with the continuing task of giving this material even a fast preliminary single reading.

We build bigger libraries with more and more stack room; but we know perfectly well that we are licked. We have hold of the tail of a geometric progression of ratio larger than one; and if you remember your high-school algebra you will know that in such a case the only question about defeat is, how long can you stave it off.

SITUATION NOW CRITICAL

This situation has become really critical, and we must do something about it. Admitting the existing general worldwide scheme of the printing of journals and books, of locating these in all sorts of special and general libraries in all sorts of places, and of serving these with abstracts, bibliographies, review journals, and so forth-admitting all that, one thing we must do is to make this process more effective by introducing all of the wholly or partly mechanized methods of search, reproduction, and delivery that can be sensibly devised.

We have at our present disposal a vast array of extremely powerful techniques-electrical, mechanical, optical, and so forth-which could aid by minimizing or even removing many of the delays which at present block the scholar's access to the articles, books, references, reproductions of portions, and so forth, which he needs to see.

As part of this first task with the printed word, special attention should be given to the various indexing, abstracting, and reviewing services.

OPPOSED TO NATIONAL CLEARINGHOUSE

It is tempting to think of setting up certain large-scale clearing centers for scientific information, and it may well be the case that careful and competent study would lead to such a decision.

My own hunches, and they deserve no more serious name, ordinarily run against such large and formally organized efforts. They tend to become bureaucratic, topheavy, and sluggish. They tend to take the critical decisions out of the hands of the working scientists and to make mountains of busy work for the kind of individuals seldom top quality--who are interested and willing to do that kind of work.

To the extent that such large-scale efforts are successful, they might make still more difficult the much more revolutionary changes that the situation really requires.

But these unusual times may require us to undertake such a task. A general service is furnished to Russian scientists by their All-Union Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of the Academy of Science of the U. S. S. R. Nearly 10 years ago, our National Research Council turned down a plan for an International Coordinating Office for Science Abstracting "on grounds of being quite without prospect of the necessary financial support, and on the further grounds that the first thing for the United States to do was to put its own house in order."

But times have changed, and we even have an enlarged view of what our house now is.

CLEARINGHOUSE SHOULD NOT BE UNITED STATES EFFORT ALONE

It seems unlikely to me that a great scientific clearinghouse ought to be set up as a purely United States effort. These problems are essentially international in character; and even in a divided world we ought to start on as broad a basis as is possible.

I have heard suggestions that a scientific clearinghouse be set up as a NATO effort. If it is in fact feasible to do it at all, this seems to me the best auspices presently available.

INTERNATIONAL INFORMATION CONFERENCE SCHEDULED

This problem, incidentally, ought to be greatly clarified, as will many other problems in the general field of your committee, by the International Conference on Scientific Information which is being planned by the National Academy of Sciences and which will be held from November 16 to 23, 1958, in Washington.

In addition to such short-range efforts to make the best of an essentially bad job, we should be doing long-range research on the basic problem of the storage and retrieval of knowledge.

What should, in fact, be printed in journals and books? What should be recorded in master copies in a few key repositories? What should be sent, not as paper by mail, but by ultrahigh-frequency radio to reproducing receivers? What are the useful limits and procedures for microscopic and ultramicroscopic recording? How can all this written material be digested, analyzed, and classified in such a way that machine searching becomes useful?

Long-rang and basic studies of this sort, which make no limiting assumptions whatever about the future use of conventional printed material, involve research that may, at the moment, seem very strange and impractical.

But looking into the future, and noticing what is happening in so many other fields that involve both complication and a great number of individual actions or items, it is easy to believe that an important role will be played, in the overall library function of tomorrow, by some adaptation of giant electronic computers.

Electrical memory organs are being designed ever larger in capacity, smaller in physical size, and more rapid in access.

PROBLEMS IN USE OF MACHINES

The logical flexibility and power of these devices are such that they can answer essentially any question which you can ask them. But here is the rub: You must ask them in their own language. You cannot cut up the issues of a scientific journal into fragments, store these bits of information in the machine's memory, and then come to it and say, "Please help me. I am interested in the interrelated roles of nucleic acid and proteins in the genetic behavior of viruses."

You have to ask this question in such terms that it is usefully answerable through a process of carrying out a series of scheduled logical steps which utilize the stored bits of information.

You could easily ask a machine, "Give me a reference to every page-of material stored in your memory, of course, which contains the three words 'nucleic,' 'protein,' and 'virus.'"

But the answer to that question would not be useful, for it would contain both too much and too little.

The job of translating discursive English or any other natural languageover into "machine language" is one which we do not at present know how to do. Indeed we cannot be certain that this problem is solvable.

STUDIES OF LANGUAGE STRUCTURE PROMISING

But recently emerging studies of the statistical and of the logical structure of natural languages are headed in this exciting direction. At least, they will reveal a great deal, hitherto unknown, about natural languages. At the best, they will in addition furnish a base for revolutionary improvement in the whole process of storage and retrieval of knowledge.

The improvement in speed which could potentially be produced through the use of these electronic computers is such as to constitute not just a quantitative change, but actually a qualitative change.

