May, 19581 LINSTEAD SCIENCE AND POLITICS 275 The Fifth Bernard Dyer Memorial Lecture Science and Politics BY SIR HUGH LINSTEAD, O.B.E., LL.D., F.P.S., M.P. (Deliveyed after the Annuat General Meeting of the Society, February 26th, 1958) To be asked to give the fifth Bernard Dyer Memorial Lecture is an honour I greatly appreciate. The purpose of the lecture is primarily to do honour to the memory of the life and work of Bernard Dyer, one of the founders of this Society. As the years pass the number of those who knew him will become smaller and there will be fewer additions to be made to the known details of his life. It is therefore fortunate that in the first lecture Sir John Russell recorded so living a picture of him, from which he emerges as one of the great individualists of the period when chemistry in this country was taking shape as an organised profession.Such links as I can claim with him are through the Pharmaceutical Society, where he studied in the laboratory that had once been Hofman’s, and through the City of London School. Here, incredibly, he was taught chemistry in 1871 by the same Isaac Scarf who taught me in 1914, forty-three years later. I met him personally once only, but he remains in my memory as a twin figure with that other individualist of the same epoch, Henry Armstrong. The two main interests in my life have been pharmacy and politics and I have chosen as the title of this lecture “Science and Politics.” I want in it to discuss the relation between those two disciplines and, if I can, to define the place that the scientist has to fill in politics.It will be useful first of all to look at examples of the sort of scientific problems that impinge most closely on politics. These are problems about which the scientist is equipped to speak authoritatively and yet he often finds that his answer is not the final one. If one were to list those likely to have the most profound effect upon humanity during the next century they would fall into two rough groups. There are the old biological problems that have been with mankind throughout its struggling history-the relation between populations and foodstuffs; the preservation of natural resources ; the conservation and utilisation of water supplies. And then there are those more recent challenges that at present outstrip our ability to regulate them-nuclear fission; penetration into outer space; and all that is implied in the term “brain-washing.” Each one of these, the old and the new, represents a field in which science and politics are inextricably mixed and to which both scientist and politician have contributions to make, although differing both in form and in content.In reviewing these problems the scientist’s approach is simple and direct. The politician’s, for valid reasons that will appear in due course, hesitating, fumbling, circumambulant. I speak here of the politician in a parlia- mentary democracy. The scientist’s method in inductive: here are the facts, where do they lead me? But they are fundamentally different in so far as there always intrudes into the political approach the incalculable element of the reactions of human beings.One or two examples will illustrate this. Sir Harold Hartley, in the first Graham Clark Memorial Lecture before the Institution of Civil Engineers in May, 1955, thus sums up the achievement of the Tennessee Valley scheme with its 27 dams and reservoirs controlling a river basin of 40,000 square miles: “The reservoirs provide 11$ million acre-feet of storage for flood control at the beginning of the flood season and have saved an immense amount of flood damage each year. Six million acres of rich bottomland is protected in this way. The replanting of the slopes has stopped soil erosion, has made the muddy streams clear again and delayed the silting of the reservoirs. T.V.A. brought new life into a depressed area and did much to raise its standard of living.” This is an objective scientific assessment of the benefits that have (almost literally) flowed from this great federal project.That was what the scientists promised and what they gave to the community. Yet what were the political reactions that it provoked? Opposition from the outset that was none the less fierce because at that period of agonising depression in the American economy it had to be under cover. And opposition subsequently There are fewer such men to-day and we are the poorer. The politician proceeds deductively: there is the goal, how do I get to i t ?276 LINSTEAD : SCIENCE AND POLITICS [Vol. 83 with the objective that there should never again be such a dynamic use of combined national resources unless indeed the country were to be driven to initiate public works by reason of a comparable slump to that of 1830.Why this political opposition to a great economic achievement? It was not simply that private vested interests moved in again once the emergency was past. Opposition to Roosevelt’s New Deal was based upon deep conviction. If we remove the same problem to another comparable area, the Danube Basin, we find F. A. Hayek in “The Road to Serfdom” maintaining that “one cannot create a kind of Tennessee Valley Authority for the Danube Basin without thereby determining beforehand for many years to come the relative