7. Postwar Activities
During the war period my responsibilities to Dr. Bush's OSRD had first claim on my time, and in fact demanded practically all of my energy. I did, nevertheless, maintain regular contact with what was going on in the Rockefeller Foundation.
And immediately after the war I began to devote a good deal of my time to a Rockefeller Foundation activity that had, in fact, been initiated in 1941; and I must interrupt the chronological order to go back and recount the beginnings of that activity.
During his presidency of the Rockefeller Foundation, it was a custom of Raymond B. Fosdick, who was always on the alert to pick up ideas, to lunch and talk with a wide variety of experienced persons. On such an occasion in 1941 he talked with Henry A. Wallace, then Vice President of the United States. Wallace had just returned from a trip to Mexico—I think, his first—and as an agricultural expert, well acquainted with the lush acres of hybrid corn in the Midwest, he had been disturbed, if not indeed shocked, to see the sparse rows of poor corn in Mexico. Had it been later in the season, he would have been even more troubled by the small ears, scarcely ever more than one to a stalk.
He remarked that if anyone could increase the yield
per acre of corn and beans in Mexico, it would contribute more effectively to the welfare of the country and the happiness of its people than anything else. Fosdick recalled
Wallace's remark as "a casual comment"; but it was not treated casually.
Directly after his return from Washington Fosdick dropped into my office, told me of Wallace's remark, and asked, "Is there anything we can do about this?"
"I don't know," I said, "but I know how we can find
out."
For the immediate steps, and for much of the detailed guidance until the war was over, I had to depend upon my fellow officers in the Division of Natural Sciences. These were Frank B. Hanson and Harry M. Miller, Jr. Both had been trained as biologists, both had had extensive foreign assignments, both were outstandingly loyal, dedicated, and intelligent. They were thoroughly seasoned foundation officers, each with nearly twenty years' experience.
Since they were at that time the two natural-science officers on full duty in the New York office, all moves in the agricultural program were discussed between them. And it is of special importance that, as a colleague officer in the sister foundation, the General Education Board, they had the specifically relevant advice of Albert R. Mann, who for many years had been Dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell University.
In the Rockefeller Foundation there is a strongly
The first decision, therefore, was to select a small group rooted tradition that the best initial step in approaching any problem is to get the advice of experts, to take the necessary time, and to remain discreetly silent until there is something to report.
of experts to go to Mexico, spend many weeks there, travel through all the varied agricultural regions, see what was limiting the production of their principal crops, and come to a judgment as to whether and how the foundation might be of aid. Three men were chosen, and their skill, wisdom, and method were such that the Rockefeller Foundation has insisted that all three of them remain associated with the program ever since, as consultants and for a wide variety of short-term assignments. It well illustrates the way Hanson, Miller, and Mann operated that one of the three men chosen for the Mexico survey, the soils specialist Richard Bradfield of Cornell, was nominated by Mann, the geneticist and plant breeder Paul Manglesdorf of Harvard was nominated by Hanson, and the plant pathologist Elvin C. Stakman of the University of Minnesota was nominated by Miller.
There was no publicity given to this preliminary investigation; and indeed after the three experts submitted their report, which indicated in some detail what could be done and how, there was a second and longer unpublicized period of preparation. For two things had to be accomplished or the work could not possibly succeed. First, the proposal had to be skillfully suggested to a number of Mexican officials in such a way that they totally embraced the idea as something they themselves desired. That delicate piece of negotiation was carried out by Miller. A skilled linguist, with long and successful experience in dealing with the Latin mind and temperament, he was ideal for this job.
Second, and as is critically true of any project, the scheme would never be any better than its leadership, so we were determined to get the best. We did, as events have clearly proved. J. George Harrar was, at that moment, the
head of the department of plant pathology at Washington State College. He had spent several years as professor of botany at the University of Puerto Rico, and both he and his wife were fluent in Spanish. Besides his technical and professional qualifications, George had been a four-letter athlete at Oberlin, and when he eventually became the head of the Mexican-North American agricultural group in Mexico he furnished them leadership at every level—he could run faster, jump a wider stream, dance the samba better, shoot better, and work harder both in the office and in the field than any one. In tact and courtesy, in skill and knowledge, in his infectious personality, in energy and dedication, he was the ideal leader. That Harrar is now the president of the Rockefeller Foundation is but the natural culmination of a plot that some of us schemed in 1941.