It is, very roughly, as though you could send, simultaneously to a half dozen of the world's greatest libraries, skillful messengers who could in your behalf consult the card catalogs, not about 1 card each second, but say 10 million cards each second.

There is some research of this sort going on now, but there is not nearly enough. I was myself a member of a Government committee, a couple of years ago, that tried to get only $50,000 a year to support research of this sort, but we did not succeed.

EXPERIMENTS ARE COSTLY

Actual pilot experiments in this direction are admittedly costly. In addition to interest in this area in the National Science Foundation, and in the Ford Foundation-supported Council on Library Resources, there is some excellent work in progress connected with the Patent Office and at the Bureau of Standards. A few university groups are at work; but the area is, in my judgment, greatly undersupported and offers a really significant opportunity.

Just in passing, it should be mentioned that progress in this area of research involves, as a rather mild case in fact, the problem of machine translation from one human language to another; and the problem of a classification scheme, for

the knowledge as a whole, which is capable of continuous readjustment to the developing relations introduced by new knowledge.

Before leaving the topic of improving our use of the printed word, something should be said that applies equally to the short-range and to the long-range aspects.

QUESTION NOT HOW BUT WHAT TO DO

For the essential present problem, in each case, is not “How can we do this or that clearly desirable thing?" The essential present problem is "What are the clearly desirable things?" It is strikingly true that we have at hand or reasonably accessible the technical means to do practically anything. The sad truth is that we simply don't know what we ought to do.

Thus, in connection with the more limited problems of abstracts, biblographies, indexes, and so forth, we do not know enough at present about how scientists actually use books and journals, or how they would want to use books and journals if other ways were feasible.

ANALYSIS OF PURPOSE OF PUBLICATION URGED

To consider another aspect, we have not, so far as I know, analyzed out the actual, and the proper, purposes of publication. To mention certain negative aspects of the problem, some articles are published to establish priority. Some articles are published merely as a sort of professional advertising, and the author writes several articles in several journals on the same subject, just as General Motors put ads in a lot of magazines and newspapers.

Some short scientific articles are published solely because journals are so crowded that there would be many months of delay for a longer version. We do not really know, as yet, what forms of publication to use for various purposes. What I am trying to say here is that we need a lot of study of an operations analysis type to find out, much more dependably than we do now, what the problems really are, before we rush into half-baked multi-million-dollar schemes.

PERSONAL CONTACT AMONG SCIENTISTS

The recorded word, however, will at best always remain a cold substitute for direct communication through personal contact. For some very curious reason there has been a particular reluctance in Government circles against spending money to permit scientists to travel to some common point where they may talk together.

It is almost as though these were viewed to be junkets for personal pleasure, to questionable conventions at which the old boys get far away from the hometown so that they can kick up their heels.

All I can say, and all I hope I need say, is that view must be held only by persons who never attended a scientific meeting, and by persons who have no understanding whatsoever of the role played in science by direct personal contact.

Legislators must safeguard the use of all public moneys, and they may have special reasons for being so suspicious that travel funds are likely to be abused in selfish or improper ways.

But I can assure you, on the bases of more than a quarter century of experience in administering travel grants for scholars all over the world, that this suspicion is not justified in the case of scientists.

I would most emphatically urge that the Government provide funds to enable scientists to attend international meetings, and I would most emphatically urge that in the budgets for the scientific activities within our own governmental structure, really ample funds for travel be provided.

The time has come to stop acting as though funds for scientific travel were dubious, to be somehow slipped through the accounting and approving process. If the responsible officials of our Government are not willing to provide adequate funds for this purpose, they must be prepared to meet the consequences of intellectual isolation.

One of the most important, and to scientists one of the most baffling aspects of this problem of communication between scientists and scientists, is to be found in the restrictions which still hamper contacts between scientists in our country, and scientists in other parts of the world.

It should be said at once that the situation has considerably improved during the last year or two. For a period after the war the situation was, in my judg

ment, a national disgrace. We do not need to waste time or energy in recalling how bad things were.

OTHER CURBS ON TRAVEL

Now we have, as I say, improved a good deal. But I would like to suggest a few points which still demand reform. Those who do not bear the direct responsibility for Government action must be patient and reasonable with those who do, for admittedly there are practical complications that may not be apparent.

But there are difficulties which scientists simply cannot understand.

In 1955 an invitation was issued, with the approval of our Government, to the astronomers of the world to hold an International Congress of Astronomy in the United States in 1959.

But it seems that the relevant Government officials are now debating whether or not we will admit, to that meeting, astronomers from the mainland of China. Do we insist on being an international laughingstock?

RESTRICTIONS ON RUSSIANS

The matter on which I would like to comment next concerns certain of the regulations which apply to visiting Russian scientists. It would be naive and unrealistic not to recognize that scientific exchange with Russian scientists presents special considerations and special complications at the present time.

On the other hand, there are specially strong reasons, scientific and otherwise, why such exchanges should occur.

To scientists it is simply incredible that we set up arbitrary zones in our country into which a Russian cannot go. It is perfectly permissilble, as I understand it, for a Russian scientist to visit the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with its vast store of the most important activities in the physical sciences and in engineering, for MIT happens to be located in Cambridge.

