Education: World Brains-Truster

After two dozen secret nominating sessions, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) finally agreed on a man for the top job. Their choice: Dr. Julian Sorell Huxley, 59, lean, wiry and brilliant British biologist who ran UNESCO in its warm-up stages.

For an outfit devoted to the “free flow of information,” they were mighty secret about it. As the delegates filed into UNESCO House in Paris (the old Hotel Majestic) to vote, three armed and mustachioed policemen checked their credentials. The press gallery was cleared, the communications system shut off. Huxley received 22 votes; three countries voted against him and two abstained.

U.S. Delegate Archibald MacLeish broke the silence by telling the press that the U.S. had voted for Huxley. (Earlier the Americans had agitated for Francis Biddle, ex-Attorney General of the U.S. and one of the Nürnberg judges.) When the new director-general followed up MacLeish by revealing a promise to resign after two years of his six-year term, observers scented a compromise.

“Useful Hypothesis.” Julian Huxley is a nervous and abrupt man with somewhat the same kind of awesome intellect and donnish wit as his younger brother, Aldous (Brave New World).* Julian’s tongue hurts as often as it humors; he was once described as “alternately cherub and pickle.” In his picklish mood, he often puts people off with a burst of terrifying temper. Some delegates had reservations about picking a man who has professed atheism (“I do not believe in God, because I think the idea has ceased to be a useful hypothesis”), birth control, eugenic mating, state planning (as a member of the British group called PEP). But most UNESCO delegates thought the choice of Huxley was one way of luring reluctant Russia in; without her, every body agreed, UNESCO was a half-cooked goose.

An Oxford graduate, Huxley has taught biology there and in the U.S. (at Texas’ Rice Institute), is a veteran “brainstruster” on the BBC equivalent of Information Please. He is the author of some 30 books (among them: On Living in a Revolution, Bird-Watching and Bird Be havior).

For many years Huxley was director of the London Zoo, took a lion cub along to one of his Christmas lectures at the Royal Institution. During the blitz he helped corner a zebra that escaped when a bomb scored a direct hit on the Zoo. As a “safety valve” for his scientific work, Huxley writes intellectual doggerel (sample lines: And heavenly matter Is mad as a hatter —Just atoms daemonic, A dance electronic).

* He is also the grandson of Biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, grandnephew of Critic Matthew Arnold, nephew of Novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward, son of Biographer Leonard Huxley.