The Care and Feeding of Mad Scientists

You could hardly have science fiction without scientists, mad or otherwise. A check of the current issues of eight science-fiction magazines shows that about a quarter of the stories deal with scientists, either puttering in their laboratories or plunging into trackless wastes on expeditions. As a result, we readers have acquired a certain mental picture of how laboratories and expeditions are run.

Well, are they run that way?

Yes and no. The pictures in the stories are sometimes accurate especially when a scientist writes the story and sometimes not. If they have any consistent fault it is one of omission. That is, there are certain practical problems and difficulties in managing scientists and their activities that are seldom touched upon in the stories, though any scientist or scientific administrator will weep on your neck for hours about them.

To begin with, who or what are scientists? People who practice science. To save type in a chase for definitions we might as well include engineers as "applied" scientists, though some of the "pure" scientists may object. The two classes are not very different as human types, except that you might say that pure scientists are like engineers only more so; or that engineers are more "average" than pure scientists.

Now, scientists vary just as other people do. There are wise and foolish ones, sober and dissipated, solitary and gregarious, courteous and boorish, puritanical and lecherous, industrious and lazy, and so on. They do as a class show certain tendencies. For one thing they are all people of high intelligence, because even to be anchorman in the graduating class at one of our tougher Institutes of Technology one has to be up in the top four or five percentile of the whole population; and to get through a Ph. D. examination in science puts one up in an even more rarefied stratum. The scientist may be a fool about some things, but he must have that basic mental power to become a scientist at all; he cannot be a moron in any strict metrological sense.

Being more intelligent than the average, scientists perhaps tend to be more reasonable, rational, and judicious than most people. When conflicts of interests or ideas occur among them, there is a better chance but a chance only of settling the conflict by reason and discussion. All of which does not prevent some scientists from getting into love-life troubles, falling for obvious hoaxes and swindles, or embracing pseudoscientific doctrines like Spiritualism and Marxism.

Dr. Sheldon, the varieties of human physique and temperament man, thinks that scientists tend towards his ectomorphic physical type and cerebro-tonic temperament. From what I have seen of scientists I am inclined, on a basis of subjective impressions, to agree. The ectomorph is the thin man, and the cerebro-tonic is the thoughtful, introverted, nervous, self-controlled, subdued individualist. He likes to work by himself, prefers ideas to people, and ages well, becoming wrinkled and leathery instead of paunchy and jowly. The psychologists class him as a schizoid.

Every time I attend a meeting of the alumni of my college California Tech I look around the circle of lean, slowly wrinkling men with sober faces behind steel-rimmed glasses gleaming over the highballs; note the careful gestures and precise speech, and chalk one up for Sheldon. How different from a conclave of salesmen or politicians.

Of course we have here a chicken-and-egg problem: Are they scientists because they lacked the physical strength to compete with other boys in sport and combat and thus directed their energies in other directions? Or are they thin and under-muscled because they never had enough interest in food to eat enough to fill them out? I don't know and doubt if anybody else does.

Some scientists are interested in arts, games, and sports in addition to their work. Einstein's violin is famous and I know several who paint. Others take an attitude of willful Boeotian ignorance towards interests outside their particular field. Many read science fiction because, as one explained: "In the stories the experiments always work."

Most of them are sociable in the specialized way that writers and other practitioners of numerically small professions are sociable: They like to congregate with the few others of their kind, but find the general mass a bore. Most of them make good matrimonial risks if the girl doesn't mind such quirks as refusing to come to meals until they have finished some recondite train of abstract thought. According to the statistics the sedentary ones like chemical engineers make better-than-average husbands, but some of those whose work requires extensive travel and exploration, such as anthropologists, are poor matrimonial risks.