But it is not permissible for a Russian doctor to visit the Harvard Medical School, because that is across the line in Boston; and Boston has been ruled out of bounds.

VISIT OF FIVE SOVIET SCIENTISTS DESCRIBED

This business is so queer and so unbelievable that perhaps I should give further examples. The organization with which I am primarily associated recently made arrangements for visits in our country of a group of five distinguished Russian women physicians and medical scientists.

Their plane arrived so late that they missed a train to Chicago. We hastily arranged for them to fly to Chicago. But it turned out that we had done an improper thing. It would have been perfectly proper for them to fly to Chicago if they departed from LaGuardia or Idlewild. But their plane left from Newark, and that region of New Jersey is forbidden territory.

When they were to leave Chicago for Madison, Wis., it was a lovely late autumn day, and it was suggested that it would be nice to drive them by automobile. But no. It was O. K. to fly, but going by auto involved passing through a prohibited zone.

At the end of their stay the United States woman doctor who had accompanied them wanted to have the group as her personal guests for dinner. She lives in Brooklyn, and that region is verboten. So she had to invite them to a restaurant in Manhattan, just across the river.

Now, if all this were part of a musical comedy laid in Upper Slobbovia, we would be amused. But, gentlemen, this is the way the Government of the United States is acting.

EXCEPTIONS MADE FOR ATHLETES

I do not have dependable official information, but I have the impression from what I read in the news that some sort of exception has been made for athletes in connection with the Olympic games, and for cartoonists in connection with a visit that a group of them propose to make.

Now, do not misunderstand me. I think it is absolutely first rate for us to welcome athletes and cartoonists. But what sort of a sense of value do we have if we make exceptions for cartoonists and high jumpers, and continue to be sticky about scientists?

Granted that the Russians have similar restrictions which they impose on our movements in their country, this sort of petty retaliation raises questions

concerning our standards of national dignity. Is it necessary for us to throw silly little international spitballs, just because someone else does?

It may be necessary that visiting scientists from certain countries be subjected to a degree of supervision of their arrivals, movements, and departures which we do not think of imposing on other visitors.

But if this is indeed the case-and for myself I do not see why it need bethen should this not be handled entirely by the Government agencies which are equipped to handle and experienced with the handling of espionage?

Is it fair or proper or useful to introduce any of these supervisory controls into the world of scholarship, where they stand in such unpleasant contrast to the ordinary intellectual code of confidence and courtesy?

DELAYS IN ISSUING PAPERS, TIME LIMIT ON VISITS

There continue, moreover, to be irritating difficulties of delays in issuing papers, and arbitrary difficulties of restriction of time on visits. Thus, I know of a distinguished Russian protein chemist who wished to spend 10 weeks visiting United States colleagues, and who was completely arbitrarily from his point of view-told that he could stay 3 weeks. This cut down his time so seriously that he had to almost rush through laboratories where he should have spent days.

I do not know whether these troublesome incidents are due to high policy or to low administration-to overmeticulous or overofficious attitudes of minor personnel.

EVIDENCE OR RUMOR?

One of the most baffling and foolish forms of these difficulties occurs when the machinery of a distant legation or embassy holds matters up on the basis of what is referred to as "derogatory evidence," but which is sometimes wholly unchecked rumor.

I know of a case in which the "derogatory evidence" was the vague knowledge that the person in question had talked at a Communist meeting. When an investigation was finally made, under outside pressure, it turned out that this person had indeed talked at such meeting. He had talked against communism. Our lack of sophistication and maturity over the past few years, in this field of scholarly international interchange, leaves us with a lot to undo, a lot of friendship and respect to regain.

It would be a wonderful thing if the Department of State would send firm word all down the line, to reach the smallest clerk in the farthest legation, saying, in effect: "We are big enough, both in power and spirit, to afford to be friendly, courteous, and prompt. Interpret the details of regulation, in the best American tradition, with plain commonsense. We are not afraid to welcome scientists-we are proud to."

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE CITED

It is most gratifying that the President, in his speech of January 9, suggested a lively collaboration between our scientists and Russian scientists in certain undebatable areas where men are, just as men, pitted against nature.

One thinks at once of the virus diseases, cancer, heart disorders, malaria, certain of the plant diseases which limit the world's food crops, and so forth.

It is to be hoped that we can indeed exploit some of these scientific areas in which the interests of all human beings are so clearly common interests, aimed at the general good.

COMMUNICATION BETWEEN SCIENTISTS AND THE PUBLIC

This is a subject to which I have devoted a considerable fraction of my life's time and energy. And since I have very recently expressed my considered views on this subject, perhaps I may be permitted to read into the record a short portion of the article in question:

No longer is it an intellectual luxury to know a little about this great new tool of the mind called science. It has become a simple and plain necessity that people in general have some understanding of this, one of the greatest of the forces that shape our modern lives.

⚫ Science and the Citizen, by Warren Weaver, Science, December 13, 1957. See also Science and People, by Warren Weaver, Science, December 30, 1955.