The Mexican agricultural program was to be a collaborative one. The Mexican government was to furnish the necessary land, and was to offer the cooperation of its own agricultural groups; but the Rockefeller Foundation would itself furnish the direction, the scientific staff, and the necessary tools, equipment, and supplies. The idea was to create in Mexico a first-rate, thoroughly modern agricultural research and development group that could focus all the power of modern methods on the problems of improving the principal food crops of Mexico. This meant breeding new varieties of corn, beans, and wheat to obtain plants suitable for Mexican soil and climate. Also involved was control of pests and diseases, modernizing horticultural methods, improving the soil used for crop production, and determining what fertilization practices were suitable for Mexico. Most important of all, however, was the basic training and eventually the advanced education of literally
hundreds of Mexican young men, so that the program could year after year become more Mexican in its management.
The young North American agricultural scientists who were selected to go to Mexico in this program were chosen with the greatest care—for the human characteristics of the men and their wives as well as for their technical proficiency. They were taken on a permanent basis and given ample opportunity, with study leaves and trips to scientific meetings, to continue their professional progress. All became proficient in Spanish, and the families entered into the culture of their new home.
The turnover on the Rockefeller Foundation agricultural staff has been phenomenally low. The men have been much sought after, by industries and by great universities. One did leave for a time—on a very good job—but is now back in a high position. Another who left became a university president, but is now back directing an agricultural program in the Orient.
When I recommended to the Rockefeller Board of Trustees, early in the 1940s, the first appropriation in support of the Mexican program, I tried to be realistic about the difficulties we faced: We would have droughts, floods, diseases. Promising developments would undoubtedly prove faulty. Progress would be slow and hard. So I asked the trustees not to approve the first appropriation unless they years of a twenty-five-year span. That span has passed, and the support of the trustees is as steady and enthusiastic as were prepared to be patient with little progress during ten ever.
Another type of patience recognizes that a great program need not start with a splurge. For 1942 the total ex- penditure in the Mexican agricultural program was under $2,000. In 1943 it rose to slightly over $13,000. The next year it was over $40,000, and by 1945 it was nearly $100,000. Ten years later, in 1955, the whole agricultural program of the Rockefeller Foundation (by then extended to Colombia and Chile), including supporting grants and the essential costs of scholarships and fellowships, was pushing $2 million annually. Four years after that the figure was $5.5 million. This kind of increase, growing as one learns how to grow, is what gets results.
Once the war was over, confident that the program in experimental biology had developed sufficient momentum to roll on, I devoted much time and energy to the New York office administration of the agricultural program. I could think of nothing that then seemed more important to me than to see that the men in the field—Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and later India—were sympathetically and efficiently backed and provided for in the home office. And with George Harrar I began, directly after the war, to make frequent trips to the locations of the agricultural activity— first to Mexico, and then as the program expanded, to the other sites. The work in Mexico prospered, and in 1950 a similar operating program was opened up in Colombia; and in 1955 another, though smaller, in Chile. Other Central and South American countries learned about the success of the work, and although no further formal operating programs were started in that area, cooperative arrangements were set up in various locations, and money grants were made to aid agricultural progress. Thus the travel involved Central America, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, and Brazil, as well as the locations of the operating programs.
Indeed in the early 1950s it was clear that important results were being achieved throughout Central and South America. Corn and wheat were raised very generally through all this region, and potatoes (a strategic crop) were a favored food all up and down the Andean ridge. Effort was expanded through a Central American Corn Improvement Program that led eventually to the establishment of an International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, created in Mexico through the cooperation of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government. Improved varieties of wheat, bred in Mexico, have by now been introduced successfully in Libya, the Sudan, Kenya, Rhodesia, Jordan, Israel, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal as well as in many South American countries. The improved corns have been similarly introduced in a large number of countries—Nepal, Pakistan, Malaysia, Kenya, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Republic, for example.
On the 1953 trip, which included the countries of the great Far Eastern crescent, one tip of which is in Japan and one in Pakistan, Harrar and I were greatly impressed by the returns that might be realized from a concentrated study of rice. "Rice is the most important food in the world.
In 1952 Harrar and I went to India, and explored with the leaders there the possibility that the foundation establish a cooperative agricultural program in India, to improve the yields and qualities of the wheat, corn, sorghum, millet, and other grains that were a vital part of their food supply. This was followed by another long trip to India and the Far East in 1953; and in 1954 the first appropriations were made in support of the Indian program. The development occurred rapidly, for by then the foundation had a reservoir of trained personnel, of improved plant materials, and of experience.