The usual accusations against scientists of absentmindedness, lack of interest in great wealth, and a tendency to treat a date with a girl as a problem in advanced socio-dynamics, have a grain of truth. However, a couple of late science-fiction novels, Stewart's "Earth Abides" and Norris' "Nutro 29," each presented a hero evidently intended as a typical scientist. The egregious characteristic of these men was, let's say, lack of character. Isherwood Williams and Thomas Hightower are weak, pliant, easygoing, irresolute men, content to drift with the tide.

Now as far as my acquaintance with the breed goes, that is not at all typical. For of all men, scientists are on the average the world's most stubborn and refractory individualists, usually inoffensive, but capable of pursuing any objective on which they have set their sights with the fanatical intensity of mania. When people call scientists "mad" they refer to this quality. If that were not the case, they would never undergo the long and intense educational process that it takes to make a scientist.

Which brings us to the main question: How do you govern the ungovernable? Should you even try?

But before we get into that subject there are two other varieties of fictional scientist, common in stories but extremely rare in fact, who require comment. One is the rich scientist. Rich scientists are rare because a boy born rich is unlikely to develop the necessary drive, while poor scientists seldom have either the commercial acumen or the time and opportunity for financial manipulations to get rich.

There are exceptions: I once knew a young scientist who inherited a pot of money, built his own lab with it, became one of the country's leading biophysicists, and is now an authentic big shot, serving on committees to advise the President what to do with the Atom and so forth.

But for practical purposes the rich scientist is like that other familiar fictional character: the super-colossal hero seven feet tall, with tawny hair and smoldering ice-blue eyes and never mind the mixed metaphors broad of shoulder and mighty of thew, who pulverize platoons of dastards and "liberates" droves of wenches as easily as we common clods put on our rubbers.

Now, it is not true to say that no such person ever lived. There was one once: King Harold III of Norway (10151066 ) whose fantastic career out-Conaned Conan. Harold the Roughneck was seven feet tall; he did lead his army bellowing battle songs and cutting down foes like ripe wheat with a two-handed sword; he did hew his way at the head of the Byzantine Emperor's Varangian Guard through the Muslim hordes to Jerusalem and back half a century before the Crusades officially began, and so forth. But the type has never been.

The other fictional type is the beautiful lady scientist. As a matter of cold fact most lady scientists range from plain to downright ugly, even though Dr. Beebe did have a very photogenic assistant, a blond girl ichthyologist, some years back. The reason is simple. Ugly girls tend to go in for science just as skinny boys do, because they can compete in this field with their fellow-beings better than on more conventional grounds.

Now comes the problem of putting our scientists to work and keeping them at it in an efficient manner. Well, where and how do scientists work?

A rather small minority geologists, meteorologists, biologists, archeologists, et cetera go on expeditions between stretches of office work or teaching. The rest work in laboratories, governmental and private. The private laboratories are those of manufacturing companies, universities, and other institutions like museums and medical centers, and a few well-fixed individuals. A little over a billion dollars is spent yearly on scientific research in the United States, half by the government and half by private agencies.

Among private organizations, colleges and universities tend to specialize more in pure science abstract problems about the nature of man and the universe while the other kinds favor applied science - engineering research on practical problems leading to improvements in ways of making and using things. However, just as there is no sharp distinction between these two kinds of research, so there is no sharp distinction between the organizations performing them. Many colleges and many industrial laboratories solve problems in both fields. Some of the laboratories of manufacturing companies do much basic research while others concentrate on specific problems.

Moreover these organizations do a lot of work for each other. A manufacturing company, for example, may rely upon its own engineers for ordinary design and improvement of its product, but resort to a university or government laboratory for advice on drastic new departures and difficult problems. The university laboratory likewise may at the same time perform engineering research for a manufacturer, research in sociology or economics for the government, and investigation of a problem in pure science for itself in order to advance the knowledge of mankind.

