THE UNEASY SCIENTISTS

THE worried debate about the relationship of science and government got a going-over last week from widely divergent angles. In a new Government document, Organization and Administration of the Military Research and Development Programs, the scientists told some of their own troubles. In an impressive editorial, the Protestant Christian Century pointed out the cause of their distress.

The Government document, a book of 710 pages, is the record of hearings last June before a House of Representatives subcommittee. What the committeemen heard was not reassuring. Individualistic scientists, said witness after witness, cannot be regimented and still work at their best.

When they are put under military command, as in the many laboratories of the armed services, they feel that they are misunderstood and their capabilities wasted. Said William Webster, executive vice president of the New England Electric System, twelve years a naval officer: "A military organization is a very trying climate for the best work of scientists."

The most violent opinion was expressed by John William Marchetti, who resigned last May as electronics director of the Cambridge Air Force Research Center after a row with a new commanding officer. Said Marchetti: "We got decisions that were stupid, just plain stupid, and some that were intolerable." He did not blame the military men for all the friction. "It is one clique pitted against another ... 'It is said of a well-known Air Force research and development center that at the officers' club the relative ranks are officers, enlisted men, dogs and civilians.' "

Calmer witnesses testified that much of the trouble comes from the military habit of rapidly "rotating" the commanding officers of a laboratory. Sometimes these birds of passage stay a year or two, learning almost nothing about the complicated work that they are supposed to supervise.

Many of the witnesses ducked the dangerous problem of security. But a few eminent ones pulled no punches. President James R. Killian Jr. of Massachusetts Institute of Technology deplored "what sometimes seems to be a preoccupation with security procedures and policies at the expense of scientific progress . . . There has been, unhappily, a deterioration in recent months in the relationship between Government and science ... Members of the scientific community are clearly discouraged and apprehensive . . ."

Said Mathematician John von Neumann of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, who last week was appointed to the Atomic Energy Commission (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) : "Very many people who have some trivial blot way back in their past do not know whether they can take a chance on getting into sensitive work ... To have once been dropped for security reasons is for the average person ... a professional catastrophe."

Most vehement about the capricious operation of the security system was Dr. Vannevar Bush, President of the Carnegie Institution and wartime chief of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. "I feel," said Bush, "that the way in which our security system is working at the present time is driving a wedge between the military and the scientific people of the country, and is doing great harm . . . The whole air of suspicion is just not such as to produce . . . the kind of ... collaboration between the mili tary men and the scientific community that we very much need . . ."

To the worried scientists, the Christian Century offered its sympathy. "The unhappiness of our American scientists is increasing as they perceive how exposed is the position of one who is, in the last analysis, a tool of the Government. It may be necessary for scientists ... to live under the eye of the FBI, but it is not pleasant.

"Our public has been taught to think of him [the scientist] as a mental colossus and a moral paragon--austere, dedicated and all but beyond human vanities in his pursuit of the truth . . . To this assumption of the scientist's moral superiority there has suddenly been added the social pre-eminence a society accords its workers of magic.

"Under such conditions one might expect the scientist to be the most secure man in our society. He holds almost ultimate power--the power of life or death. But many an American scientist is ... in moral torment. He has watched his science move from theory to human holocaust . . .

"Again many an American scientist is troubled because he finds himself dragged willy-nilly into a partisan conflict . . . The scientist discovers that he is no longer the austere and impartial figure of popular legend and his own desires. Instead he is a partisan in a relentless battle for power . . . The scientist who is engaged in atomic research for the Government has no stomach for such power struggles--but he cannot avoid becoming involved in them ... To protect his sanity he disavows moral responsibility for the consequences of his work. But does he convince himself?"

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