Although surpassed by wheat in the world's total acreage, the volume of food produced by the world rice crop is 10 to 20 per cent greater than that of wheat. For about 60 per cent of the world's population, something like 80 per cent of the calorie intake comes from rice.
When we returned to New York, Harrar and I wrote a report for our fellow officers and for the trustees in which we pointed out: "Rice is ... the major food for those parts of the world which are underprivileged, and where useful knowledge concerning rice thus bears upon the major the race between food and population is so grim that starvation is a constant threat and a not infrequent reality. Any food needs of some one and a half billion people, many of whom constitute the world's hungriest and most precariously fed group."
Although rice has fed millions for thousands of years, it is nevertheless a striking fact that at the time of our report strangely little was known about it. This was partly because rice has been important in those parts of the world where science has not progressed very rapidly, but also because the rice plant is, speaking roughly, too good for its own good. It is so vigorous, so able to cope with a variety of conditions, and so resistant to many diseases that it manages to produce a tolerable crop under almost any circumstances.
In various places, and notably in Japan, there had been able and vigorous programs of research on the more obvious and applied aspects of rice cultivation: what fertilizer to apply and when, the effect of depth of paddy water, selection of the most promising varieties, and so on. In a very few places, and notably at Cuttack in India, there had been recent attempts to cross the high-yielding Japonica types with the Indica types that prosper in the tropical latitudes; and at Cuttack a beginning had also been made on basic studies of the rice plant.
But generally speaking, at the time of our report, many fundamental questions about the rice plant could only be answered with "No one knows."
This 1954 report went on to analyze the value and the desirable structure of an international rice research program. There were, especially at that time, grave problems concerning the suitable location for an international rice research center. The countries with scientific strength to offer were Japan and India. For a variety of reasons, a location more in the center of the great rice crescent seemed desirable. But certain political resentments, left over from World War II, complicated the problem. We did, however, strongly recommend that the Rockefeller Foundation study the problem and undertake, as soon as possible, the establishment of such an activity. Two specialists were added to the foundation staff, and they spent eighteen months in the Orient, becoming familiar with the institutions, individuals, research, and extension programs concerned there with crop improvement. It was not until 1962 that the groundwork had been laid for the actual launching of the program; and at that time the International Rice Research Institute was created. The Ford Foundation, long conversant with the successes elsewhere of the Rockefeller Foundation agricultural activities, offered to cooperate in the venture. They furnished more than $11 million to create the entire physical plant required, and generously agreed to share with the Rockefeller Foundation the annual budgets for at least seven years. The research center was located at Los Baños in the Philippines, and an entire community was created— laboratories, library, field buildings and equipment, and housing for the staff. All this was done with the warm cooperation of the Philippine government, which furnished the land. The Rockefeller Foundation took the responsibility for the staffing and scientific direction. This institute has already had outstanding successes. A short-stemmed, stiff-strawed variety of rice has been bred and released to interested governments; and gains of 50 to 200 per cent in yield have been reported from locations in India, Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines, and even in Latin America. One hundred and six scholars and thirty-five fellows from sixteen countries have received in-service training at this institute in the past four years. Newspapers, magazines, movies, and television have been publicizing the great importance to the world's food problem of "the new rice," now regularly referred to as the "miracle rice." When one spends years on a job involving a mass of almost daily detail and a multitude of projects, he is fortunate if, looking back, he has the satisfaction of having been associated with one or two activities that have had sizable, successful, and permanent impact. For my nearly thirty years in the Rockefeller Foundation, I have that sort of satisfaction with respect to two programs, in both of which I had the privilege of major administrative responsibility: the program in experimental biology which played a sig. nificant role in initiating and developing the present-day field of molecular biology; and the agricultural program. An editorial, referring especially to the dwarf wheat strain developed in Mexico and the improved rice strains developed at Los Baños, stated, "They have provided coun- tries which were perennially faced with starvation with the means not only to become self-sufficient, but equally important, to regain their self-respect and national pride." The Rockefeller Foundation's agricultural program is widely recognized as a great example of what can be accomplished when a superbly competent technical staff, dedicated to long-range effort, is given wise direction and is sustained by stable planning and ample support. The primary credit must go to the leadership of George Harrar.
