Get-Together

In the U.S. and Britain for the past fortnight, thousands of scientists have been getting together to discuss ways & means of making the world a less perilous place to live in.

P:The 118th meeting of the American Chemical Society in Chicago attracted some 9,000 scientists who brought along a staggering total of 1,181 papers. The chemists and chemical engineers were pleased by progress in production and use of cortisone and ACTH, delighted by reports on improved petroleum weapons in man's war against the insects, but worried about a major problem of the atomic age: safe disposal of deadly radioactive waste material.

P:In Birmingham, England, scientists attending the 112th meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, spent three hours heatedly debating the Wegener theory of continental drift.* Finally they put the question to a vote. The result, an even division for and against, proved that the scientists are as thoroughly split as the continents. Less controversial was a speech by Sir Harold Hartley, the group's president, who came with his own list of the world's biggest problems: 1) the growing strain of increasing population, 2) the malnutrition and endemic sickness of perhaps half the world, 3) the inequalities between the more forward and the backward peoples, 4) the gradual depletion of resources and their unequal distribution, 5) the human problem of improving the way of life of many of the earth's millions.

P:At Harvard more than 1,000 of the world's leading mathematicians met in the International Congress of Mathematicians --the first to be held in the U.S. since 1893. The main purpose of the congress was to give mathematicians, who are seldom understood by anyone else, a chance to talk to each other about their specialties. Mathematicians from 45 countries showed up, but a message from the U.S.S.R. Academy of Science stated that Russia's mathematicians could not possibly get around to attending because they were "very much occupied with their regular work."

*Germany's late Professor Alfred Wegener speculated in 1920 that the earth's continents were once a solid mass which broke up and drifted apart.

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