Science: THE UNEASY SCIENTISTS

THE worried debate about the relationship of science and government got a going-over last week from widely divergent angles. In a new Government document, Organization and Administration of the Military Research and Development Programs, the scientists told some of their own troubles. In an impressive editorial, the Protestant Christian Century pointed out the cause of their distress.

The Government document, a book of 710 pages, is the record of hearings last June before a House of Representatives subcommittee. What the committeemen heard was not reassuring. Individualistic scientists, said witness after witness, cannot be regimented and still work at their best.

When they are put under military command, as in the many laboratories of the armed services, they feel that they are misunderstood and their capabilities wasted. Said William Webster, executive vice president of the New England Electric System, twelve years a naval officer: "A military organization is a very trying climate for the best work of scientists."

The most violent opinion was expressed by John William Marchetti, who resigned last May as electronics director of the Cambridge Air Force Research Center after a row with a new commanding officer. Said Marchetti: "We got decisions that were stupid, just plain stupid, and some that were intolerable." He did not blame the military men for all the friction. "It is one clique pitted against another ... 'It is said of a well-known Air Force research and development center that at the officers' club the relative ranks are officers, enlisted men, dogs and civilians.' "

Calmer witnesses testified that much of the trouble comes from the military habit of rapidly "rotating" the commanding officers of a laboratory. Sometimes these birds of passage stay a year or two, learning almost nothing about the complicated work that they are supposed to supervise.

Many of the witnesses ducked the dangerous problem of security. But a few eminent ones pulled no punches. President James R. Killian Jr. of Massachusetts Institute of Technology deplored "what sometimes seems to be a preoccupation with security procedures and policies at the expense of scientific progress . . . There has been, unhappily, a deterioration in recent months in the relationship between Government and science ... Members of the scientific community are clearly discouraged and apprehensive . . ."

Said Mathematician John von Neumann of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, who last week was appointed to the Atomic Energy Commission (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) : "Very many people who have some trivial blot way back in their past do not know whether they can take a chance on getting into sensitive work ... To have once been dropped for security reasons is for the average person ... a professional catastrophe."