Fantasy Football Challenge - Football Fanatics Library

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Popular Science Monthly

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at Vienna, the Biological Station at Naples, the Royal Institution in London, the Wellcome Laboratories in England and at Khartoum, the Smithsonian, Wistar, Carnegie and Rockefeller Institutes in the United States; the list of research institutes of important dimensions (excluding astronomical observatories) is, I believe, practically exhausted by the above enumeration, and many of them are woefully undermanned and underequipped. At least two of them, the Solvay Institute wholly, and the Frankfort Institute for Experimental Therapy in part, owe their existence and continuance to scientific men, Solvay and Ehrlich, who have contrived to combine the pursuit of wealth and of science, and have dedicated the wealth thus procured to the science that gave it birth. In 1900 the value of the manufacturing industries in the United States which had been developed from patented scientific inventions was no less than $395,663,958 per annum,[4] corresponding to a capital value of about $10,000,000,000. It is impossible to arrive at any accurate estimate of the proportion of this wealth which finds its way back to science to provide equipment and subsistence for the investigator, who is creating the wealth of the future. But the capital endowment of the Rockefeller and Carnegie Institutes, the two wealthiest institutes of research in the world is, according to the 1914 issue of Minerva, only $29,000,000. The total income (exclusive of additions to endowments) of all the higher institutions of learning in the United States in 1913, was only $90,000,000, of which a minute percentage was expended in research. [4] 12th census, Vol. 10, Part 4. If science produces so much wealth, is there no contrivance whereby we can cause a small fraction of this wealth to return automatically to science and to furnish munitions of war for fresh conquests of nature? A very small investment in research often produces colossal returns. In 1911 the income of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry was only $21,000. In 1913 the income of the Institute for Experimental Therapy at Frankfort, where "606" was discovered, was only $20,000; that of the Imperial Institute for Medical Research at Petrograd was $95,000, and that of the National Physical Laboratory in England (not exclusively devoted to research) was $40,000. Yet these are among the most famous research institutions in the world and have achieved results of world-wide fame and inestimable value both from a financial standpoint and from the standpoint of the physical, moral and spiritual welfare of mankind. In 1856, Perkin, an English chemist, discovered the coal-tar (anilin) dyes. The cost of this investigation, which was carried out in an improvised, private laboratory was negligible. Yet, in 1905, the United States imported $5,635,164 worth of these dyes from Europe, and Germany exported $24,065,500 worth to all parts of the world.[5] To-day we read that great industries in this country are paralyzed because these dyes temporarily can not be imported from Germany. All of these vast results sprang from a modest little laboratory, a meager equipment and the genius and patience of one man. [5] U. S. Census Bureau Bull. 92. W. R. Whitney, director of the research laboratory of the General Electric Company, points out that the collective improvements in the manufacture of filaments for electric lamps, from 1901 to 1911, have saved the consumer and producer no less than $240,000,000 annually. He adds with apparently unconscious naivete that the expenses of the research laboratory in his charge aggregate more than $100,000 annually![6] A handsome investment, this, which brings in some two hundred million for an outlay of one hundred thousand. [6] "Technology and Industrial Efficiency," McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1911. According to Huxley the discovery by Pasteur of the means of preventing or curing anthrax, silkworm disease and chicken cholera, a fraction of that great man's life work, added annually to the wealth of France a sum equivalent to the entire indemnity paid by France to Germany after the war of 1870. Humanity has not finished its conquest of nature; on the contrary, it has barely begun. The discipline of thought which has carried humanity so far is destined to carry it further yet. Business enterprise and politics, the all-absorbing interests of the majority of mankind, work in an endless circle. Scientific research communicates a thrust to this rotation which converts the circle into a spiral; the apex of that spiral lies far beyond our vision. We have, not decades, not centuries, not thousands of years before us; but, as astronomy assures us, in all probability, humanity has millions of years of earthly destiny to realize. Barely three thousand years of PURPOSEFUL scientific research have brought the uttermost ends of the earth to our doors; have made civilization and excluded much of the most brutal and brutalizing in life. Not more than two hundred years of research have made us masters where we were slaves; masters of distance, of the air, of the water, of the bowels of the earth, of many of the most dreaded aspects of disease and suffering. Only for forty years have we practiced antisepsis; only for sixty years have we had anesthetics; yet life to-day is well-nigh inconceivable without them. And all of this has been accomplished without any forethought on the part of the acknowledged rulers and leaders of mankind or any save the most trumpery and uncertain provision for research. What will the millions of years which stretch in front of us bring of power to mankind? We can barely foreshadow things too vast to grasp; things that will make the imaginings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells seem puny by comparison. The future, with the uncanny control which it will bring over things that seem to us almost sacred--over life and death and development and thought itself--might well seem to us a terrifying prospect were it not for one great saving clause. Through all that may happen to man, of this we may be sure, that he will remain human; and because of that we can face the future unafraid and confident that because it will be greater, it will also be better than the present. What can we do to accelerate the coming of this future? Not very much, it is true, but we can surely do something. We can

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