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Show national commission gi sideration to the So needs. For Secretary Udall. priority con-i west's water mo must feel some anguish at the criticism he has received from his friends in the conservation movement over the dam proposals, the National Water Commission might well prove a blessing. Ihe comnms.on, il it ever receives House approval and is set up, could search for ways to loosen the regional and institutional rigidities that now bind water resource development planning. (~ It -..,- a huge task, but the commission might even discover a solution to the Souihwes.'v water problems that would keep dams oul of the Grand Canyon and allow Colorado basin politicians to keep their heads above water.-Li ttiiR J. CARTER International Science Activities: Some New Vistas Open The axiom that science knows no frontiers seems to have been respected in a literal way until the Napoleonic era, at least in the Western world Dining the American Revolution Benjamin Franklin was playing by the accepted rules when he wrote a sate conduct letter addressed to captains oi American naval vessels and privateers in behait ol Captain Cook, who was sailing oil to explore the South Seas. England and France were at war with each other as often as not during the 18th and early 19th centuries, but British and French men oi science corresponded freely, passed through the lines to visit one another and conduct scientific business, elected each other to their academies, and mutual!) deplored the work oi the politicians. But the rise of the national state. the increasing importance of science and technology in warfare as the long day of the musket and massed formation passed, and the growing efficiency of communications ami police techniques blurred the old civilized distinction that science is stnctlv the affair of scientists and war the affair of politicians and professional soldiers. For most scientists In the United States today, however, the spirit oi the Enlightenment still, in some form, survives. The credo that science is international owes something as well to the practical belief that there can really be no secrets in basic research and that more is to be gained from the open exchange ot ideas and mutual cooperation than from scientific isolationism. A good many scientists unquestionably also see the international dialogue among scientists as one way open to them in the nuclear age to help prevent catastrophe. It is unquestionably much more dif- 17 JUNE 1966 ficult now than it was 200 years ago to separate science from politics. Old-fashioned nationalism has been exacerbated by ideological differences which complicate relations particularly between the United States di\C, Western European nations on the one hand and Communist countries on the other. Forces which propelled a generation of great theoretical scientists to the United States from Germain, Italy, and Hungary also produced Pontecorvo, Klaus Fuchs, and the fictional Dr. Strangelove. The Soviet Union, with its old academic ties to Western 1 urope coexists with the West more comfortably scien-tificallv than it does politically. Mainland China, with its cultural pride, its sense of outrage over injuries and insults inflicted by the West, and its special hatred of the United States for being the most powerful Western nation and so deeply involved in Asia, is something entirely different. In the United States, the international activities of American scientists have been to a major degree institutionalized. The apparatus, however, has not yet fully developed, although it is clear that the most important organizations, from both the policy and the administrative standpoints, are the State Department, the Office of Science arid Technology fOST) in the Office oi the President, and the quasi-governmental National Academy of Sciences. "the United States does not have the equivalent ot the minister of science found in the cabinets of many European countries. Our closest approximation is the director oi OST. who is also the President's science adviser and often represents the President at international meetings. But the OST staff is currently small and fully occupied with domestic problems. A committee now, however. is looking into the possibility of OST's engaging in greater activity in international scientific matters. For at least a decade the State Department has been seeking, without great success, to acquire the scientific competence it needs in the second half of the 20th century. State's difficulties in this sphere have been dramatized by a failure over the past year and a half to fill the top scientific job in the department, that of director of the Office of International Scientific and Technological Affairs. One difficulty is that the role of the science director has not been well defined. The department badly needs to be able to 'understand the significance of scientific and technical developments, in this country and abroad, relevant to foreign policy decisions. Lately, the department has taken steps that indicate it is more serious about increasing its competence than it has been before. But it is still not clear whether the science director, who is also science adviser to the Secretarv oi State, is to be an administrator running the science attache program and overseeing our activities in international organizations and other functions ot ihe department in which science is involved, or whether he is to act primarily as a policy adviser and scientist-diplomat. Problems of science in the State Department and recent developments will be discussed in another article in this space. The scientific community has not rallied energetically to the aid of State, perhaps because ot a feeling that science has. up to now at least, not been taken seriously in Foggy Bottom. It is probably true that in international matters scientists have preferred to work through the Academy, which the scientists regard as their own and as essentially nongovernmental despite the lederal source of most of its funds. Historically, the academies have been the instruments oi international activities. The Royal Society and the French Academy of Sciences, both founded in the 1660's, set the style And our own National Academy of Sciences, established 200 years later, followed the lead zealously from ihe start, since the Unit- 1605 |
