SCIENCE FRUSTRATED

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXVI, 10 January 1936, Page 2

SCIENCE FRUSTRATED

LOP=SIDED DEVELOPMENT Lecturing on “Science and Social Needs,” Professor Julian Huxley said the only satisfactory view to take was that science was a function of society, influencing the social system in which it had been horn, and being influenced by it in return. An analysis of science in existing society revealed a large degree, of mal-function. Science was often frustrated ; actual discoveries already yiade were not applied. Research where an immediate profit motive, or one ol immediate military advantage, could be discerned, obtained far greater financial support than long-range research, or research where the advantage was indirect or not to be assessed in money-returns. This had led to an extremely lopsided development of science in Britain, which was just the opposite of what should be aimed at. The obivous demands of mankind on the applications of physico-chemical science, in the shape of flying, increased power, rapid communication and transport, storing up sounds and pictures, and so on had already been granted as the result of scientific activity in the past 200 years. Those on biological science, such as a high level of health and energy, control of sex, of development and of racial progress, had not ; yet they spent much less on biological research. Even more striking was the extremely small amount of money and energy spent on psychological and sociological research in view of file fact that almost all the difficulties of our present civilisation sprang, not from failure to control external nature, but from failure to control human nature, and its social and economic systems. They often characterised the period in which we lived as the Age of Science. That was quite inaccurate. Before they could call themselves truly scientific, they must bo willing to use scientific method for the understanding and control of all departments ol existence. Further, to prevent the piecemeal or lopsided development ol science they needed a new discipline—the scientific study of science itself, in its capacity as a social function.