Conant Analyzes Modern Science Trends in First Columbia Lecture

Lowering a curtain of secrecy over vast areas of research has been one of the remarkable innovations in science and technology in the last decade, President Conant said last night at Columbia University in the first installment of a lecture series.

Under the title of "Modern Science and the Modern Mind" the President's four Bampton Lectures propose "to examine the cultural significance of what has been going on in science since, say, 1935."

Such is the necessity of hush-hush in the whole atomic energy field, Conant asserted, that, "It is impossible today or in the foreseeable future to have a frank, rational, searching discussion of the industrial uses of atomic energy. The general public might just as well stop reading anything in the papers about atomic energy or atomic bombs. By the nature of the case it is almost certain to be misleading."

Charity and Sanity

But, the President said, the public must not wring its hands about this situation. It must understand the consequences of secrecy and applied nuclear physics, and it must learn to "live with these consequences with charity and sanity." This, he said, "is surely the chief spiritual problem of our time."

The role of the scientist in society has changed drastically, Conant claimed. Far from being in the "long hair" sphere while the inventor is the public idol, the scientist of the 1950's is at once theorist and inventor, in that the public expects of him the miracles it once expected from an Edison.

His changed status in this respect and his altered status in relation to organized society, that is, the Government, constitute major developments in the role of the scientist.