Comrades

Wherever they went, huge crowds greeted them with banners saying, WELCOME, SCIENTISTS OF THE WORLD! The Soviet press lionized them; Soviet scientists eagerly showed them through their laboratories. Last week, still slightly dazed by their tumultuous reception, U.S. scientists who attended Moscow's international science congress two months ago (TIME, July 2) turned up at a Manhattan meeting to report their impressions. Conclusion: within five to ten years, the U.S.S.R. may well challenge U.S. pre-eminence in science and technology.

The U.S. delegation, headed by Harvard's Astronomer Harlow Shapley and General Electric's Nobelman Irving Langmuir, found much of Russia's scientific equipment destroyed by war. Though the Russians and the visiting scientists politely avoided prying into each other's war research, it was obvious that the Russians had been in no position to match the vast U.S. work on the atomic bomb. Yet Physicist Langmuir thought that in less than ten years the U.S.S.R. would certainly be able to carry out a "Manhattan Project" of its own.

No world-shaking scientific discovery has yet come out of Soviet Russia. But the visiting scientists noted with surprise that throughout the war Russian scientists, unlike those in the U.S. and Britain, had devoted their main effort to long-range, fundamental research. Langmuir & Co. further discovered that the Russians, through sheer volume of effort, already led the world in some fields of study (e.g., geology and soil science). In Moscow, they found famed Physicist Peter Kapitza presiding over one of the world's best-equipped electronics laboratories--where a photoelectric cell ten times as good as any in the U.S. has been developed.

Furthermore, the Soviets play up the prestige of their scientists, and provide them with the material comforts of the good life. Kapitza, for example, has a country dacha and two chauffeurs; he said that if he wanted a house in the mountains the Government would gladly build him one.

The visitors were most impressed by the Russians' eagerness to end their long scientific isolation. Every advanced science student is now required to learn English, and top Russian officials proposed an immediate exchange of students and professors with the U.S. and Britain. Predicted Physicist Langmuir: "The U.S.S.R. and the U.S. will lead the world in science."

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