Lessons from Oak Ridge

For weeks after a reunion party of University of Tennessee faculty members, Physicist William G. Pollard had a burning idea on his mind. One of his colleagues --a woman physicist--had just returned from a wartime job with the atomic energy program at the University of Chicago, and during the party she suddenly made an exciting suggestion. Oak Ridge, said she, had so many facilities that U.S. universities lacked. Why couldn't it be made into a permanent educational institution itself? A few months later, Pollard took a leave of absence from the University of Tennessee to devote himself to turning Oak Ridge into just that. By October 1946, his colleague's suggestion had become a fact.

Last week, as the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies began its sixth New Year, it was a humming campus with ten different training programs, and this week a new batch of 32 students from 19 states will arrive for special study. Some of the students are professors, some are M.D.s, some are graduates working for advanced degrees. Their fields cover everything from agriculture to biology, chemistry to cancer. In its five short years under Executive Director William Pollard, the institute has become a major mecca, not only for physicists, but for scientists of every sort.

Combine of Campuses. To get the institute started, Pollard carried a crusade to every important campus in the South, preaching the simple doctrine that "Oak

Ridge will just be a federal island within the South, unless we can add its research potential to our educational system." Soon, he had such men as President Frank P. Graham of the University of North Carolina and Dr. Paul Magnus Gross, vice president of Duke University, in the crusade with him. When the institute opened, it had 14 charter members willing to help support it, and gradually the number rose to 29. Through a central council and a board of directors these members manage the institute's affairs, share its Government-owned facilities. Says William Pollard: "We like the universities to feel that Oak Ridge is a part of their own campus."

Apparently they do, for each summer some 75 professors pour into Oak Ridge for research and brush-up courses on the latest scientific developments. In turn, the institute sends out members of its own staff to lecture at campuses all over the South. With Southern medical schools, the institute also maintains a special laboratory and 30-bed hospital ward to study the effects of atomic energy materials on cancer.

Trucks & Tracers. But the influence of the institute extends far beyond the South. It is under contract to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and the AEC fellowships it administers are open to students in any university. In the past six years, more than 800 scientists from 45 states and twelve foreign countries have taken its special course in using radioisotopes (socalled "tracer atoms").

For such students, the institute offers equipment no other campus could afford. It has use of the largest of the national atomic energy laboratories, the biggest gaseous diffusion plant (for the separation of uranium isotopes), and is in the world center of the production and study of tracer atoms. Its museum, complete with artificial lightning and Geiger counters, is host to hundreds of students a year. Its special exhibits travel by truck to schools and fairs from Florida to Oregon.

But in one sense, the institute teaches more than lessons in science. It is also the proof of an often neglected thesis: that what universities cannot afford alone, they can often get by getting together. The plainest lesson of the institute is simple economics.

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