Under Harrar's presidency the program of the Rockefeller Foundation has been reorganized to furnish approaches to five problems of world-wide importance. All those who were associated with the early stages, a quarter century ago, take deep satisfaction that one of the five problems chosen for increased future emphasis is headed: "Towards the Conquest of Hunger."
Before the war, I had had close contact with the pioneering computer that Vannevar Bush invented and which was developed under his close supervision. (Sam Caldwell, a professor of electrical engineering at MIT and a member of our war committee, had been a leading figure in the detailed design and construction.) And during the war it tion could be stored, any item of which could be made avail-
Prospects of this general sort were clearly on the cards at the end of World War II. And a few years after the war became evident that we were going to have electronic computers of unprecedented speed and logical flexibility, and with "memory" organs wherein vast amounts of informaable to the computer in a fraction of a second.
—in July 1949, in fact, while on a short vacation—I began to put on paper ideas that had been accumulating over the previous two or three years. What were we really going to do in our culture with this incredibly powerful new tool, the electronic computer?
In addition to all the obvious applications, two possi- bilities occurred to me; and I devoted time to each. The first of these concerned the relation of the computer to mathematics.
Classical mathematics appears to be implicitly and perhaps unconsciously based on the assumption that real quantities change continuously. This in turn stems from the idea that terrestrial material is itself ultimately continuous in its structure—totally without "graininess" no matter how minutely examined—as if it were, at whatever scale of magnification, the way butter looks under the naked eye.
And yet we know that this is not so. We know that matter (and also its alternative form, energy) is composed of discrete units. Discontinuity, not smooth continuity, is the ultimate and true nature of things.
Computation in a digital computer can be made as accurate as one wishes by utilizing a sufficient number of significant figures. But the calculation retains, in the last figure, a residual "graininess," in that that figure cannot change by less than one unit.
In these great computing engines we thus have a way of dealing with the quantitative aspects of nature which corresponds to nature's own structure. Continuity is an artifact: it is the spurious smoothness that results from lack of sufficiently fine and precise focus. When the German mathematician Leopold Kronecker (1823-1881) stated a
century ago that "God made the integers. All else is the fused thing, but there has turned out to be a basic truth in work of man," he actually had in mind a different and conhis dictum.
Influenced by considerations of this sort, I believed that the computer might have a truly profound effect on the whole structure of mathematics, demanding a revised foundation which from the outset recognized discontinuity and discreteness as natural and necessary aspects of quantification.
Although there have been large developments to adapt mathematical procedures to suit the nature of the computer, the more revolutionary development of a discontinuitybased mathematics has not occurred, but I am still inclined to view this first idea which I had in 1949 as interesting but probably impractical.
The second idea concerning the impact of electronic computer developments was a strange one at the time, although it has since become familiar.
Early in 1947, having pondered the matter for nearly two years, I started to formulate some ideas about using computers to translate from one language to another. I first wrote this suggestion to the American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), who was then teaching at MIT. I chose him because I knew him as a gifted linguist and brilliant logician. To my surprise and disappointment he was almost completely skeptical and discouraging about the idea. But I continued to turn the subject over in my mind, and in July 1949 I wrote a thirteen-page memorandum explaining why there was some real hope that translation could be done with computers.
Obviously, an efficient procedure for translating would be of great social service to the world, even if it did not produce elegant prose. It was by that time clear that computers could carry out any logically planned sequence of steps, however complex and extensive, at lightning speed. Memory organs would be available for storing vast data such as are found, for example, in Russian-English, TurkishFrench, and other dictionaries.
There appeared to be two really serious difficulties: the ambiguity of meaning of many words ("fire" means to shoot, to set ablaze, to discharge from a job); and the apparently distinct and complicated ways in which the grammar (and more especially syntax) of various languages accommodate the expression of ideas. For both of these difficulties I had suggestions of ways in which they might be handled. Being no student of linguistics, I was conscious that my ideas might be naïve or unworkable. But the possibilities so intrigued me that I had the memorandum mimeographed. I sent it to twenty or thirty persons-students of linguistics, logicians, and mathematicians. The first reaction and thinking about it, he rescued the memo from the bas-
There continues to be much work on this problem. Difficulties have arisen, as was to be expected. It would be absurd to hope for machine translations of literary works that would be acceptable from the point of view of style.
was almost universally negative. A distinguished linguistic scholar later told me that after the initial reading he threw the paper in the waste basket; but waking in the night ket. Over the subsequent ten or fifteen years that scholar devoted a good part of his energy to the problem of machine translation.
