion exchange resins. For recreation he gardens at his summer home in Sussex County, N. J., in a setting reminiscent of his boyhood home in Maine. He was born in Wilmington and studied at Harvard and Columbia before going to Zurich in 1916-17. During World War I he worked on airplane wing dopes and during World War II on rocket propellants.
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years in their nuclear bomb program through the wholesale betrayal from which we suffered. It would be equally stupid to overlook the evidence that they are making enormous expenditures in wealth and in manpower in the form of applied and developmental research on actual and potential weapons. If, as Assistant Defense Secretary Quarles says, Russia is turning out graduate engineers at twice as great a rate as the United States, how long do you think it will be before the five years' advantage they have gained from treason will seem a drop in the bucket of their accomplishment in overtaking us? " W e must seek to support and defend man's right fo the search tor knowledge and fo toster every possible means of prosecuting the search." It seems clear then that both as members of the human race and as citizens of a particularly fortunate community we must seek to support and defend man's right to the search for knowledge and to foster every possible way of prosecuting the search. In this search man has found two generally useful methods of attack, which are usually classified as on the one hand fundamental or basic, and on the other hand applied or developmental. These are terms which I have come to dislike very much, partly because I think their use obscures a more important classification, but mostly because the terms have become entangled with unfortunate and unnecessary judgments of value. In their extreme form these become the snobbery of the theorist who claims to be unhappy if his discoveries turn out to have any practical value and the contrary snobbery of the practical man who claims that his only motive in the search for knowledge is dollars and cents. Applied vs. Basic K n o w l e d g e
I have worked in industry and in connection with military materiel which by any criterion was applied research. have also done academic research which was just as clearly fundamental. Neither activity was superior to the other, either in personal satisfaction or in usefulness to society. There have seemed to b e times and conditions when each of these occupations was superior to the other. Though it is a fine thing for a man to be convinced that his job, out of all the jobs in the world is the most exciting, the most interesting, and the most worth while, it is also a fine thing for him to hold his sense of the superiority of his position on a pretty firm leash. James Conant has made what seems to me to b e a more important distinction, namely that between the work of 1463
RESEARCH the uncommitted investigator on the one h a n d and programmed research on the other hand. The latter, no mat ter whether it be the search for a new transuranium element, or that for a better yield in the production of an antibiotic, is conscious of its goal and can largely plan its path toward that goal in advance. T h e former sets out to explore a neglected area or to look for new and unexpected phenomena or for new generalizations in a familial "The most important discoveries have always been the least ex pected ones." one. H e r e also any absolute judgment of relative values seems to me to be completely unjustified either in terms of satisfaction to the researcher or in terms of benefit to society. Both kinds of work are vitally necessary to our na tion and to the human race, and both deserve large public support. It is only too clear, however, that it has always been easier to get support for pro grammed than for unprogrammed re search, and that there are powerful forces now acting which tend even more to favor the former. Advantages of Planned Research
One reason for this is obvious. T h e benefits to be obtained from pro grammed research are immediately ap parent, t h e expenditure needed to at tain these benefits can be estimated with some confidence, and the whole proposition has a reasonable and sensi ble air. In supporting the uncommitted investigation, on the other hand, we are betting on the success of an untried individual without even knowing how large or in what form the reward will be if w e win. It seems a crazy thing to do; b u t t h e fact is that it has paid off again and again in the past and has paid off heavily. Indeed history indi cates that without the results of such successful gambles on the uncommitted investigator, programmed research it self eventually becomes sterile. For example, the whole science of physics had nearly come to a stop in the early nineties, last century. Some programmed research seemed desir able, b u t it was not really exciting and certainly all the great discoveries h a d already been m a d e . This was the atti tude of most physicists at a time when the completely unexpected discoveries by uncommitted investigators of x-rays, of radioactivity, of the q u a n t u m prin ciple w e r e just around the next corner. Think of the state of inorganic chemis try and of theoretical organic chemis try on the eve of Bragg's completely 1464
unexpected discoveries of t h e structure of salt crystals, or t h e state of chemotherapeutics just before Fleming's com pletely unexpected discovery of peni cillin, b u t I shall not labor t h e point. I think most people accept t h e history, but many refuse, as I have said before, to believe that this history will prob ably repeat. Startling Discoveries in the Offing
Mow it is vitally necessary for our future that such unexpected discoveries shall b e made, arid it seems to me highly probable that they will b e made. I a m sure no biochemist or physiolo gist would now say that the structure of his science is complete, a n d that a full understanding of the life process now requires only a programmed ac tivity of development and application of k n o w n principles, that t h e r e is no need of great and unforeseen discov eries. Nor d o I see how anyone strug gling with t h e extremely important task of developing new or better heteroge neous catalysts can fail to feel the need for the discoveries which will change what is now an almost completely empirical art into a well organized science. These are fields in which I have a hunch that great discoveries will be m a d e before very long. Active development is occurring over a wide range of related fields. This situation always seems to offer fertile soil for the new and important discovery. But I should not w a n t to put too m u c h em phasis on the hunch. The most impor tant discoveries have always been the least expected ones. T h e willingness to gamble on the un committed investigator is equally im portant for our national survival. There is n o very good reason to suppose that wo shall continue to keep a h e a d of our enemies with respect to programmed and especially to outright develop mental research, particularlv if they continue to η rod u ce technically trained men faster than we do. But the Com munists' whole social philosophy re jects scornfully the very idea of un committed, unprogrammed research. The fact that our society does admit the value of this kind of research and does support it, although somewhat feebly, is to m y mind our best hope for peace and security. T h e rights of which I h a v e been talking are the rights of mankind, not simply the rights of the individual. Obviously t h e r e can be no right of the individual to b e supported as an un committed investigator, merely because lie would like this kind of life. There just isn't that kind of capital available from past or present savings, aside from the fact that such a program would turn many good plumbers a n d book CHEMICAL
