SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD

Harvard is catching up with today. The age of business found its academic embodiment on the other side of the river some time ago; the announcement in this morning's columns shows that the age of science is also to be adequately represented on the campus. The Harvard of yesterday was not unimportant in the scientific world. In the sciences of biology and physics, however, its efforts have been chiefly directed towards the development of old rather than the exploration of new fields of research. With the buildings completed there will no longer be a physical handicap to progress.

Yesterday's editorial remarked that shrubbery does not make a faculty. Neither will new laboratories bring discoveries to Cambridge ipso facto. In spite of the new Mallinckrodt laboratory Harvard still lags in the coming field of physical chemistry. The buildings under construction can only justify themselves if they connote progress in the new physics and the new biology, and geography, newly made a science. For the science of yesterday, unlike its culture, is no good at all. Harvard must catch up with tomorrow.