rate of progress of the different ra.ces inhabiting this area, or without subordinating all their individual aspirations or wishes to this task.. . . Though there are no doubt many people who honestly believe that if they were allowed to handle the job they would be able to settle all these problems justly and impartially, and who would be genuinely surprised to find suspicion and hatred turning against them, they would probably be the first to apply force when those whom they mean to benefit prove recalcitrant, and to show themselves quite ruthless in coercing people in what is presumed to be their own interests.” You may feel that a Macedonian or Bulgarian peasant would willingly sacrifice some modicum of such liberty as poverty allots to him in return for a plenteous supply of water and power. You may feel that the choice in such cases often lies between collective action and no action at all and that Hayek’s arguments have no roots in reality.Nevertheless, they represent political ideals deeply andl sincerely held. They have no relevance to the scientific balance sheet of schemes such a s the T.V.A. or the Danube Basin: that balance is measured in gallons and kilowatts. But a politician can ignore ideals such as Hayek’s only at his peril. A neat example of the interplay of politics and scientific irrigation schemes is mentioned in “Report of the Royal Commission on East Africa” (Cmd. 9475 of 1955). The Com- mission point out that “throughout East Africa the lack of discovered or developed water supplies is a major factor in preventing tlhe use of otherwise productive resources.” They recognise that some part of the limited finance of the governments of the East African territories should be devoted to meeting this basic need.What could be more straight- forwardly obvious than that this money should be used on schemes selected by the Govern- ment for priority? But the Commission warn against such utilisation of government water- development agencies operating at or below cost. Experience in Kenya has shown that once government shows itself prepared to move into this field and offer its services on what are in effect subsidised terms, numbers of farmers forthwith postpone embarking on water development privately and wait for their turn in the government scheme. The result is likely to be that the amount of water development may prove to be less than if the government had never moved in at all ! .. . But perhaps this is not politics but simply human nature ! The reverse process-politics driving science-is vividly illustrated in Israel. The Proclamation setting up the new State of Israel in 1948 declared that Israel “will be open to the immigration of Jews from all countries of their dispersion.” No Jew who reached Israel could be turned away, and since mid-1948 nearly 900,000 Jewish immigrants have been received. The total population, Jews, non-Jews and immigrants, at the end of 1956 was about 1,800,000. So in ten years the population had doubled. Politically, that meant that every natural resource of the country had to be developed vigorously. Scientifically, that largely meant the development of water resources. From Dan to Beersheba the country is green.From Beersheba to Eilath on the Red Sea there is brown desert, the Negev. You fly south from Tel-Aviv over a landscape of the moon. Through this the Israelis have driven a monumental motor road and at rare intervals in this barren desolation groups of bungalo.ws can be picked out, each with its minute miracle of green where the desert is being compelled to flower. Israel’s irrigated area has increased from 300,000 dunams in 194849 to 1,000,000 in 1955-56. These achievements are spectacular, and one cannot but observe the almost complete absence of similar initiative by Egypt in Sinai and the Gaza strip and by Jordan along her long frontier with Israel. As I have said, political necessity has forced irrigation on Israel. But even there politics has at the same time compelled a truncated scheme.There can be no region where a comprehensive water con- servation scheme would be more rewarding than in the whole of this part of the Middle East. It should include Lebanon and Syria in the north, Israel and Jordan in the centre and Egypt (A dunam is a quarter of an acre.)May, 19581 LINSTEAD : SCIENCE AND POLITICS 277 and Saudi Arabia in the south. But one has no sooner named the countries concerned than politics rears its head. The feud between Arab and Jew is paralleled only by that between Muslim and Hindu, and makes any large scale co-operative enterprise a matter of immense difficulty even were the atmosphere not darkened by the aftermath of the Sinai campaign. These examples could be multiplied many times to show how politics blunts the edge of science.Take another of these fundamental biological problems where science and politics interlock-the reactions between population and food supply. The name linked with the first discussion of this problem in our own country and our own times is, of course, that of the Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus, curate of Albury in Surrey, who, in 1798, published his “Essay on the Principle of Population.” He argued that population would soon increase beyond the means of subsistence