RESEARCH WORK OVERSEAS

Press, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 26122, 26 May 1950, Page 8

RESEARCH WORK OVERSEAS

“DESPONDENCY IN SOME FIELDS” NEGLECT OF PI.A.nY RESEARCH Because of the inability of others to utilise their discoveries many plant research workers in Britain and America were looking with envy upon the chemists and atomic physicists, said Dr. I. D. Blair, senior lecturer in microbiology at Canterbury Agricultural College. Lincoln, in giving some impressions yesterday of his visit to these countries under a Nuffield Travelling Fellowship in natural science. This was a very sorry situation, which was considered within the community of scientists to be a reflection upon the current state of the times, he said. Some of the best research work of the past had been that concerned with “the making of two blades of grass grow where one had grown before,” Dr. Blair said. Within the branches so concerned there had been a great spirit of adventure because the results, where they had planned improvements, been very spectacular. Now there deep despondency among many of the workers in these branches of study, particularly in the United States. This was associated with the fact that many forms of scientific endeavour had tended to become unpopular among those who controlled the purse strings. The situation had become aggravated when it was known that notwithstanding its excellence a good deal of research seemed to increase so-called surpluses. He could not see why the surpluses could not be distributed among the people in the problem areas of the world who were really starving, Dr. Blair said. The chemists and atomic physicists were working in a fluid and dynamic field, albeit one that was encouraged mainly because of its vast potentialities as seen by politicians, Dr. Blair said. This was the state of affairs which existed outside the great British universities. It gave a certain amount of comfort to find that in the environment of the universities there was still a tremendously uplifting approach to the pursuit of true knowledge.