THE CHEMICAL WORLD THIS WEEK
RESEARCH FUNDS:
No Grants for Granted "At this moment the whole financial and administrative structure of higher education and research in the U.S. is in considerable danger. If students are disagreeable and politically unpopular, may not Congress be tempted to force the transfer of research contracts from universities to more secure sites? In the short run this is quite likely. The research world cannot afford to take this support for granted any longer." So said Don K. Price, dean of the John Fitzgerald Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, l i e spoke at the annual meeting of Midwest Research Institute, in Kansas City, Mo., where he received the MRI citation. "Only if university faculties can take effective action to make it clear that they propose to defend universities as centers of learning and rational inquiry can they protect the academic and research community from serious political reprisal." If the reprisals do come, "The rest of the research world will lose as heavily as the universities," he points out. "For the style, the attitudes, the sense of freedom, the obligation to share basic concepts for testing and criticism that are fostered in the selfgoverning university faculty are the fundamental protections of scientists. "We should really worry less about the student rebels and more about the issues that their elders have persuaded them to raise," dean Price says. "I am inclined to think that both have chosen the wrong target. They should concentrate their fire not on universities or science or technology, but on the administrative and political system that supports and directs it." This would be consistent with their demand for relevance, he explains. "We do need to see that our science and technology are made relevant to contemporary problems." What the rebels need to learn is that relevance can be attained in modern society only by responsibility, he says, and responsibility can be achieved only by organization, discipline, and selfcontrol. Speaking of the system that now exists in the U.S., dean Price says, "Nowhere before have scientists and scholars been in such a favorable position to influence policy decisions while retaining a secure base of support for their work. This system, which has made it possible for government to intervene in the solution of social and economic problems without assuming the ownership or de12 C&EN JUNE 2, 1969
Don K. Price Education and research in danger
stroying the autonomy of our academic or business institutions, may help us avoid the apparent necessity of choosing between socialism and old-fashioned capitalism." If the rebels really want academic science to be relevant to social issues, he says, they should applaud opening the crucial issues for public discussion. The rebels of the New Left say that by getting deeply involved in current problems, the scientist has sacrificed his position of complete detachment from the system and forfeited his status as an independent moral censor, dean Price says. "But the dilemma of the New Left is an absolute one. It is not possible to be relevant without also becoming responsible. Absolute purity in politics means absolute irrelevance," he says. "If we in the universities are to be responsible as well as relevant, we are going to have to make a more effective union between the work of the technological and scientific community and the administrators,'' dean Price adds.
Goodyear Aerospace nor the Department of Defense is talking about it, the system may well be suited to tracking incoming missiles and differentiating nuclear warheads from missile-spawned junk. Other uses Goodyear anticipates for its system include air traffic control, reconnaissance and surveillance systems, electronic warfare systems, inventory control, and information retrieval systems. The latter two uses—those from which the chemical community might derive the most direct benefit—may be marginally economical at the present time, Goodyear Aerospace's manager of computer engineering Jack Rudolph admits. Associative processing, he notes, costs the user 35 cents a bit, while conventional systems run about 25 cents a bit. Offsetting this at least partially, however, is the fact that the Goodyear system requires only 60% as many bits to do the same job done by larger conventional computers and the Associative Memory system does it up to 1000 times faster. The concept of Associative Memory hinges on what Goodyear calls, in classic Pentagonese, content addressability and parallel search capability. "The operation is analogous to a mixed audience responding simultaneously to a command from a speaker to stand up if their last name begins with the letter A," Mr. Rudolph says. "The analogy for the conventional computer would be for an usher to go from seat to seat examining name tags to make the same identification. "Obviously," he continues, "our system is most cost effective where speed is at a premium. In logistics or inventory control slower systems can be more easily tolerated. In air traffic control, however, delay can result in loss of human life."
AIR POLLUTION:
Quality Information COMPUTERS:
The Associative Memory Bread—butter; Winter—snow. "Association" is a word game most people have played. "Such 'Associative Memory' is the basis of a new computing device under development at Goodyear Aerospace Corp. for the Rome Air Development Center, Rome, N.Y. The "brain" is being used currently by Air Force data processing experts, Rome project engineer James L. Previte says, to evaluate the advantages of associative processing techniques. And, though neither
"The Air Quality Act of 1967 outlines a mechanism for dealing with air pollution problems on a regional basis. That mechanism is now in motion. Keeping it running and making it work requires coordinated action at all levels of Government and by industry and the public." So says Dr. John T. Middleton, commissioner of the National Air Pollution Control Administration, in the preface to a booklet "Guidelines for the Development of Air Quality Standards and Implementation Plans" just issued by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Purpose of the publication is to make air pollu-