and that checks on this increase are necessary. The essay aroused a storm of controversy and, in his second edition in 1803, Malthus modified some of his conclusions. The problem remains a cardinal one in Africa and in Asia to-day. There are still some who accept the Malthusian doctrine.But the better view seems now to be that an increase in population provides by its own labour the food and other resources it needs. It is a problem of fundamental importance for the European settlers in Africa. They are, of course, fearful of the consequences of a steady increase of the African population and this fear evidently coloured their evidence to the Royal Commission to which I have already referred, evidence that seems to have been based on the belief that the Africans were increasing at an annual rate of 2 per cent. and would double their numbers in thirty-five years. To what was essentially a political approach the Commission opposed a scientific one. They undertook a statistical examination of the available census figures and reported that “apprehensions concerning an unduly rapid rate of population growth are not supported by the statistical material available; there is no evidence that the African population as a whole is increasing at an annual rate of 2 per cent.; [although] there has been an upward movement in the rate of natural increase.” But although science speaks here with an authoritative voice and has figures on its side, no politician would be so simple as to imagine that that disposes of the affair.The fear of the European that he will some day be drowned in a sea of Africans is too deeply planted to be eradicated by statistics, however authoritative. As examples of ways in which politics and science may interact, I have chosen two -conservation of water and the relation between population and food-where science may claim to be on the side of the angels, wherever that may leave politics.I want by way of contrast to take an example where science, unless it shows high responsibility, can all too easily serve the devil. It is what we to-day crudely call “brain-washing,” and it takes us back to Pavlov and his dogs. Pavlov knew that when a hungry dog saw food it would salivate. A bell was rung at the same time as he fed his dogs and he found, after many repetitions, that they would salivate at the sound of the bell even in the absence of food. From this Pavlov developed the theory of the conditioned reflex, which explains learning as the building up in the individual of a jig-saw of conditioned reflexes each one based on a different stimulus.It is this process, recognised for half a century and mildly applied in such persuasive operations as advertising, that has now been conscripted into the service of Soviet Russia. Dr. Joost Meerloo, formerly Chief of the Psychological Department of the Dutch armed forces and now of Columbia University, New York, describes two institutions, part of the Moscow Academy of Science, that are dedicated to the political application of the Pavlov theory. He says, “They are under orders to emphasise the purely mechanical aspects of Pavlov’s findings. Such a theoretical view can reduce all human emotions to a simple, mechanistic system of conditioned reflexes. Both organisations are control agencies dealing with research problems and the scientists who work on them explore the ways in which man can theoretically be conditioned and trained as animals are.” Now it so happens that in this current month, Express, a French weekly, has been publishing (January 31st, February 6th and February 13th) an account of the experiences of a Hungarian, Lajos Ruff, aged 26, during his “brain-washing” by the political police in Buda-Pest for six weeks until he was released during the abortive revolution of October, 1956.It reads like a fairy story and Ruff may be the only witness available to testify to its truth. ,4nd yet I have a firm feeling that his tale is in the main true. The headquarters of the political police in Buda-Pest, Andrassy-utca 60, had an unsavoury reputation when I was278 LINSTEAD SCIENCE AND POLITICS [Vol. 83 there in 1947.I can remember also all too well an unhappy woman who came to see me at the Bristol Hotel with a tale of the condition in which she found her husband when she was allowed to visit him. There was again the experience of the father of a Hungarian friend of mine now in England, who was frequently visited by the political police at all hours of the day or night, taken away to the commandatura and detained there, ostensibly for interrogation but in fact to break his spirit. I had the privilege of spending a full day with him at Esztergom and I subsequently read the verbatim account of his trial. The Mindszenty who gave evidence at the trial was no longer the Mindszenty of Esztergom. And so I am prepared to believe the substance of what Ruff has to say. This, remember, is not the Arabian Nights.It is Europe in 1956. He was confined in a comfortable cell, which he soon began to visualise as “the magic room,” where one was free from all responsibility for decisions of any kind. Here he was first conditioned to mistrust himself. He was put to sleep. When he was woken up a kindly doctor would accuse him of attempted suicide. He would deny it only to find a cut artery bandaged up and blood on the floor. Or he would be accused of trying to strangle himself. A scarf would be found in his bed and his neck would be severely bruised. Then he was conditioned to believe that he could never escape. A ray of light was projected into his cell. But wherever he stood or sat or lay it crept slowly towards him. Finally after some days he was convinced he could not escape it and so he flung himself into it, only to find it harmless and to sink into an exhausted sleep. He was given perpetual cinema shows so that finally the frontiers between the real and the imaginary lost their significance.