The "laboratory" using the word in its broadest sense will comprise a group of buildings or a single building or a part thereof, with equipment and personnel. This will be divided into parts, called "divisions" or "sections" or "laboratories" or whatever, each specializing in some field or branch of science. Then each of these subdivisions has two more or less distinct areas: the office space where the scientists have their desks separate cubicles for the higher ups; a general deskery for the rest and stenographers, and a "laboratory" proper where the physical work is done.

A "laboratory" in the last sense is seldom so neat and shiny as it appears in movies about noble scientists. Instead it is cluttered with odds and ends of electric cable, tubing, wire, glassware, stands, pencil stubs, mechanics' lunches, old technical magazines, ash trays made of discarded scientific paraphernalia, and so forth. Let some officious person "clean it up" and the scientists scream that they can no longer find anything: "I've been saving that roll of copper-nickel-iron wire for a year to use in Project 8663B, and now just when I have a use for it-"

There is no very serious problem in hiring a young scientist to work in a laboratory. That is one reason there are degrees: so that the young scientists come neatly ticketed. Hence if you have work to be done in biochemistry you hire a biochemist.

But then the trouble begins. If he turns out to be no good you fire him but how do you know when he is no good? Maybe the problem you gave him was inherently insoluble, so it is no discredit to him that he failed to solve it. On the other hand if he fails to solve several problems and then some other man succeeds, the first man doesn't look very good. I have known a third-rate scientist who would repeatedly turn in nice neat reports, carefully calculated and composed and reasoned and every time the report would be rendered useless by some glaring basic error in scientific assumptions.

Then, in most lines of work there is a rough correlation between a man's general work habits neatness, agreeableness, punctuality, et cetera and the merit of his work. But with scientists this does not apply. Some very good scientists are disorderly people who keep irregular hours and snarl at everybody. It takes a good administrator to weigh the worth of the men under him and to see through such superficialities as sloppiness of appearance or disagreeable personality.

Well, how do you get a good administrator?

Ah, there's one of the hardest nuts of all to crack. In most organizations, when you wish to choose a man to head the outfit or a section thereof, you pick the one in that group who has shown the most ability in his assigned work in the past. Now, if your outstanding scientist is also a good administrator you're in luck and there is no problem. But this doesn't happen any too often, because the qualities that make the best scientist are not at all those that make the best administrator. The scientist often cares little for people and doesn't get on well with them; the administrator must be an expert on people and must get along with them. The scientist is usually bored to tears by bookkeeping, finance, time-checks, organization charts, and maintenance problems; the administrator must seize all these with a sure and confident grasp.

Does it fallow that the man who knows the most about accounting, organization, and the like is the best lab administrator?

No, because here you run up against another paradox. A laboratory cannot be closely compared with a production; sales, teaching, or policing organization, all of whom can show results that can be measured in simple units: dollars, arrests, and so on. A production department produces things that can be simply evaluated; a laboratory produces knowledge, and nobody knows what the knowledge will be worth until a year or a decade or a century has elapsed.

But the administrator, playing nursemaid to a gang of idiosyncratic geniuses, must justify his fat salary. Unless watched he is likely to impose upon the laboratory a degree of regimentation, organization, and paper work that actually cuts down the productiveness of the group.

In large organizations there is a natural tendency for paper work to increase with time. Each executive thinks of some daily or weekly or monthly report on hours, progress, equipment, et cetera which, if he could only make everybody turn it in faithfully, would give him a much clearer picture of what is going on in his organization. So he institutes this report, but seldom thinks to abolish any of the reports established by his predecessors. As a result the paper work increases until the scientists are actually spending a fifth or a quarter of their time writing reports.

These contradictions and difficulties are least evident in laboratories that do cut-and-dried engineering tests. Such outfits run in a routine manner, with one engineer bossing a gang of undegreed technicians, in much the same manner as a production department.

