Science and Cash

IT is a commonplace that the wealth of modern societies is in a large degree the creation of scientific research, and it is therefore often suggested that scientific workers should share in this wealth on a scale more or less comparable to that on which labor and capital are rewarded. In particular Sir Ronald Ross has for some years supported the idea that scientific workers who have made important discoveries should, as a routine, receive pecuniary rewards from the State — of course the State — on a scale comparable to those rewards received by successful generals.

At first sight the justice of his contention seems clear. In other intellectual occupations — for example, literature, music, and the fine arts — those men and women who are most highly esteemed by their contemporaries enjoy fairly large incomes. A scientist can practically never hope to earn as much as £2000 per year as such, and is generally glad if he gets half that sum, while incomes of £300 are quite common. To make more he must go out of the path of pure research and teaching, and apply his talents to industry, administration, popular writing, or some other activity for which there is an economic demand. Very little can be made by taking out patents. One cannot patent a new fish or a new star, and medical etiquette rightly forbids the patenting of a new medicine or a new surgical instrument. The physicist and chemist cannot patent their great discoveries, for two different reasons. In the first place they do not know how they will be applied. When Richardson discovered that all hot metals emit electrons he did not, presumably, suspect that he had made wireless telephony practicable. He could not take out a patent for all possible applications of his discovery; and many equally fundamental facts elicited at about the same time — for example, the emission of electrons by radioactive bodies in the cold — have found no paying application as yet.

Again, as a general rule, the greater the discovery the longer the time before it is applied. It was a long time before Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetic induction could be applied to the manufacture of a practical dynamo. He did not make a penny out of it, and fortunately his heirs-at-law are not still being paid for it, as are those of Nelson for the Battle of Trafalgar. The Chinese might regard it as equitable that every user of electric light or power should burn at least one currency note per year before Faraday’s image, and even a posthumous reward is better than none.

The French, for example, do not pay their men of science a living wage. On the other hand they give them statues — often very good statues — when dead, and call streets after them. And to many scientific men, such is our perversity, the prospect of becoming a street name is a better incentive to effort than a rise of salary.

The greatest difficulty of a scheme of rewards during life is to be found in the impossibility of estimating the importance of a discovery until the discoverer is dead or too old to enjoy the money. Any jury will inevitably tend to rate the discovery of a fact above the invention of a method of research. Let us take as an example the recent and thoroughly justifiable award of a Nobel prize to Banting and Macleod for the preparation of insulin, the substance by whose injection a victim of diabetes may be restored to health. The numerous extracts prepared before success was reached had all to be tested by injection into dogs in order to study their effect on the amount of sugar in the blood. Now accurate blood-sugar analysis is extremely difficult, especially when one has only a few drops of blood to work on. It has been brought to its present degree of efficiency by some sixty years of very persistent and rather dull work in hundreds of different laboratories. This work had occupied far more time and probably required more thought and patience than the final stage at Toronto. But its value was less obvious at the time and its appeal to the imagination is smaller.

As a matter of fact a great scientist is very lucky if in his own day he receives such recognition as a Nobel prize. Willard Gibbs, the father of modern physical chemistry, was probably the greatest American scientist of the nineteenth century. He was so far recognized by his contemporaries as to be made a professor, though I cannot believe that his lectures were very intelligible. His sister habitually compelled him to drive her round in her buggy on the ground that her husband was a business man and could not spare the time.

But the fact that under a system of rewards much merit would be unrecognized is the least argument against such a system. No conceivable system can forestall the judgment of posterity. It would tend to divert scientific effort toward the obtaining of sensational rather than solid results. If a prize of a million dollars had been offered fifty years ago for a substance whose injection would relieve diabetes (and insulin would have been very cheap at the price) many of the men who devised the methods of blood-sugar analysis would have been drawn into fruitless attempts to isolate insulin.

Again, no chemical discovery is more obviously worthy of recompense than that of a new element. Three new elements — hafnium, masurium, and rhenium — have been discovered in the last three years. But in each case the discovery was made through the application of Moseley’s law connecting the X-ray spectrum of an element with its atomic number. This law was arrived at as the result of a series of very careful and laborious measurements, which furnished the chemist with a weapon of enormous power. But I do not suppose it was considered worthy of a paragraph in the popular press at the time of its discovery, and I doubt if the public would stand the allocation of large sums from its exchequer as a reward for work which is unintelligible to it.

Scientific discovery should be paid for on a system of credit rather than of cash down. At present, research in pure science is mainly performed by professors and lecturers at universities in the intervals of the teaching and administration for which they are paid. A little research of this kind is paid for as such by the Medical Research Council and other public bodies, but the vast majority of public money spent on research goes out for work on various branches of applied science, such as aeroplane design and practical medicine. The Royal Society has established a few professorships wholly devoted to research work, and one cannot but hope that many more such will be founded. A great discoverer can generally expound his own work, but he may be a thoroughly bad elementary lecturer and an extremely incompetent administrator of a laboratory. It would be an advantage to education as well as to research if these duties could be more often separated.

And everywhere the salaries are extremely low. It is too late to reward Faraday, Hertz, or Pasteur. We can at least see that their successors possess an income large enough to allow them to bring up a family of five children and give them a first-class education, while allowing themselves such luxuries as a small motor-car. I can think of no professorship in Britain or France that satisfies this criterion. Our research workers are faced with the choice of deserting their calling on marriage or drastically limiting their families. I can think of some who have become expert witnesses, journalists, civil servants, and even tobacco salesmen, to their own economic advantage, but hardly to that of posterity. Others content themselves with one or two children — a questionable advantage to the public, since scientific ability is strongly inherited.

There is perhaps a final argument, from the point of view of the scientist, against a system of rewards for research: namely, that it should logically imply a system of punishments for discoveries adjudged to be of disadvantage to the public. The discoverer of a new explosive, a new poison-gas, or a new principle in aeronautics might find himself or herself condemned to the most appalling penalties. Such discoveries are often made by persons of the mildest character who have no idea that their work will serve to kill a fly, much less a human being. And as it is equally true that discoveries of immense general utility are often made by misanthropes only interested in pure theory, and caring not a rap for their own or anyone else’s welfare, there is perhaps no injustice in refusing them pecuniary rewards which few of them have ever demanded.

However, it is not only unjust but contrary to the public interest that scientific research should be, as it is, the worst paid of all the intellectual professions.