“I cut myself off from real life,” he says, “I had no decisions to make. I had no need to think. . . .” Even when the door of his cell was left open, he had no desire to escape. It was at this stage that he began to reveal the names of friends. It had ceased to be a matter of any reality or meaning to him that they existed or what might happen to them as the result of his disclosures. One final quotation- “To the extent that I lost confidence in myself, my confidence in the doctor increased. . . . I was not far from the state in which one is said to say no matter what to a tribunal which seems to you unreal so that you can get back more quickly to the sole reality that matters, the safe world of the magic room.” Well, there it is: civilisation in the year of Our Lord 1956.Scientists may say hard things at times about politicians. Let them reflect with some humility on this prostitution of science by scientists as well as by politicians. I want to take briefly one other example of a field where politics and science interlock all too closely. There is no need to go over the familiar arguments in detail-the immense potential benefits to mankind and the immense dangers. What is of interest for our argument is that you have here a fundamental scientific discovery that has been hurled into the political arena and become the centre of acute controversy.Members of Parliament are willy-nilly having to equip themselves with all the vocabulary of atomic science and the Prime Minister is rapidly qualifying himself for a senior teaching post in a university department of nucleatr physics. It is right that there should be this intense concern. What, however, is less laudable is the manner in which scientific facts have become twisted and distorted to provide material for purely party debates. We know that there are dangers from radioactive fall-out. We do not know accurately what those dangers may be. In such circumstances it is surely not for responsible persons to exaggerate those dangers without information and to alarm the community by partisan statements.What is needed is the fullest information from the most reliable sources to enable some judgment to be formed of how far the danger extends and what are the risks we are running. That course was eventually followed and atn almost historic report on the hazards of radio- active fall-out was brought out by a committee of the Medical Research Council under the chairmanship of Sir Harold Himsworth. But not before h a m had been done by the irresponsible use of partial and distorted information for political purposes. I am not concerned to-night to defend or attack the two-party system as it has developed in this country. It has much to be said in its favour. Many of my French friends-some of them ex- perienced members of the Assemblke Nationale-speak enviously of the strength that the system And then there is Cardinal Mindszenty. He was told to keep away from it as it would damage him.That is the field of nuclear energy.May, 19581 LINSTEAD : SCIENCE AND POLITICS 279 ensures for the government of the day. And I am certainly no advocate of a multi-party system nor of that will-o’-the-wisp a national government of coalition. But I must acknow- ledge that with its many advantages the two-party system has one grave disadvantage. According to it, the duty of the Government is to govern and the duty of the Opposition is to oppose. And that latter duty can be in some circumstances interpreted to justify the use of alrnost any means to embarrass or discredit the Government. Both the parties are open equally to this criticism.At times when feeling is running high it is all too easy for partisanship to outrun discretion and responsibility. It is such occasions-perhaps they occur too often-that get politics and the politician a bad name, particularly when it is possible to compare side by side the reactions to the same problem among scientists and among politicians. Yet, broadly speaking, I am here to defend the politician in spite of actions that may from time to time appear to be indefensible in his behaviour or his decisions. Politics, in its parliamentary context, has been defined as “the infinite adventure of governing men.” A French professor to whom I shall refer again, Gustav Le Bon, once wrote that governing men is a very difficult matter and that the most a statesman can hope to achieve is “not to be too much governed by them.” Be that as it may, someone must attempt to govern and in a parliamentary democracy this implies the consent of the governed and therefore that he who governs shall conform to the only