[Letters to Editor]

Abstract

I HAVE not yet had time to study the Report of the Indian Industrial Commission, and may, therefore, be ignorant of some of the arguments for centralisation, but I am certainly in general agreement with the views expressed in the leading article in NATURE of February 19, and by Prof. Soddy and Dr. Rendle in the issue for February 26, regarding the dangers of that method of research organisation. Investigations under centralised bureaucratic control must almost always be concerned solely with questions capable of receiving easy and immediate replies, for the obvious reason that directors and committees can rarely be persuaded to authorise attacks upon difficult or distant objectives, regarding which, perhaps, no replies at all may be forthcoming. Now the most important discoveries have generally been made precisely by such attacks, and investigation is a lottery in which the greatest prize often falls to him who takes the greatest risks. Directors and committees do not like risks, and, consequently, seldom make discoveries. I should like to know, for instance, how any “Indian Scientific Service” would have attacked the malaria problem, which I commenced to assault (in a very foolhardy manner!) in 1890. I am sure it would have refused to authorise my attempts, and even to publish my first results. On the other hand, it would have wasted, with ripe bureaucratic prudence, thousands of pounds in looking for Plasmodia in marshes, or in trying to correlate various species of mosquitoes with local outbreaks of the disease, and I am sure it would have achieved nothing at all up to the present day.