But there is a vast load of dull but necessary translation that need not be elegant; and by now it has been demonstrated that computers are capable of this.
The return to full duties at the Rockefeller Foundation after the war was a great joy to me-and for a special reason. All my life I have had the conviction that when a person takes on a new job, the curve of his effectiveness is low at first while he is breaking in (and for some unusual occupations this extends over a year or even longer), then should rise steadily for several years, but then tends to flatten out. In most cases, the horizontal asymptote is reached at a total span of about ten years. Only if circumstances change in some significant way is a person likely to continue to be freshly challenged by his job after that length of time.
Twice in my earlier life I had had about that span of years on a job-from 1921 to 1932, at the University of Wisconsin, and from 1932 until I started war work, at the Rockefeller Foundation. The five years of the war were such a complete change for me that I came back to my Rockefeller Foundation work as though it were a fresh opportunity.
In many ways it was. By 1945 the agricultural program had advanced enough so that it then occupied much of my rewarding on three levels: the human importance of the time. It offered a fascinating new challenge. It was equally problem of hunger with which it was concerned, the interest of the scientific problems with which I had to become familiar, and the managerial and political aspects of helping
to work out the collaborative arrangements with a number of foreign governments.
The pattern of my travel was greatly altered. Before the war it had been largely confined to the United States and western Europe, with only an occasional trip elsewhere. After the war I continued to travel, somewhat less frequently, in Europe, but I also made regular visits to Mexico and South America, and extensive survey trips in Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and up to Japan.
The internal environment of the Rockefeller Foundation was equally stimulating. I served under four presidents, and I would gladly sponsor in any contest for outstanding individuals: Max Mason, Raymond B. Fosdick, Chester I. Barnard, and Dean Rusk. They were very unlike.
Max Mason was a scintillating genius, whose characteristics I have already set down.
Raymond Fosdick was, from the point of view of the operating officers, an ideal president. He was warm, friendly, full of stimulating questions. He depended heavily on the operating officers for technical judgments (which suited us perfectly), and he so completely had the confidence of the Board of Trustees that he could always smooth out our problems with them. All of us on the staff not only fully respected and trusted him, we had a deep affection for him.
Chester Barnard was president for only four years. He came—ostensibly at least-from industry, for he had been the President of the Bell Telephone Company of New Jersey. During his undergraduate years at Harvard he supported himself with three activities: he tuned pianos, he ran a dance band, and he himself conducted a translation service which dealt with three languages. Chester Barnard was born to be a scholar, and his distinguished industrial record was something of an accident. He had a most unusual mind. He used to drop down to my office late in the day, often would sit there smoking silently for some time, and then would come out with wholly unexpected remarks: "I am worried: everything is going too smoothly." Or "What is the relation between the half-life and the average life of a radioactive substance?"
At first we were all a little frightened by him. Promptly after his arrival I wrote him an office memo telling him that I had been in the habit of working at my home on Wednesdays, but that I would of course be in the office every day if he preferred that. He called me in, sat me in front of his desk, pointed to my memo and, looking rather grim, said, "I don't know if I approve of that!" Then before I could get my breath, he grinned and added, "Why don't you come in to the office on Wednesdays, and stay home and read and think all the other days?"
Chester Barnard thoroughly enjoyed the give-and-take with all the other officers. He almost always lunched at the big common table with a group of a dozen or more, and the conversation was totally unpredictable, but serious and rewarding.
Shortly after that I wrote him another memo, criticizing something he had done. Again he called me in and sat me squarely facing him, again he looked pretty grim and said, "Don't ever do that again!" And then again he grinned and explained that he referred only to my having written the criticism. Circulating interoffice memos of that sort could, he thought, start incorrect and unfortunate rumors among the clerical staff. Next time, he told me, I ought to come in to his office, look him in the eye, and say, "Chester, you goddam fool, why did you ..." From then on we were relaxed friends.
One day at lunch he asked me if I had read, in the Bell System Technical Journal, an article by Claude E. Shannon on a mathematical theory of communication. I had. Did I understand the article? Not realizing the risk I was running, I answered yes. Could these ideas be explained in less formidably mathematical terms? Again, yes.
"All right," he said, "do so."