conditions-however distasteful to him-that may permit him to do so. Before the United States could be brought into the second World War, the President had slowly to ripen public opinion over two years.One of the major factors in the failure of the Suez operation was the impossibility, for security reasons, of taking any preliminary steps at all to prepare public opinion in this country for such drastic action by our forces. Instead of being prepared, the public was stunned. There may be the clearest of reasons for some line of action that can be demonstrated scientifically and yet it may be politically entirely un- realistic.The economic advantages of a union between the two parts of Ireland are no doubt very great. Yet he would be a brave man who would dare even to suggest at a public meeting in Ballymena or Portrush that they might conceivably be worth discussion. I do not doubt that it can be persuasively shown that Israel is not a viable economic unit. But I have equally no doubt that nothing short of physical extinction will prevent that country from developing and improving its living standards steadily. There it is not mathematics that provides the answer. The politician must, of course, use science. But ultimately his decisions are taken by that sixth sense, Ze sens du $.possible, the sum of all the factors, material, human and moral that bear on a situation. To underline the cardinal necessity of always carrying the people with you in any major political change may suggest that a Member of Parliament should be merely the delegate of his electors.But this ought never to be so. Edmund Burke stated memorably the relationship between a Member of Parliament and his constituents in his speech to the electors of Bristol after the declaration of the poll on November 3rd, 1774. “Certainly, gentlemen,” he said, “it ought to be the happiness and glory of a repre- sentative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinions high respect ; their business unremitted attention.. . . But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the Law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry alone, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” Nevertheless, the greatest and most independent of statesmen is never a completely free agent to do precisely what he believes should be done at the time when he believes it should be done. He must temper his actions by regarding the state of public opinion.Roosevelt knew it ; Baldwin found it out ; it was tragically brought home to Sir Anthony Eden. Gustav Le Bon, to whom I have referred, wrote a t the end of the last century a remarkable book, which is too little known. It is available in English as “The Crowd.” By reference mainly to French examples, he attempts an analysis of the motives and ways of behaviour of men and women when they lose their identities as the result of becoming, however temporarily, members of a crowd. “There is He must “carry the people with him.” Politics is not mathematics. It is will power. He called it “La Psychologie des Foules.”280 LINSTEAD : SCIENCE AND POLITICS [Vol. 83 nothing so queer as folk” and Le Bon lays bare the peculiar queerness of folk in the mass.Writing more than sixty years ago, he draws attention to the destruction of the religious, political and social beliefs in which all the elements of our civilisation are rooted. “The ideas of the past,” he says, “although hall‘ destroyed, being still very powerful, and the ideas which are to replace them being still in process of formation, the modern age represents a period of transition and anarchy. . . . The entry of the popular classes into political life- that is to say, in reality, their progressive transformation into governing classes-is one of the most striking characteristics of our epoch of transition.” Then, by way of an analysis of the characteristics of what he calls a psychological crowd -a crowd in which the individual has come to surrender his personality-he explains the effect on politics and government of this shift in the balance of power from the traditional governing classes to the new governing classes.From this Le Bon demonstrates that crowds are not to be influenced by reasoning. They think in images and are specially impressed by the marvellous. Among their charac- teristics he notes impulsiveness, irritability and the absence of judgment and of the critical spirit. This being the condition of human beings when they are assembled in the particular kind of crowd that we recognise as a nation or other political community, he goes on to show that the art of governing them cannot be based primarily on appealing to their reason. For good or for bad, says Le Bon, crowds are led by affirmation without proof, by repetition and by contagion.