Science Is Not Enough

Some of the nation's top scientists gathered last week at Yale to honor the nation's first and one of its best scientific research centers (see SCIENCE). They could reasonably have expected to hear self-congratulatory speeches on the centennial of Yale's Sheffield Scientific School. Instead, from the school's director himself, they heard the explicit suggestion that science doesn't know all the answers, and never will.

Said grey, spindly Director Edmund W. Sinnott: "Science is modern, popular and dominant. It needs no special pleaders.... It cannot help being tempted to a certain arrogance and a conviction that the keys of truth are in its hands alone. [But] logic and reason are no monopoly of science. . . . Science regards a human being not as a soul which may be saved or lost but as an exquisitely constructed physicochemical mechanism. ... To many thoughtful minds the gains of science are secondary and superficial things.

"Let us face the fact that what the world must have is a fuller cultivation of those qualities which are best termed spiritual. Whatever we may think as to their origin, as scientists, we should no longer sneer at them; for on their strength depends our own survival. Man leads a double life, of mind and spirit. If mind is suspect, as in religious fanaticism, man may become a creature only of his instincts; if spirit is suspect, as today when scientific materialism carries such authority, he is in danger of degenerating into a selfish and soulless mechanism. To be a whole man, he must cultivate both parts of him."

Weird Mysteries. As head of Sheffield (he is also president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science), Dr. Sinnott presides over a school that grew out of a dank laboratory, 15 feet below the ground because the architect was fearful of "the black arts, explosions . . . and weird-like mysteries" of chemistry. The cellar lab was built for Professor Benjamin Silliman, the father of scientific teaching in the U.S.--whose name was frequently honored at Sheffield's centennial last week.

Since Silliman's day, Sheffield has done a great deal of pioneering in science's black arts. "Sheff" taught the first U.S. courses in geology, paleontology, physiological chemistry, established the nation's first agricultural experiment station. It was the first U.S. school to provide a post-graduate course for the Ph.D. degree. Then crusty old Elias Loomis pioneered in devising the basis for modern weather maps and Bertram Boltwood discovered ionium. Sheffield's most famous teacher: Josiah Willard Gibbs, the top mathematical physicist of his day, who laid down the laws which form the basis for modern thermodynamics.

"Whole Men." When Botanist Sinnott took over famed Sheffield School two years ago, it became a graduate school only. But he is partly responsible for Yale's recent decision to require undergraduate liberal arts students to take broad courses in the goals and methods of science; and to require science majors to study the humanities.

Yale's scientific program is designed to put in practice the warning Dr. Sinnott gave his fellow scientists last week: "The sciences must be taught not as a privileged and superior discipline but as parts of a great whole and against the background of all human knowledge. Only whole men can save the world today."

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