Impressed By Equipment

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32060, 7 August 1969, Page 6

Impressed By Equipment

A visit to the physical department of the University of Canterbury yesterday impressed a, prominent physicist, Professor K. H. Hausser, director of the department of molecular physics at the Max Planck Institute, Heidelburg, West Germany.

“I was impressed how wellequipped your scientists are for such a small country with a limited population,” he said in an interview.

Professor Hausser, who is on his way to Melbourne for an international scientific

conference, said he hadf visited Auckland University, the D.S.I.R. in Wellington and Canterbury University. Asked in what scientific field he could foresee the greatest development in the future, Professor Hausser said this would probably centre on research into heredity. There was considerable danger that the basic heredity aspect would deteriorate, he said. This was not his field, but considerable work was being done in understanding the genes and the aspects of heredity, and great progress would be made here, he said. Professor Hausser said that in Europe the situation had been hardened by Czechoslovakia which had done no-one any good. He said that he had attended an international scientific meeting in Siberia in 1967, when there was some freedom of expression, but colleagues who had attended a meeting in Russia recently had told him that the situation was worse than it was previously. In September he would go to East Germany to lecture. He regarded this as a responsibility because opportunities were limited for colleagues there to visit the West.

“It is rather complicated for ' them,” he said. “The authorities are loath to let them out, but want to be

represented at international meetings. If they send a political man who does not understand science, he will be laughed at because scientists are very hard when it comes to this sort of thing.” Of scientists, Professor Hausser said a conservative, right-wing scientist anywhere in the world would be hard to find. Most were liberal, against any regimentation and in favour of world peace.