SCIENTISTS IN WAR

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20125, 20 December 1939, Page 5

SCIENTISTS IN WAR

BRITAIN’S SHORTAGE PROFESSOR’S OPINION LONDON, Dec. 1. The suggestion that Britain is dangerously weak in the number of young scientific men with the fighting services was made by Professor J. B. S. Haldane, professor of Biometry at University College, London, in a speech at Birkbeck College, London. “We are told, he said, “that our forces have the best scientific brains behind them. I doubt it. Apart from the Royal Air Force, I am not sure that our fighting forces ai'e not worse oil than they were 25 years ago. We are still using the same experts in many cases as we used then. “The scientific departments, apart from the R.A.F., have not many really first-rate permanent workers. This is not because scientists object to war. It is much more because the problems offered them in peace-time are pretty dull—except in the R.A.F., where the problems are of the greatest scientific interest.

“Therefore, there is a tendency to get ‘into these departments rather stodgy people who are good at routine work, but are not men of imagination and initiative. I do not think that the Cabinet includes one member who is in close touch with scientific development as Lord Balfour was in the last war.”