EDITORIAL
Objectivity Beyond the Laboratory The human affairs of the scientific and technical world are not all easily handled objectively
T
he efficacy of scientific and technological communications is a strong influence on the soundness of work in the fields concerned. Except where facts are exhaustively collected and organized and the mind has been rigorously trained to objectivity, emotion or personal preference exerts an influence. The scientist is trained to be rigorously objective in his research. However, in the rapidly growing world of scientific and technological human affairs he can seldom expect to have all the needed facts. Emotion and personal preference exert a greater influence as his supply of facts is a smaller part of the whole. He needs special effort not to forget this. The influence of emotion is looming large in the very complex matter of organizing scientific communications and the direction of development of the affairs of the American Chemical Society. In the conduct of human affairs we prefer statesmanship—an objective effort for the good of the whole—to politics, which uses the influence of personal preference to gain a decision. The same should apply in the human affairs of the scientific and technical community—but a much
higher level of statesmanship should be expected in view of tradition and training to objectivity. ACS President Arthur C. Cope said during the meeting of the Council that he had not yet found an open-and-shut question in the area of scientific communications. The knotty and controversial problems with which the ACS and other organizations are now grappling need to be approached with recognition of that difficulty; clear-cut solutions to such problems are seldom possible. There is a large and growing body of people with training in science and technology. The objective of a sound publications program should be the most effective possible service to aid these people in their grasp of the rapidly changing fields of knowledge on which they depend. As the approach is bent otherwise in the interest of personal preferences or limited groups, the worth of the system will suffer.
SEPT. 11, 1961 C&EN
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