Reunion in Moscow

As the San Francisco conference prepared to adjourn, United Nations scientists were staging their own show of international unity, in Moscow last week. Cabled TIME Correspondent Craig Thompson:

The ink had hardly dried on the declaration of surrender by Germany when the Soviet Union Academy of Sciences, which had already planned a jubilee to celebrate the 220th anniversary of its founding by Peter the Great, decided to turn the observance into the first international gathering of scientists on the Allied side since the London conference of 1941.

In response to hastily distributed invitations from the Soviet Academy, upwards of 150 men of science gathered in Moscow last week. They came from Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Czechoslovakia, England, France, Finland, Hungary. India, Iran, the Mongolian Republic, Rumania, Sweden, the United States and Yugoslavia. Their names ranged from illustrious to illustriously obscure.

From France came Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie, and Mathematician Henri Laugier. Among England's delegation of 20 were Biologist Julian Huxley, Royal Academician Sir Robert Robinson. England would have sent more but for Winston Churchill's last-minute refusal to grant exit visas to some ten men engaged in war research. From the U.S. came 16, including Harvard's Astronomer Harlow Shapley and General Electric's Chemist Irving Langmuir.*

Soviet Steam. Even before the scientists began to arrive, the Soviet press turned on full propaganda steam to make all Soviet citizens science-conscious.

For some of the visiting scientists, it was a first opportunity for firsthand examination of science as a monolithic state enterprise. Except for independent academies in Georgia, Armenia, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, all Soviet science is under the direction of the Soviet Academy. Within this organization are 76 research institutes, 11 independent laboratories, six observatories, 42 meteorological and astronomical stations, 73 libraries and 16 museums. The Soil Research Institute in Moscow alone is an eight-story building covering more than a city block.

Science & the State. One great question troubling the visiting scientists was: can science be free when it is state-controlled? Academician A. F. Joffe undertook to lay their doubts at rest. Said he: "Can scientific research be planned? There are people who claim that fulfillment of any plan is incompatible with the private initiative of a scientist, and that science, aiming at solution of practical problems in industry, agriculture, transport or defense, delays treatment of deeply theoretical problems which promise nothing in the way of practical results in the immediate future. Yet the experience of science in the Soviet Union shows that these and other contradictions advanced by the opponents of state participation in the guidance of scientific endeavor are purely imaginary.

"As illustration, I can cite an experience of my own. This happened in May 1930, at a time when our country was still comparatively poor and all efforts and means were directed at fulfillment of the first five-year plan. My colleagues at the Institute and myself thought it was essential to begin work on the atomic nucleus.

We were worried, however, because . . .

the new researches we outlined required the additional expenditure of several hundred thousand rubles. I went to Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who was chairman of the Supreme Economic Council, put the matter before him, and in ten minutes left his office with an order signed by him to assign the sum I had requested to the Institute. Once started, we have continued work on the atomic nucleus for 15 years as an essential part of our plan."

The visitors, who had come to observe rather than argue, offered no comment.

Hail Darwin! Hail Franklin! The second get-together was in the red-and-gold Bolshoi Theater. On the stage, where the academicians sat, a white, heroic-sized bust of Lenin stood on a pedestal underneath a mammoth poster portrait of Stalin. President Komarov's welcoming address (read for him because he was ailing) proposed greetings to Stalin, Molotov, Kalinin, the Red Army, the Red Navy. The conferees enthusiastically sent them.

In Russian political propaganda and agitation, Charles Darwin is the most quoted of English scientists, because his Origin of Species is considered a refutation of the supernatural. Toward the end of Komarov's speech, he reviewed British science in two paragraphs, most of which was devoted to the great work done by Darwin. American science was covered in one paragraph, which mentioned Benjamin Franklin.

*Among those not present was U.C.L.A.'s Geneticist Herbert Spencer Jennings (TIME, Feb. 5), who turned down an invitation because he was too busy propagating new types of paramecium.

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