This was the origin of the effort that led to the publication of a small book that, surprisingly enough, after several seasons in hard covers is even now, eighteen years later, selling steadily as a paperback, advertised as a "classic"!
When Dean Rusk was made president no officer was surprised, for we had seen him in action for two years on the Board of Trustees and had surmised that this short period on the board was a planned preparation for his advancement. We had great respect for his mind and character; we all recognized the breadth and depth of his social commitment, and we liked him as a working colleague and friend.
It was inevitable that the variety of new contacts made during the war, and the activities that were war-related, would not cease abruptly in 1945. Some of these tied in with my Rockefeller Foundation activities—for example the continuing problem of relocation of deposed scholars, and the wide interest of many persons in developing our national strength in applied mathematics. The experience of the war had demonstrated the practical national, as well as the personal intellectual, value of work in this field, and had shown what history had in fact proved over the centuries— that mathematics, including its most "pure" and abstract portions, is healthiest and strongest during invigorating contact with a wide range of problems in the real world of experience.
For a few years after the war there were plans at several important locations for substantial, if not major, development of applied mathematics. It is distressing to have to record that in general these brave starts were not sustained. There are, fortunately, present indications of useful reintegration of all aspects of mathematics at several universities—Brown and Rochester, to mention only two important examples. And since the war there has been one truly significant development, at New York University.
Richard Courant, who had been the head of the world-renowned Institute of Mathematics at Göttingen, came to the United States early in the Hitler period. He became an American citizen in 1940; and when the Applied Mathematics Panel was formed in 1943 we chose Richard as a major member of the central directing and planning group. I had known him well before that, and as I worked with him during the war years, my admiration and affection grew. After the war it was inevitable that we thought and schemed together a great deal concerning ways to strengthen mathematics in the United States. With his scholarly leadership and organizing ability and energy, he gradually built up the advanced program in mathematics at New York University until it was clear that once again he was to be the director of a major world center.
Richard Courant is now, as a formal matter, retired; and so am I. But our many years of close association are permanently exemplified in the Courant Institute of New York University which is located in a beautiful new thirteen-story building named Warren Weaver Hall.
There were other activities that grew naturally out of the war experience. The accomplishments of Bush's OSRD had demonstrated to the armed services that they must continue to keep in close and productive relationship with research. The Navy was particularly alert to this problem, and especially skillful about developing its role. I was privileged to have some association with these military efforts, serving as Chairman of the Naval Research Advisory Committee and as a member of the War Department Research Advisory Panel (both during 1946-1947), and as Chairman of the Basic Research Group of the Research and Development Board of the War Department during 1952-1953.
Also in the service of the government, and obviously also related to the support of research, but differing in many other ways, was a period of service on the Board of the National Science Foundation. I would have to confess that I attended my first meetings of this board (which in effect bears just about the same relationship to the National Science Foundation that a board of trustees does to a philanthropic foundation) with some doubts, and perhaps even with some apprehensions, that I would find the Board of the National Science Foundation somewhat less admirable than the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation. I was, to be sure, contrasting, in my doubts, a relatively new and inexperienced board with one which I had long considered the best possible. And it was difficult to avoid assuming that there would enter into the considerations of the National Science Board some elements of regional ambition, of political influence, or of institutional loyalty. And in the choice of the membership of this board, certain considerations undoubtedly entered which related to the balancing of geographical representation, and even some consideration of religion and race.
I found that my doubts were unjustified. I never listened to elements of debate in that board that the country as a whole could not have been proud of.
A quite differently oriented set of interests and activities developed at about this time, related not to the war but, at least initially, to my biological-medical contacts and experience within the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1951, Dr. Cornelius P. Rhoads, then the Director of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, who had been both a personal and a professional friend of mine for years, asked me to be a member of his Board of Scientific Consultants. He thought that their program was making effective use of the techniques of chemistry, but he suspected that they were not exploiting the resources of physics as actively as they should. Because he thought of me primarily as a physicist, he thought I might be helpful.
I doubted that I could contribute, but I was certainly glad to try.
This began an association that grew and ramified over a sixteen-year period but ended in the spring of 1967 when I resigned from all but one of the appointments I held in the various parts of the Sloan-Kettering Memorial Cancer Center. My one remaining tie there is the chairmanship of a committee on bio-mathematics being developed jointly by Sloan-Kettering and Cornell Medical College.