But as soon as any originality or thought is allowed you have "research," and the more research you have, the "purer" the science, the greater are the administrative difficulties. The troubles also increase with the size of the organization, reaching a maximum in government labs and those of great private companies like du Pont and Bell Telephone. [footnote: I said great companies like them, not necessarily those two companies themselves. ] Though oceans of ink have been spilled on the respective merits and faults of capitalism and socialism, from the point of view of the ordinary working scientist or engineer, the difference between working for the government and for a large corporation could be put in your eye without discomfort.

Experience shows that for profound theoretical research in pure science, men work best when working alone or in a voluntary association of two or three brains, and when given the greatest possible freedom. On the other hand for solving practical engineering problems, or applying known principles, the best results are had by well-organized teams of specialists seeking well-defined objectives. University laboratories, which go in more for pure science, therefore tend towards the former type of organization if you can call it that - while industrial laboratories, devoting themselves more to practical engineering, incline towards the latter.

The good administrator is the one who can tell what is the optimum degree of organization and control for his particular group doing his particular kind of work. He must be able to manage his geniuses, to spur them on, and to protect them from uninformed outside interference without pampering them to the point where they take advantage of his liberality as some scientists, like other people, will do if encouraged.

He must watch out, for instance, for the scientist who has been working for a long time on a problem and is hesitant to apply the crucial test for fear it will prove that he is on the wrong track, and who therefore goes on indefinitely refining his apparatus and devising subsidiary tests and generally fiddling around. The administrator must prowl around the laboratory enough to keep track of what goes on without driving his charges wild by constantly breathing dawn their necks. He must be able to ask for clearly defined results without imposing upon the scientist his ideas of how the results should be obtained and at the same time be ready to offer sound advice if asked, or to take corrective action if the scientist obviously has got off the track and is getting nowhere.

One authority recommends that a good laboratory administrator should be somebody like a patent attorney, who has had plenty of contact with science without himself being primarily a scientist. Another suggests: "All administrators should be women, of the aggressive but motherly type. I think they would possibly do a very good job, being willing to provide for their mad little creatures in return for a kind word now and then, and no ego buildup."

As a practical matter the administrator, even if not primarily a scientist, should have a pretty good grounding in science, so that he shall be able to judge his juniors' results and make intelligent suggestions when asked. Also, many technical people get huffy when asked to take orders from nontechnical people, whom they regard as virtual illiterates.

Well, then, suppose you pick your administrator from the ranks of nonscientists who still know enough science for the task. What do you do to reward the scientist who has worked long and well for you and who in a more conventional organization might reasonably expect to be promoted to command of the group? For while most scientists are not extravagant hedonists with violent power-complexes, they do - like other people like to live reasonably well, and their egos demand at least some satisfaction in the form of promotion and pay-raises.

Sometimes, as I said, a good scientist is also a good administrator, in which case there is no problem. But sometimes you have to cook up a scheme for raising a scientist's pay and rank without actually putting him in charge of a department. You call him a "consultant" or a "senior engineer" or something, and reward him by giving him more freedom and less paper work instead of the reverse, which is the normal lot of the executive.

As an example of the absurdities inherent in this paradox, there was a world-famous physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos during World War II. To give him a rank commensurate with his standing in the field the United States Government had to hire him at one of their top rates, which meant that when the organization chart was drawn up this man was Number Three in command at Los Alamos. Ordinarily this meant nothing; Numbers One and Two ran the place and let Number Three sit in his chair and cerebrate. But the time came when Numbers One and Two were both away at once and our hero found himself acting director. A maintenance man came in to see the director and gave the physicist a long report on some perilous fire hazard that he had found, which should be attended to at once. When the maintenance man had finished, the physicist looked at him vaguely and said:

"But that has nothing to do with physics!"

And thereupon he rolled up his eyes and withdrew his soul once again into the Nirvana of the higher mathematical physics.

