SCIENTISTS POST

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30469, 17 June 1964, Page 22

SCIENTISTS POST

U.K. Outbid By U.S.A. (N.Z.P.A.-Reuter— Copyright) LONDON, June 15. Dr. John Wesley Mitchell, iged 50, a New Zealander, formerly of Christchurch, who was appointed director of the British Government’s National Chemical Laboratory from last October at £4050 a year, is returning to his former post as professor of physics in the University of Virginia. Dr. Mitchell had also been lecturer and reader in experimental physics in the University of Bristol, England. Dr. Mitchell is noted for the Invention of the arditrontube which made revolutionary improvements in high-speed photography. He gained his M.Sc. at the University of Canterbury, was awarded an 1851 science scholarship in 1935 and went to Oxford where he became a Ph.D. in 1937. During the war Dr. Mitchell worked in the Ministry of Supply armaments research department at Woolwich. The Institution of Professional Civil Servants recently protested to the Prime Minister (Sir Alec Douglas-Home) that there was a “crisis of confidence” among scientists and that the Government bore a heavy responsibility for the present state of affairs. The United States National Science Foundation reported earlier this year that 912 British scientists and engineers left for the United States in the year ending last June.