Science: Research Boom

U.S. industry has vastly expanded its research laboratories, as well as its factories, during the war. What will happen to them in peace? Will the laboratories, too, slow, down when war orders stop? Industrialists think not.

The National Research Council's Office of Scientific Personnel quietly polled representative laboratories, including most of the top-ranking ones, for a conservative estimate of their plans and needs. All the laboratories, instead of cutting back, hope to enlarge their staffs at war's end. Total planned increase: 20%. The biggest laboratories, convinced of a research boom in postwar business, expect to hire about three times as many scientists as they did before the war.