Big Demand Overseas For Trained Scientists

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28161, 27 December 1956, Page 11

Big Demand Overseas For Trained Scientists

The proportion of successful high school pupils, inslead ot only the "cream” of them as in the past, who entered the universities of Britain had been increased, mainly because of the number and amounts of financial grants, said Mr John Vaughan, senior lecturer in chemistry at Canterbury University College, in an interview in Christchurch yesterday. He returned on Christmas Eve after spending lb months in the United States and Britain.

For some time, the Americans, he said, had been extremely conscious of the need for science graduates, in particular engineers, and in general technically-quali-fied men.

It seemed that British universities had become increasingly conscious of the shortage of scientists since he had been last in Britain seven years ago, said Mr Vaughan. The shortage was a real problem for Britain, and more and more was being done to produce technically-qualified persons. Under a United States Public Health Service fellowship, Mr Vaughan went to the University of Michigan for a year, to work on the chemical behaviour of substances known as tetrazoles, compounds which had shown promising possibilities in the control of cancer.. A grant by the Carnegie Corporation en-

abled him to visit colleagues m his- field of organic chemistry in other American universities. His visit was sponsored by the United States Educational Foundation in New Zealand, and he travelled as a Fulbright senior scholar. He then went to Britain for three months to visit organisations in which work in his Held was taking place. Tetrazoles were compounds with a high nitrogen content, and with ring structures of a certain molecular type, and cer-

tain reactions to them had not been fully investigated before he was given his fellowship, said Mr Vaughan. In addition, not many tetrazoles were known He prepared a new series of tetrazoles, and at the same time investigated their decomposition, that, again, gave him a number of new compounds which were of interest to the United States Public Health Service.

Mr Vaughan’s work, in general will be published soon in an American technical journal. "Judged from chemistry and from my point of view as a teacher, the pass bachelor’s degree in America does not take students as far into chemistry as comparable British or New Zealand students,”’ said Mr Vaughan. “That is not really the result of a sort of slow teaching. One of the factors .involved is that Americans pay much greater regard to general education as such. Some of their general education, schemes were most impressive.” In the graduate schools, standards varied tremendously, as was to be expected in a country as big as the United States, he said. In the top-rated graduate schools, the post-bachelor courses were extremely good, and in those particular graduate schools the student gaining a Ph.D. would catch up on the British student, and often forge ahead of him in the amount of knowledge he had assimilated.

“I was surprised at the very large extent to which Government agencies in the United States supported university research,” said Mr Vaughan. A healthy sign was that a man gaining a bachelor’s degree at one university would invariably study for his Ph.D. degree in a different university, said Mr Vaughan.. That was stimulating both to the man and his contemporaries .at university. Every facility was made available to him at all the universities, said Mr Vaughan, who spoke highly of the generosity and hospitality of Americans. All connected with the universities were keen to hear of university lite and research in New Zealand and he .was called on to give lectures wherever he went.