keepers into second rate scientists. T h e right to the search for knowledge brings us therefore, as all rights do, to a re sponsibility. Granted the desirability of supporting unprogrammed research, and recognizing the limitations which must b e placed on the amount of such research, who is to t a k e the responsi bility of choosing the men w h o are to be supported? The problem is a par ticularly difficult one because the choice must b e m a d e early if it is to be effective. T h e evidence is clear and emphatic that the really original ex ploratory research is t h e product al most exclusively of young men. T h e older man may be m u c h more effective than t h e younger one a t the organiza tion a n d direction of programmed re search, and many men are highly pro ductive scientists throughout long life times. As such they get and they de serve much support in what amounts often to the exploitation and develop ment of the discoveries of their youth. The problem society has to face is that of maintaining a correct balance be tween this obviously necessary kind of support for research by men who have already made great creative discover ies, and the less obvious b u t at least equally imperative necessity of recog nizing and supporting the untried young men who have the potentiality of making the next great discoveries. Finding Creative Genius
The problem of recognition is an ex traordinarily difficult one, for w e must distinguish the creative genius from the glib talker and the facile mernorizer. We have to make the gamble of picking a young man, of giving him enough money to live on, and enough equip ment and materials for his research, and " W e have to make the gamble of picking a young man, of giving him enough to live on, and enough equipment and materials for his research, and of then saying · . . 'Mow go ahead and work on any thing that interests you.' " of then saying in effect "Now go ahead and work on anything that interests you." Yet this is exactly the gamble that most universities h a v e been making all along. I have been o n the staff of a single university for nearly 35 years, I have worked in a wide variety of fields of chemistry, and very rarely in a field which was, at the time I started work in it, what is called a n active field. Yet I have never during t h a t time been sub jected to any pressure whose weight I needed to recognize to modify my re search program because some colleague or some administrative officer thought AND
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RESEARCH it would bring greater publicity or otherwise be to the advantage of the university if I did so. I certainly do not claim that the universities always make the best choices, but I do claim that the proportion of young men w h o have been given this kind of opportunity by my own and by similar universities is truly remarkable. " . . . Government and industry will do little or nothing unless they are backed by informed public opin ion." I do not mean to imply that this kind of support for the young uncommitted investigator has existed only in the uni versities. General Electric's support of Langmuir's studies on high vacuum is a classic example from industry. But I do mean to emphasize that the uni versities are especially experienced in recognizing the kind of young men whom we can afford to support in this way, that they have been especially effective in the past in the selections they have made, and that it is extremely important for society that they continue to perform this function unless some effective alternative is developed. There is, of course, great danger that the universities will be forced to give up or to heavily curtail this function, which is after all only one of their im portant duties. There is the pressure of the continuing inflation which has reduced the value of their endowments by 50% or more. There is the pressure of the enormously increasing real cost of research, which results from the fact that the more one pushes back the fron tiers of knowledge the more elaborate and expensive the instruments needed for further advance become. In terms of the very large extent to which the universities are dependent on govern ment there is the pressure of fear of using taxpayers' money for activities which are difficult to explain to the average citizen and which an ignorant or an unprincipled legislator might call boondoggling. There is the powerful pressure of patriotism, in the form of the demand that the university undertake a large programmed activity because it is necessary for the national defense or the demand that a brilliant young man be diverted from his own research work in order to take part in a crash program which is of desperate national urgency. I would be the last to deny the cogency of such demands, but I cannot help the feeling that the need is sometimes stated more emphatically than is justi fied in the individual case, and that it is made without sufficient consideration of the inroads which such demands VOLUME
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make on OUEI limited supply of truly creative scientists. There is the pressure on the individual to "get into an active field of re search' because it means quicker recognition, more rapid promotion, a more bountiful support through research contracts anci grants. But an active field of research is often a field in which there is intense competition to do the fairly obvious tilings which are corol laries of a n&v/ idea or a new technique. Research in such a field is almost al ways programmed research, it is fre quently purely developmental research. Please let me reiterate that I do not in any sense deprecate this kind of re search; it i s firuitful, necessary, and praiseworthy. But w e cannot afford to have it extinguish research of the un committed, unpr-ogrammed kind. There is danger that in. our enthusiasm to sup port the further development of a bril liant new coxicept or technique w e shall crowd out the conditions and the en vironment which made the discovery of that idea or technique possible.
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No Easy Solutions I have presented problems but I have not presented and do not intend to try to present a_ny facile solutions. I have spoken particularly about the responsi bility of society to maintain the search for knowledge and to maintain it in all the ways which past experience has shown to b e profitable. But a respon sibility of society has no meaning un less it is felt as a responsibility by the people who malke u p that society, that is, by you, by xne, and by our friends and neighbors and relatives in the broadest sense. The most futile, the most des inactive things you and I w h o know the facets o f the situation could do would be t o settle back and say to our selves "Yes^ the government ought to support more fundamental research" or "Industry i s not repaying its debt to fundamental research" and to feel that we have na further responsibilities. Of course, government and industry will do little o r nothing unless they are backed by informed public opinion. The way to get this is through the crea tion of an atmosphere in which the im portance o f these problems is recog nized and i n vvliich the search for ways to solve them i s actively pursued b y a great many people. This is the w a y democracies have solved such problems in the past, ancH I see no reason to sup pose that w e have lost the ability to do it in the future. The creation of this kind of an atmosphere is something all of us can
