spencer klaw : The New Brahmins - Scientific Life in America

Preface IA Brief Prospectus
NOT MANY YEARS AGO scientific research in the United States was for the most part a priváté activity. Except for those branches of science relevant to medicine, or to cer-tain branches of industry and agriculture, science seemed as remote from the concerns of ordinary men as art or poetry. This notion was, of course, dispelled by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People and their governments have come to look on science as a precious natural resource, on whose skillful exploitation the health, prosperity, and military might of nations all depend.
The awe that scientists now inspire, and the patronage they command, have inevitably changed the nature of their calling. They have become richer and more caught up in worldly affairs. A physicist may earn more than a United States senator, and scientists are continually being summoned to Washington to advise politicians on how to deal with smog, or missiles, or the high birth rate in Africa. One of the characteristic dilemmas that scientists now face vhether to regard such invitations as calls to duty, or as temptations to escape for a time, with somé show of
honor, the painful uncertainty and intellectual perils of sci-entific work.
Scientists have alsó been affected by changes in the technology of scientific investigation. In many branches of scíence enonnous—and enormously expensive—instruments are required, together with the services of squads of en-gineers and technicians. As a result, more and more men who have been traíned as scientists end up, by necessity or choice, as scientific administrators. The high cost of re-search has alsó made scientists more and more dependent on pnblic patronage, forcing them to become involved in the kind of politics in which all citizens must engage if they want large sums of money from the government. The main business of science is still the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. But the way the pursuit is mounted, the rewards attendant on its success, and the temptations that beset the pursuer—all these have changed to an extent and in ways undreamed of when scientists now barely in their fifties were beginning their careers.
The aim of this book is to portray the scientific com-munity in the United States: to convey a sense of what it is Jike to be a scientist ín America in a time when scíence has become a form of established religion, and scientists its priests and ministers. Much of what I have written is based on published sources. But I have alsó drawn heavily on what I have been able to learn by questioning scientists themselves. Since 1964, I have talked at length with somé one hundred and twenty-five scientists, constítuting, in a very loose sense, a representative sample of the American scientific community. Among the people I interviewed were graduate students and postdoctoral trainees; sci-entists at big universities and scientists at small colleges; scientists who work with huge machines and direct the work of large teams of researchers and scientists who sit by themselves and think; scientists who work in industrial laboratories, scientists who work for the government, and scientists who run businesses of their own; scientific ad-ministrators and scientific politicians; applied scientists and scientists interested in events and domains almost unimaginably remote from the world we can see and touch and feel.
In generál, I asked these people to teli me about their careers: about the choices they had made, and why, and how they felt about their work and its rewards. Somé of the interviews were spread over two or three sessions, and ed many hours. To encourage the people whom I interviewed to speak freely, I assured them I would not use :heir reál names without their permissjon. Many of the people whom I have quoted in the pages that follow are efore identífied by names other than their own—a fact that I have indicated by italicizing such names the first :ime they appear. Where I have written at somé length about a scientist's career, I have often changed not only his e but other ídentifying details as well.
It is hard to speak of oneself, evén to a stranger and with the promise of anonymity, without striking poses. But most of the men and women with whom I talked seemed to feel an obligation to report on their lives as scientists with as much scientific objectivity as they could summon up, and on the whole they succeeded in summoning up a great deal. I was particularly impressed, and moved, by the hon-esty wjth which many of them talked about their fears of f ailing as scientists, and about the reality of f ailure itself.
A word is in order as to what kinds of scientists this book is about. My originál intention, to which I have adhered, was to write mainly about mathematicians and people trained in what are often called the hard sciences. I was not sure what I should do about psychologists and econo-mists and other social scientists. It seemed wrong to ignore them, and yet it soon became clear that unless I was pre-pared to stretch and mutilate them horribly I could not make them fit intő the same bed that so nicely accommo-dated physicists, chemists, biologists, and other varieties of natural scientists. And so I decided to leave them out of the book, except for a brief Appendix in which I would explain why I had left them out, and say a few words about their status as demimondaines in the American scientific community. What I have to say elsewhere in the book should be taken as applying only to natural scientists.