Hokitika Guardian & Evening Star WEDNESDAY, MAY 19, 1920. RESEARCH WORK.

Hokitika Guardian, 19 May 1920, Page 2

Hokitika Guardian & Evening Star WEDNESDAY, MAY 19, 1920. RESEARCH WORK.

It is very surprising to note alter a sojourn of some years in America air' Canada, said a lecturer in Sydney the other day, the extraordinary indifference of Australia and New Zealand to the lessons taught by the war in respect to the vital importance of higher education and research wort. In Europe •Asia., and America the war lias com pletely transformed the attitude of the leading industrial States towards higher education and investigation. What all the warning words, propaganda, and precepts of our scholars and investigators for half a century have failed to do the sharp demonstration oh war effected within the brief space of five years. Research was discovered to the politician, not as the amiable weakness of elderly scholars, but as the main spring of national industries and the arbiter of life and death in war. So it happens that in America to-day money' is being lavished upon research, particularly of course, research of some immediate material value, Industrial Research” so called, but not to the exclusion of the “pure” sciences from which are to issue the industrial discoveries of ; the future. In the first place immense sums of money are now being expended by industrial firms in the United States on research, often along puj-oly theoretical lines. Thus it is estimated by Dr J. 0. Fields, from data supplied to him by the firm that the General Electric Company expended on research in its various laboratories in 1918, no less a sum than two million dollars (£400,000). Ihe Eastman Kodak Company, employ a staff of 40 research workers, and its research laboratory costs £30,000 per annum to maintain; as much, it may be pointed out, as the entire annual expenditure of the University of Adelaide, which is expected by this expenditure to 7 ispense the totality of human knowledge, from classical literature to surveying, to some 600 or 700 students annually. The Western Electric Company employs 309 research workers, and expends for this purpose two and a half million dollar-) annually. The Dupont Explosives Company employs in-its four chemical research laboratories 290 workers and expends two million dollars annually on research. A long, preliminary training in research methods—in the teohni pie of finding out new things—is nn absolutely essential perquisite to success The time has passed when fundamentally important industrial discover’es can be made by the lazy bov of the factory' who ties two parts of a machine together with a piece of string or by the operative who forgets to remove the fabric from the stretching machine, overnight, and so discovers the process of mercerisation. That day is past; it is early Victorian, and it is extinct Today, as Pasteur has said, “Chance favours only tile prepared mind.” Where are we to get these “prepared minds?” Obviously the only place from which they can come is the institution of higher training, the university. But do the students of our universities actually acquire training in the technique of Binding out new things? And this leads us to the second objection, that the shortly-to-be-by-gone manufacturer propounds, the objection that lie has tried research and that it does not pay. An incident which came to m v notice while fill'ng the Chair of Bio-chemistry at Toronto w' 1 serve to illustrate the origin of t’.is objection. A certain, individual had been recommended to a. leading firm of manufacturer as a. suitable person to conduct research, and the question of his appointment was, with unusual wisdom, referred to the Research Council of Canada. The reply chanced to pass through mv hands, and it was to the effect that the Council did not recommend the appointment, because the man in question had not yet made a mark in research as a student in his

university, and instances were numerous of failures and disappointment due to the employment of men “‘who have not cut their eye-teeth in this matter of research.”