SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH.

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 19814, 30 December 1929, Page 2

SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH.

VALUE TO MEDICINE.

ILL-PAID PROFESSORS. (MOM OUR OW> CORBCSPOXDBNT.) LONDON, November 21. Delivering the annual Norman Lockyer lecture in London, Sir W. Morley Fletcher (secretary of the Medical Research Council) put in a plea that better pay should be given to medical research workers. "Salaries iu academic life are in general," Sir Walter said, "indefensibly low. Even now professors who may be most eminent men of world-wide reputations are fortunate if they receive £I2OO a year. Only a few with special administrative responsibilities receive £.1500. These are salaries which men reaching eminent success in any other walk of life would regard as an offence, and even in the academic world the headmaster of a great public school would think of them derisively. A man of distinguished ability, whether in teaching or research, may count himself lucky if after an expensive training and years of toil he earns £SOO a year before he reaches 30. "In my daily work I am continually finding men or women giving service of first-rate value to science and to the nation, yet receiving for their willing toil only a small fraction of what they might have earned in closely allied professional work or in other walks of life."

He laid down three propositions:— (1) For a long time the initiative regarding new methods and remedies has been steadily passing from the physician himself to the scientific worker in the experimental laboratory. (2) As lately as until just before the War it was the almost universal rule in this country that nobody should be paid for doing research work as such. (3) There is very urgent need for more encouragement for really brilliant men to give their lives to medical research.

Sir Walter referred to the advances made in medicine through contribution of the sciences, and added:—"As to the art of surgery itself, it is difficult to imagine that it has any further advance to make of a major kind. We must believe that we have already seen the zenith of surgery in the world history, except in so far as it must remain to deal with wounds and accidental injuries. At the same time we are not in eight yet of anything like a victory over disease all along the line."