National Reports:
JR, WILLIAM K. WYANT
National Reports San Francisco: Frank Mankiewicz. Minneapolis: Sam Romer. Chicago: Albert N. Votaw. Boston: Courtney Sheldon. Dallas: Bicknell Eubanks. New Orleans: John Carmichael. St. Louis:...
...Before we are smothered by the economic pressure of a mounting population...
...This protective myopia unfortunately tended to reduce the attention given the significant conclusions announced following the Conference on Science and Human Responsibility at Washington University here this fall...
...But it was not the fault of the authors that "wolf" had been cried so often, and that the very word "challenge" nowadays sends the average citizen in search of a Martini...
...We face, however, the task of providing an adequate place in our society for more and more old people...
...Whether we shall do so depends upon the spirit that is within us...
...we do not find any other partner or foe around us...
...However platitudinous the phraseology might appear to a surfeited reader, the fact that persons as well-informed and hard-minded as the conference participants could agree that man has the knowledge and means to influence his destiny was meaningful...
...Louis conferees were scientists accustomed to dealing in demonstrable facts...
...Nowadays, especially in the densely populated areas of the world, the limitations of our chances in life primarily come from other men who have the same right to the goods of this earth that we have...
...When Compton opened the conference, he rejected the Malthusian view that population increases will always outstrip increases in production...
...The knowledge and the strength to meet these great challenges are available...
...The group included 28 eminent figures in science, technology, the humanities and public affairs, from this country and abroad...
...The increasing control of infectious diseases and the mounting prevalence of mental disorders call for new approaches to the problem of health...
...Under such circumstances, any progress in technique or engineering was to the advantage of man...
...It appears to the members of this conference that science is competent to find the knowledge, and that technology can create the machinery needed, to give every person his appropriate opportunity...
...The daily press gave them a decent burial, and the public did not mourn...
...Speaking for the fields of biology and zoology, Paul Weiss of the National Research Council pointed to the infinite variety of microscopic life, declaring that nobody can forecast the future for "any individual, be it mountain, man or cell...
...This vision is taking form in such documents as the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights...
...For the longer future, the world's prosperity will depend more upon the form of man's aspirations than upon the limitations of his technical knowledge...
...D. Dubarle of the Catholic Institute of Paris and other's arrived at the same idea: The physical world can be conquered if man has sufficient good will toward his fellows...
...In earlier times, human life was threatened by illness, famine and wild animals, snow and ice in the winter...
...By their various routes, Heisenberg the physicist, Weiss the biologist, Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan of India, the Rev...
...LOUIS ALTHOUGH Americans are widely represented as quaking with fear at the possibility of nuclear extermination, the majority are so tired of reading and hearing about the hydrogen bomb that the only way to get them really interested would be to explode a small one at eye-level, about 10 feet away...
...Many wise heads, in the past, have thought long and hard and reached the opposite conclusion...
...Obviously, this was not language that would arouse the countryside, set the Mississippi River aboil, and cause managing editors to rip out page one...
...3. The individual: "An objective that seems acceptable and of vital importance throughout the free world is that every person shall have an opportunity to grow to his fullest stature...
...Richmond: Lawrence King...
...Atlanta: Joseph Fiszman...
...2. Health: "The great strides of medicine during the past century continue unabated...
...These are giving new health and vigor to mankind...
...A participant, Werner Heisenberg of Gottingen, one of the foremost physicists of Europe and an originator of quantum mechanics, explained how modern physics had removed the basis for materialistic philosophy...
...the world must set its human sights, draw its plans, and put these plans in operation...
...Louis: William Wyant Jr...
...They agreed that there is very real danger of an H-bomb holocaust that might destroy civilization...
...education and other subjects, the conferees ended with an earnest peroration: "The really pressing question is: Can these challenges be met in time...
...Here are portions of the carefully qualified statement read by Chairman Compton on the final day of the conference: 1. Economics: "Under conditions of relative peace, and with the aid of science and its use in industry and agriculture, we see the way of meeting to an increasing degree man's economic needs during the next few decades...
...Compton also heartily rejected, as did his colleagues, the harsh determinism so long fashionable among scientists, who in their zeal for unfolding the secrets of the outside world tended to look upon religion as mumbo-jumbo and faith as wishful thinking...
...At the invitation of former Chancellor Arthur H. Compton, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, the conferees met for two weeks in what they called an "atmosphere of urgency...
...The gist of the new testimony was that things in the world of nature are not nearly so cut-and-dried as they seemed to Sir Isaac Newton or Laplace, nor is homo sapiens so helpless a creature of his environment as might have been inferred from Darwin's Origin of Species...
...After discussing international law...
...Scientists Discuss the Atom's Future By William K. Wyant Jr...
...Not a man to hit the sawdust trail, Heisenberg put the case this way: "It might not be too crude an oversimplification if one were to say that, for the first time in human history, we face on this earth only ourselves...
...Many of the St...
...They agreed, also, that mankind has both the knowledge and the strength to work out a salvation if it wants to do so...
...The trend toward a devastating third world war must not be permitted to pass the point of no return...
Vol. 37 • December 1954 • No. 50
