Don't Be a Dodo

Conventionally considered, it was a good showing. Of the 58,000 chemists who might have come, 2,321 crystallized in Washington last week at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. As at most large scientific conventions, the principal concern was better jobs, but the chemists listened to papers touching on nearly every chemical compound that can be put into a test tube. They heard about hydrazine and dithiooximide and triacetyl-aldehyde-L-erythrose. The learned speakers told how to keep plastic shower curtains from smelling bad and how to keep cattle from getting arthritis.

Most of the papers were interesting only to tiny groups of specialists. Chemistry has divided and subdivided until a cellulose chemist can hardly tell what a fuel chemist is talking about.

Nut Tighteners? A few days later, when the Chemical Society held a second regional meeting at St. Louis, its president, Dr. Charles Allen Thomas of Monsanto Chemical Co., gave his flock a timely talking to. He did not come right out and call the chemists dodos, but he warned them that overspecialization (the nemesis of the dodo) might make their science stagnate.

"The danger . . ." said Dr. Thomas, "is in our specialized approach to the study of science. We have transferred the techniques employed in the mass production of goods to the study of those fundamental phenomena which are the wellsprings out of which man's mastery of his environment flows. We have failed to see the great difference between physical and intellectual production. Are we becoming nut tighteners and wrench wielders . . . strait-jacketed . . . within narrow disciplines?"

Treadmill. Dr. Thomas admits that some specialization is necessary, but he thinks it is seductively easy to develop too much of it. Many animal species specialized to live in the seas, or the forests, or the air. "Each was a specialized animal adjusted to a specific environment. And when the environment changed, other species became predominant . . ."

"The appearance of man . . . with his generalized form, and his ability to adapt himself to changing environment, brought on the scene the 'lord of creation' who was flexible enough to survive a variety of changes . . . This generalization has been both the strength and the weakness of man . . . While . . . specialized species either perished ... or stagnated in static societies . . . man rose from precariousness to precariousness . . . The point I want to make is that biological specialization can eventually lead to ... destruction or to a treadmill of repetition . . .

"A highly specialized animal ... is practically in equilibrium with all phases of his environment... Is something similar, perhaps, happening to the scientist? Is the specialist, in the confines of his narrow discipline, failing to accept the challenge of unfamiliar territory, to risk the uncertainties and the tensions of coupling and interconnecting the many aspects of science? ... If this is so, he is no longer a true scientist."

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