The scientific administrator's lot is a pretty exacting one. He has to go as far as he can to give his scientists optimum working conditions, but he can seldom go so far as they would like. They would like laboratories stocked with unlimited equipment which they could simply pick up in the stock room and walk off with, without even signing a receipt, and a minimum of supervision and reports. Then the administrator would not know what was going on, and when Congress or the Front Office or the Faculty Committee came around to ask what his geniuses were doing to justify their expense he would have a tough time answering which would not be good for next year's appropriation.

Or he might find that one of his bright boys had gone off into some line of work that happens to fascinate the scientist but that has nothing to do with the overall objectives of the organization.

On this last point, a tot of trouble would be saved if the administrator would make it quite clear to the scientist when he hires him, just what is expected of him. If the man is employed to do dull routine tests on hydraulic valves he should be made to understand that fact clearly, and if he doesn't wish to test hydraulic valves he does not have to take the job. But if the scope of the job is not made clear the scientist may get a bright idea for an improvement in rotameters and neglect the valves for his wonderful new discovery. And then trouble pops and the administrator is caught in the middle between the outrage of the scientist who is insulted by the lack of appreciation of his genius and the equal outrage of the man who is paying to have valves tested and expects just that.

Another thing the administrator has to watch out for is overorganization, a disease that flourishes in large organizations in general and governmental departments in particular. We all know something about the general principles of organization; authority must be congruent with responsibility, fields of authority must be sharply demarcated, objectives must be clearly stated, and so on. And we know something about line versus staff organization and organization charts.

Now, there are people who love those little charts with their lines and boxes as a pig loves mud. If given a free hand they will think up so marry interlocking relationships and lines of authority and committees, and ordain so many committee meetings and consultations and memoranda in octuplicate, that the organization will be paralyzed by sheer complexity. No organization will work very well if it is so complicated that even those running it can't understand it.

To give an example, during the late war I once had charge of the War Production Committee of the Naval Air Material Center in Philadelphia. This was the governmental equivalent of a labor-management committee in private industry, and was supposed to process suggestions for increasing production. Somebody in Washington set up the most elaborate scheme you ever saw, according to which several hundred people in the shops and laboratories were to be organized into five levels of committees. The shops elected the first set of committeemen, who in turn elected the second from among their number, and so on.

As this was too complicated to be workable we simplified it to a mere four levels and went ahead. We had three hundred sixty committeemen working about one hundred fifteen hours a week on WPC work, plus five full-time employees including Lt. Comdr. de Camp - and three part-time officials spending another two hundred fifty hours a week on this activity. And most of the "work" was sheer waste motion. The useful part of it could have been done by a mere handful of people spending a fraction of the time, while the rest actually produced instead of talking about production. [footnote: I am happy to say that some months before the end of the war, the admiral and I agreed to abolish the whole monstrosity, and I was allowed to go back to gadgeteering. ]

Over-organization is especially pernicious in dealing with scientists, who mostly like to work by themselves and who to some extent became scientists so that they could do so.

And speaking of line and staff organization, there are two ways of handling the minimum routine work and paper-shuffling that must be done. One is to divide it or rotate it among the scientists, so that each gets his fair share of drudgery. The other, which is better if the organization is big enough to afford it, is to setup service departments to handle such matters. A scientist is not normally expected to clean the floor under his desk; you hire a janitor for that. By the same token you can take much routine letter-writing; material ordering, and the like off his shoulders by providing expert help.

On the other hand he will probably have to do a certain disagreeable minimum of drudgery no matter how he hates it and no matter how well organized the laboratory is. For instance, he will have to write his own progress reports, or at least dictate them, because nobody else knows enough about his particular work to do so intelligently. And if you don't make him turn in progress reports, he may die on you, leaving a mass of mysterious wires and tubes whose meaning nobody knows.

Even a "pure" scientist, relieved as far as possible of administrative and routine tasks, will have to learn something of administration in order to manage his assistants. True, some very special scientists like mathematicians work without assistants - without any equipment save a pencil and paper and some reference books.