These contacts, at that impressive medical crossroads at the four corners of Sixty-eighth Street and York Avenue in New York (do not forget that the Rockefeller University occupies one of these corners), have given me deep satisfaction. "The cancer problem" (which is of course a large array of interrelated problems) involves on the one hand scientific issues of real interest and general significance, and on the other hand it is a problem of the greatest human concern.
Growing out of contacts arising partly in the Rockefeller Foundation and partly at Sloan-Kettering, I became involved in three other health-related activities. During all its early years I was on the board of the Health Research Council of the City of New York-a unique organization most easily described as a biological-medical research foundation, supported out of New York City's own funds, and making grants to groups and individuals located in New York City. I was also on the board of (and later president of) the Public Health Research Institute of the City of New York, another unusual civic enterprise getting basic support from the regular budget of the City of New York, but also being substantially aided by research grants from Washington, and doing very fundamental research in areas related to metropolitan health problems.
Toward the end of my period of service in the Rockefeller Foundation I became interested in the Academy of Religion and Mental Health, which has by now developed into a major instrument for providing opportunities for collaboration between religious groups and those in the medical, social, and behavioral sciences. It is multiprofessional and multifaith. It has wide membership, sponsors an important journal, has held many successful conferences and symposia, conducts a research program, and holds ap-
proximately 500 branch meetings yearly. I served on the board of trustees of the academy for some time, and was deeply committed to its purposes. When a period of ill health forced me to be less active, I was made honorary vice president.
Still another area of activity that developed after the war was my involvement with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This vast organization, with the largest membership of any general scientific society in the world, embraces all fields of pure and applied science. In the earlier days each branch of science conducted intensive sessions at which its own specialized research reports were given, and there was also some mild attempt to organize interdisciplinary sessions of general interest. Then the meetings got so large that they almost collapsed under their own weight. One group after another, first the chemists, then the physicists, the mathematicians, the biologists found it necessary to hold other and separate meetings. Attendance fell and the function of serving as a communication center between the various branches of science became less effec- tive.
Elected first to the governing board of the AAAS, I participated in many discussions of ways to improve our annual meetings. Learning that the second of the two original charter purposes of the organization was to serve as a means of communication between science and the general public, I began to campaign for a rededication of the activities of the association. This gradually developed into a plan to hold a two-day conference at Arden House to examine our purposes, our plans, and our procedures. The report of this conference won enough interest and accept-
ance so that—having talked myself into a job, as so often happens—I was elected president of the AAAS for 1952. It is not easy to pin down this date, for the AAAS has, at any one moment, a president-elect, an active president, and a retiring president. It is a little like a major-league baseball game with one at bat, one on deck, and one in the hole. So this involved three more years of active participation in AAAS affairs. I have no notion that either my needling or my speeches had any permanent effect, but I did do something real and lasting when I helped to recruit Dael Wolfle as a new chief administrative officer of the AAAS. Under his leadership a worthy physical home for the AAAS was acquired, the membership has greatly increased, the weekly journal Science has vastly improved, and in these and other ways the association has prospered.
Over the fourteen-year period covered by this chapter my duties at the Rockefeller Foundation evolved and shifted substantially. The first few of these years involved considerable attention to cleaning up and tapering off interests that arose during the war. This was also a period of heavy concentration on the development of the agricultural program. After having been made the vice-president responsible for all the foundation's activities in the agricultural, natural, and medical sciences, it was necessary to turn over the detailed administration in these branches to able and experienced senior officers of these specialities. This in turn meant that I spent more and more office and travel time on general aspects of the foundation's work.
In 1959, at the statutory age of sixty-five and with over
a quarter of a century in the employ of the Rockefeller Foundation, I was retired in accordance with the rules of the organization.
"Retirement" can be a traumatic experience for those whose occupational interests have not included elements that can be carried forward into later years, and whose formal occupation has been so totally absorbing as to have excluded the development of other interests. I faced neither of these difficulties. My years at the Rockefeller Foundation were deeply satisfying to me. I loved my work. Every morning on the commuting train I would go over, with pleasurable anticipation, what was scheduled for that day. I hugely enjoyed my colleagues and the rich variety of interesting persons and problems.
But I believe in change and I have always enjoyed change. So in spite of the enthusiastic pleasure and satis- faction I had had throughout my years in the Rockefeller Foundation, I was not sad about leaving that behind. There were so many other things to do!