Rape of the Laboratories

For Dr. Vannevar Bush, general of the U.S. army of war scientists (TIME, April 3), last week was one of the most anxious of the war. It looked as if the under-26 draft might take a vital section of his army away from him. As a good soldier, Dr. Bush made no public outcry. But outcry there was aplenty from the nation's scientists.

Draft boards had begun to call young scientists considered irreplaceable by their laboratories. Secretary Charles L. Parsons of the American Chemical Society cried: "Sabotage!"

Youngsters are the brains and guts of the nation's war-research program. In some of the most vital new technologies, such as electronics, they are the whole show; one eminent scientist observed that "no man older than 35 can have a really fundamental grasp of electronics." Some typical cases:

P:At M.I.T. whose laboratories include the U.S. headquarters for electronic research, 478 irreplaceable men under 26 (not including 4-Fs) faced imminent in duction. A dozen had already gone. Said M.I.T. President Karl T. Compton: "Selective Service is rapidly becoming no longer selective."

P: Of 200 men in a key war-instrument laboratory, all but two are under 26.

P: U.S. chemical companies, now desperately searching for 2,000 vitally needed chemists, have lost 3,000 to the armed services.

P: The new draft order threatened to call back from the fighting fronts technicians sent there by Dr. Bush's OSRD to watch the performance of new weapons under battle conditions.

Many a U.S. scientist last week grimly contrasted U.S. draft policy with those of Britain, Russia and Germany, which have taken care to keep their scientists where they can be most useful -- in the laboratories. The heedless drafting of scientists, said they, would not only put a crimp in the U.S. war effort but place the nation at a serious disadvantage in postwar technology.

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