But most laboratory scientists as they rise in their field are given bigger projects that require the help of extra hands and brains. A young scientist may start out all right until he reaches the point of having six or eight assistants. Then he runs into trouble because he has to get along with one technician who is a chronic loafer, another with a sneering disagreeable personality, another who steals laboratory equipment to sell, and so on. Then, despite his lofty boasts of neither knowing nor caring about the black art of human relations, he has to learn it or else.

So much for laboratory scientists. There remains the matter of scientific expeditions. Here you need not worry much about paper work and over organization, because the ordinary expedition is too small. It may comprise anywhere from one person to a few score; expeditions whose personnel runs into three or four figures, like the Navy's recent reconnaissances to the Antarctic, are very exceptional. And a few score people is still small compared to the six hundred odd researchers of General Motors Research, or du Pont with more than eighteen hundred scientists and an even larger number of technicians.

Expeditions, however, have their own peculiar troubles troubles not often brought out in the stories. The bigger the expedition and the more remote and rugged the place it is going, the more acute the difficulties will be. These troubles are personality conflicts, and any expedition of more than a half-dozen members is likely to have them.

For one thing exploring attracts not the prosaic, steady, average type of person, but the aggressive and unconventional individualist. When you crowd a lot of people of this type, of varied backgrounds, together for long periods, suffering from equatorial heat or polar cold, tempers get short and personalities grate. Faults of character that would be overlooked in civilization show up with glaring distinctness. Moreover if the conditions are to be rugged, the leader must pick comparatively young persons to stand the hardships, and being young they have not developed the self-control and tolerance that might enable an older group to get along.

A candid account of many expeditions would reveal a distressing story of feuds, hatreds, mutiny, and outbursts of temper. The leader of such an expedition is in a difficult position. When a man turns out to be no good after it is too late to send him home, he can't simply shoot the twerp. All he can do is relieve him of all duties connected with the expedition. And then he has the character underfoot for months, sulking, intriguing and plotting absurd revenges.

But when the explorers get home they feel ashamed of having acted in such a childish manner. Hence in writing up their experiences or, more usually, having a ghost do it for them they tend to gloss over their personality troubles, and so most written accounts of expeditions give a deceptive effect of sweetness and light.

One of the most famous American expeditions of the last thirty years operated in a far country for several successive years, and one year the scientists actually threatened to strike if two of their number were not excluded from further participation. These two, while pleasant enough ordinarily I met both of them became hogs when the supply and variety of foods was restricted. Thus when the jelly was passed at dinner one of them would take all of it. Another member almost caused a massacre because he ribbed and kidded a young native government official attached to the expedition, until the young man left in a fury and reported to his government that the group was really a secret military expedition.

However, from what I have been able to gather, most of the personalitytroubles are caused, not by the scientists, but by the other personnel: aviators, mechanics, photographers, and so on. Scientists are by and large fairly easy to get along with if you don't expect too much of them. Their general tendency is to concentrate on their own recondite researches and to pay little attention to each other and none at all to other human beings.

All these troubles are compounded when an expedition is mixed as to sex, for after a few months in the jungle or on the Greenland ice cap even the average lady scientist looks good. More than one such mixed expedition has come home tearing its collective hair trying to figure out how to effect assorted trades of husbands and wives. When one mixed expedition was sent out some years ago, the people who managed it seriously considered sending the men across the ocean in one ship and the women in the other, to defer as long as possible the evil day when sex would rear its beautiful head.

If an expedition must be mixed, it probably works best when it is small and consists entirely of married couples. If the director brings his wife but does not let anybody else bring his, you have a source of friction. And if you mix married couples, single people of both sexes, and married people without their mates, you are asking for trouble.

But anybody who tries to manage people or activities for any purpose is asking for trouble, which is no adequate reason for giving up a worthwhile project. A successful expedition or laboratory is not one that has no personality or administrative troubles, but one that achieves its objectives in spite of them.