“To know the art of impressing the imagination of crowds is to know at the same time the art of governing them.” “All the great statesmen of every age and every country, including the most absolut e despots, have regarded the popular imagination as the basis of their power, and they have never attempted to govern in opposition to it. ‘It was by becoming a Catholic,’ said Napoleon to the Council of State, ‘that I terminated the Vend6en war, by becoming an Ultramontane that I won over the Italian priests, and had I to govern a nation of Jews I would rebuild Solomon’s temple’.” And a final quotation : “A knowledge of the psychology of crowds,” says Le Bon, “is to-day the last resource of the statesman who wishes, not to govern theim-that is becoming a very difficult matter-but at any rate not to be too much governed by them.” The developments studied by Le Bon were reviewed in 1927 by another Frenchman, Julien Benda, in a book he called “La Trahison des CZercs”-“Betrayed by the Intellectuals,” we might translate it.It was a book that did not attain fame until it was reprinted in 1947 at the end of the second World War. Benda’s conclusion-that humanity had been let down by those who should have been its intellectual saviours-seemed to have been tragically reinforced by the behaviour of many of the leaders of French thought during 1939 and 1940 and especially during the German occupation. In his book Benda proclaimed the duty of the intellectuals in every community to be to defend eternal and objective values-reason, for example, and justice. Surveying the development of humainity from the same viewpoint as Le Bon, Benda suggests that there was a time when human beings could be regarded as forming two groups.There was the mass of the people held together by such forces as membership of the same country or of the same class. And there was the small intellectual class or corporation, which understood and opposed the inadequacy and parochialism of such a limited conception of human association. These latter were the teachers, the artists, the philosophers who were seeking to discover the soul of Europe, something that would rise above nationality. Among other means to their ends they were developing a universal language-Latin-and standards of thought and behaviour based upon thle teachings of the Greeks and of Christ.Benda considered that by the time he was writing this corporation of the 6lite had sold out to the masses. It no longer opposed their purely realistic and material ideas. Indeed, it had taken them over and glorified them. “To-day,” he says, “the game is over. The layman has won. . . . Indeed, all humanity has become lay, including the intellectuals.” By “lay” he means materialistic and it is this surrender to the whims of the masses that leads him to accuse the intellectuals of trahison-treachery, betrayal. It is the writers-especially the journalists-who come under Benda’s lash. The scientist escapes. He escapes largely because he has so far been uncommitted. But the scientist has all the same been increasingly sensitive to his lack of authority in the political application of his discoveries and there is an increasing demand among scientists that they shall have an effective voice in the practical conduct of political affairs.They are, in fact, poised for the decisive move from the objective field of science to the subjective field of politics. AndMay, 19581 LINSTEAD : SCIENCE AND POLITICS 281 I want to-night to raise at least one voice against what may well be a tragic decision if it were acted upon by any large group of scientists. In to-day’s world-a world of propaganda, cold war, mass hypnotism by broadcasting and by newspapers with vast circulations-truth is too easily a casualty. If humanity is to be deprived of objective standards because the scientist has come down from his uncommitted heights to take sides in the party-political battle, then humanity will be immeasurably the poorer. To say that the scientist should stand aloof from the party-political contest is not to exclude him from politics in its fullest and best sense.He has political duties of the first importance that no one else can perform. The first is to ensure that his discoveries are clearly presented to the public. There is an eager audience waiting to be informed about the significance of scientific developments. There is an immense diversity of means whereby these things can be brought to the eyes and ears of the men, women and children who want to know about them. But just because these means are so potent and so pervasive there is a great responsibility upon those who control them and use them to ensure that, so far as is humanly possible, they are used in the service only of truth as that is understood by science.This responsibility rests with particular weight on the shoulders of some individuals. The scientific correspondents of great newspapers, those who have the direction of scientific programmes on the radio, those who teach science in schools and universities, cannot escape from it. A special duty rests upon some of our scientific bodies both in specialised fields and generally. The British Association for the Advancement of Science has for long recog- nised the need in this field and has recently studied ways by which, at its annual meetings and otherwise, it can disseminate still more widely a knowledge of the contributions science is making to human progress. It grows harder as science expands and deepens.It faces the peculiar difficulty that the mass of people, as Le Bon so clearly showed, are neither able to follow a reasoned argument nor wish to do so. They think in images and are at the mercy of someone who can put persuasively and vividly his story to them. This, then, emphasises