Research

Press, Volume LXXX, Issue 24152, 11 January 1944, Page 4

Research

We reprinted on this page yesterday the “Manchester Guardian’s” report of an address in which the director of the British Coal Utilisation Research Association summed up the value of results recently gained in coal research. Beside this report it seemed useful to reprint, also, recommendations submitted to the British Government by a special committee which had investigated the need to expand and reorganise scientific research after the war. If British discoveries are to produce during the next 20 years an “ amaz- “ ing transformation ” of the methods of using coal, as Mr J. G. Bennett confidently predicted—if coal is to be used in smaller quantities but much more efficiently, to have a higher value and maintain a more prosperous industry, to yield less fume and filth and more goods and gains—then it is of course to be assumed that New Zealand will sooner or later benefit accordingly. How much sooner or how much later, it is useless to speculate. But if progress has to be imported, vision and vigour have to control the import policy; and the vision and vigour to do it successfully are of the same sort as are needed to originate progress. The real question for New Zealand, therefore, is not whether the results of oversea researches can be borrowed or bought but whether New Zealand has fully exerted and wisely organised the energies to produce its own, or is now preparing to do so. It is not disparaging past achievements, which are neither few nor slight, to say that too little has been done, and that efforts to do more have been defeated by bad distribution and definition of research functions, by faulty general control, and by mean finance. Animal diseases, for instance, cost the Dominion more in a month than is spent on animal research in a decade. The past could be left behind without further reproach, though it should not be forgotten, if there were any certainty that the future is to take a new impetus and a new direction. Not even the present achievements of New Zea-

land’s scientific workers, organised for war, give any such promise. Though largely unrecorded, as yet. they are numerous and valuable achievements; but they are the work of men who, enlisted for the duties of an emergency, will take up again, when it is over, their full . and

normal duties in a system unchanged, undeveloped. Or if there is to be change, growth, advance, a new purpose and a new place for science in the Dominion’s life and work, there has been no word of it, or hardly a word. The want of a policy, as the Government should possess it and as the University should possess it, is disturbing.