Word: seaborg
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...preoccupation with immediate, practical results, the U.S. is badly neglecting pure scientific research. The warning was sounded last week by Nobel-Prize-winning Atomic Chemist Glenn T. Seaborg* before a joint meeting in San Francisco of the Atomic Industrial Forum and Stanford's Research Institute. Seaborg's clincher: of the nation's huge ($3 billion) annual outlay for science, "no more than 5% . . . is used for basic research...
...Seaborg outlined the real difference between "basic" and "applied" science. Actually, most "pure" scientists have long been closely involved with practical applications of their studies, e.g., the H-bomb, radar, rocket propulsion. Indeed, when defending their research budgets to outsiders, they "almost universally point to the most outstanding practical applications [they] can single out, and swear that these could [never] have happened without the basic research of past years." Yet, despite all its useful byproducts, pure research stands apart. It is motivated not by the need for an answer to an immediate problem, said Seaborg, but by an "intellectual curiosity...
...right, Doctor. You told this board this morning that Dr. Seaborg did not express himself prior to the meeting of October...
Robb: You testified that you had no intimation from Dr. Seaborg prior to the GAC meeting of October 29, 1949, as to what his views on the subject were. I am going to show you a letter . . . dated October 14, 1949, addressed to you, signed "Glenn Seaborg," and ask you whether you received that letter prior to the meeting of October...
...letter Dr. Seaborg had said that he "would have to hear some good arguments before I could take on sufficient courage to recommend not going toward" a thermonuclear program. He noted that Dr. Ernest 0. Lawrence, director of the radiation laboratory at the University of California, was already proposing to get the program under way. If the GAC were asked to comment on the proposal, he wrote, "It seems to me clearly we should heartily endorse it." Despite this sharp exception to the GAC's "unanimous" stand, Dr. Oppenheimer originally had said that he did not recall the letter...