Science: Prizewinners on Secrecy

Is the progress of science in the U.S. being held up by unnecessary secrecy? To find out, Missouri Democrat Thomas C. Hennings Jr., chairman of the Senate’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, wrote to all living U.S. scientists who have won Nobel Prizes. Last week Senator Hennings released replies from three chemists, six physicists, eight men in medicine or physiology. Their consensus: yes.

Sample comments:

¶Columbia’s Dickinson W. Richards, 1956 prizewinner for his work in cardiology: “Every scientist suffers when there is any restriction, at any level, to the free exchange of knowledge. Except insofar as restrictions are required by the exigencies of national defense, we believe that there should be no restrictions.” ¶The Rockefeller Institute’s Fritz Lipmann (1953 prize—discoverer of coenzyme A) cited a research group whose classified work in a fast-moving field became obsolete before it was permitted to be published. “Such instances damage the morale of the scientific worker.”¶Harvard’s Percy W. Bridgman (1946 prize—physics of high pressures): “If I think that my colleague may be able to make some helpful suggestion, I can feel it only highly irrelevant that he may not have secured clearance by the FBI.”¶The University of California’s Berkeley Chancellor Glenn T. Seaborg (1951 prize —synthesis of new elements): “I am concerned about the virtual absence of easy, direct communication with scientists of the Soviet Union . . . Poland, Czechoslovakia and China. If we do not get a proper perspective on the development of science in countries such as China, we shall not be able to act rationally, and will surely suffer a rude awakening in the not too distant future.” ¶Bell Labs’ Walter H. Brattain (1956 prize—co-inventor of the transistor) said that before World War II the U.S. was “a nation that offered asylum to independent and nonconformist thinking individuals,” but after the war the Government went on classifying “anything that might possibly aid an enemy”—a program that discouraged “top scientific men who might otherwise have come to our country.” Concluded Brattain: “I feel very strongly that most restrictions done in the name of national security turn out to be foolish . . . Don’t kill the baby to protect it from the kidnapers.”