the need for, and the heavy responsibility of, scientists who are willing to assume the r6le of interpreters of science to the public. They can influence public opinion for good or for bad by a single broadcast or a single newspaper article. To achieve their purpose they must present what they have to say in vivid images and stir the emotions.And yet in selecting their examples and in planning the emphasis of their argument they must regulate themselves by the coldest objective standards. To interpret science to the public is in such circumstances an undertaking of the highest trust and responsibility, worthy of the attention of the finest scientific brains we have. Within this large field of making science understandable by the public is a narrower field, and the need for it to be adequately filled has been most vividly brought home to me during a now long experience of politics. The politician, and I include the statesman and all who have the direction and decision in affairs of government, is frequently faced with problems the solution to which depends upon an assessment of abstruse scientific facts or probabilities.As we know, the politician is rarely himself equipped to undertake this assessment. For example, what minister is there who from his own knowledge of atomic science or of biology can provide the current answers of science to the questions provoked by the threat of the hydrogen bomb? He must turn to some authoritative scientific source of information. It must not only be reliable, it must be shorn of the suspicion of party-political affiliation. WRere is he to find it, particularly if science has so involved itself with party politics that individual scientists have aligned themselves with political parties and their opinions have thereby become-rightly or wrongly-suspect and liable to be discounted accordingly? Just as historically the political bishop came to be treated with reserve, so, too, the political scientist handicaps himself and renders less effective his services both to politics and to science.An historic example of the force with which a completely objective case can be presented for a scientific purpose is Sir Henry Dale’s letter to The Times on August 8th, 1945, a few days after the first atom bomb had been dropped. He discusses the claims of scientific freedom as opposed to the secrecy imposed by considerations of security. “This achievement [nuclear fission],” wrote Sir Henry, “at all stages, has been the greatest of war secrets, kept with a magnificent loyalty. The scientists concerned will remain loyal to that duty, guarding closely whatever has still to be kept secret till the war with Japan Far from it.The interpretation of science to laymen is no easy task. Where is he to find i t ?282 LINSTEAD : SCIENCE AND POLITICS [Vol. 83 is finished. Then, I believe, they will wish to be done with it forever. We have tolerated much, and would tolerate anything, to ensure the victory for freedom; but when the victory is won we shall want the freedom.” Another example, on a different plane, but in its own way intensely stimulating, is the paper read by Sir Charles Goodeve before the South Wales Institute of Engineers at their Centenary Meeting on October 29th, 1967. He called it “The Development of Britain’s Physical and Geographical Advantages.” He shows how unevenly Britain has developed her advantages and how in fields where there is little or no direct competition the utilisation of our coal and water, for example, we have lagged seriously behind others.He shows a clear appreciation of how politics can bedevil the application of science to improving our affairs. “We are slow,” he says, “to apply modern knowledge because to do this means change and change means hurting a few and benefitting others, generally many others. Those who are about to be hurt scream loudly ; those who will benefit keep quiet for fear that they become a target for the screams of the first group. Change leads to opposition and as 2 consequence a large part of our scientific effort remains unused.” But this does not prevent him from advocating the remedy that, as a scientist surveying our problems objectively against the background of intense scientific development everywhere, he regards as essential-capital investment in modernising industry and its services. And he does this boldly, although recognising that “the vast majority of people will vote for subsidised housing, free medicines, old age pensions, etc., without being conscious of the consequences.This country needs investment more than anything else, but this can only be achieved at the expense of current consumption, the curbing of which is apparently politically impossible.” I am personally not prepared to believe that even this need be politically impossible if science will only tell the community persuasively and clearly what science knows, and I have put these two examples to you to emphasise the sort of r81e that science can fill and that the country badly needs science to fulfil. A most effective instrument for developing an association between politics and science on a non-party and objective basis is the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee.This consists of some two hundred members of both Houses of Parliament and of all parties, together with representatives of a large number of professional scientific bodies. It forms a bridge between science and politics, enabling members of Parliament to listen to the views of experts on scientific problems that have a bearing on the country’s development and enabling scientists to make contact through the members of Parliament with ministers and others who are responsible for the counkry’s educational, scientific and economic progress.Let me now try to sum up the argument to which you have listened so patiently. I have been urging that in politics as it is generally understood, that is the rough and tumble of the party-political arena, there is really no appropriate place for the scientist. I am urging him to be the referee, not the player. There can be no socialist physics nor conservative biology: life peerages may remove even heredity from the Upper Chamber. But in the full field of politics, embracing the whole life of the community, the scientist has a part to play of still almost unsuspected importance. He must be not only the discoverer of new things, but also the interpreter of them. He has not only the right, he has the duty to offer advice according to the highest standards of scientific objectivity.All too often the scientist writes off the politician as someone before whom scientific pearls are cast in vain because he is too concerned with what is popular to busy himself with what is right. In so far as that is true, it underlines this duty that lies on the scientist to interpret his beliefs to those who have the practical duty of applying scientific discoveries to daily affairs. And in so far as it is true that, as a condition of governing at all, the politician must carry the man in the street with him, then the second imperative duty for the scientist who would exercise authority in public affairs is the selling of his discoveries and all they mean to the public. He will have no difficulty in attracting a crowd once he sets up his stall. They are hungry to buy.His problem will arise because so often what he has to sell is so much less than they ask. Science has given to the man in the street so many miracles that he has become insatiable. And he will not believe the scientist who may modestly protest that he does not know, that only time will show or that experiments are inconclusive. Never- theless, the responsibility is squarely on the scientist’s shoulders to help out the politician by revealing to the man in the street the meaning of new discoveries, their limitations and, above all, their more uncomfortable, unpopular or even disastrous implications. And allMay, 19581 LINSTEAD SCIENCE AND POLITICS 283 that must be done in the passionate images which alone will attract and hold attention, yet must at the same time be illuminated solely by the cold, objective light of scientific truth.Much of what I have been saying is well summed up in a private note written by Lord Halsbury, which he has kindly said I may quote to you- “The responsibilities of scientists for the moral consequences of their work must be shared with the community. Any discovery can be put to good or evil use. It does not appear to me that scientists can do more as scientists than explain as clearly as possible to the rest of the community where the possibilities for evil latent in any of their discoveries really lie. The issue is, therefore, whether they do this effectively or ineffectively. I believe scientists would do this more effectively if they could speak on political issues with more authority. I believe this authority would come best from the exercise of a self-denying ordinance in political matters, namely by dissociating themselves from any political party whatever and behaving as public servants are expected to behave.” He goes on to say that this is by no means a negligible request to make of them, since many have sincere and strongly held views. But the things they lose are more than com- pensated for by the contribution that they make to the moral store of humanity. Sir Henry Dale said at the end of the letter from which I have quoted, “The true spirit of science working in freedom, seeking the truth only and fearing only falsehood and concealment, offers its lofty and austere contribution to manJs moral equipment, which the world cannot afford to lose or to diminish.” Julien Benda challenges the scientist as much as any other of the intellectuals. He reminds us that there are certain fundamental standards and truths, represented in the field with which we are more particularly concerned by the objectivity of science, which are in grave danger in this present age. He maintains that it is the duty of the intellectual to protect those standards at all costs. And he then goes further and asserts that if he is to perform that duty the intellectual must keep himself clear of the compromises and tempta- tions of the world of politics. Only so, he asserts, can the truths which so quickly become casualties in the buffetings of everyday existence be kept untarnished. Though the intel- lectual himself may be crucified, says Benda, yet his words will haunt the memory of men: that is to say, the truths will go marching on until at length they prevail.