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eleven" elected for one four-year term, and turn over the profit of their joint enterprise to a foundation dedicated to the further advancement of medicine. Here, obviously, is a successful prototype organization for the effective collaboration of experts. It has averted the danger of internal strife by selecting its members according to competence and character. Objectivity and openness ban political plotting; respect for the opinion of others, tact and helpfulness are expected; unbridled ambition, egotism, and arrogance disqualify. Substitute for the specialist doctor a professor with his students, creatively engaged in his special research program in the field of materials, and you have the spirit and first outlines of an organization for our Center. Input, Output, and Converter Let us switch standpoints to place the problem in a different perspective. An engineer, when inventing a device, strives to develop a converter that transforms a prescribed input into a desired output. Viewed in these terms, the situation at the Mayo Clinic seems straightforward: the input is patients with unknown ailments, entering the front door; the output is patients, analyzed and marked for treatment, leaving by the back door; the converter is an intricate kind of machinery measuring the patient's status quo and reactions, staffed by expert analysis who evaluate the evidence. There is, in addition, a hidden feed-back loop leading from patients during their later treatment back to the experts and into a case-memory unit. This stored experience is converted internally into additional information about the recognition of diseases, their trends and treatment. The Center for Materials Science and Technology envisioned at M.I.T. is more complex to picture, since its tasks are more involved. Its is to be an institute for graduate and post-doctoral studies ranging in scope from abstract theory to fully engineered prototype devices. It will be concerned with materials: their structure, composition, properties, and applications from atoms and molecules to gases, liquids, solids and their interfaces, from insulators to electrolytes, semiconductors and metals. It should be a center for education and information, for pioneering and advice, for trouble shooting and long-range planning. The Mayo Clinic would correspond to an Institute for Materials only. Our center, in medical analogy, will have the much greater task of rebuilding man and making him fit to live in his surroundings; it anticipates-on the level of nonliving matter- the "medicine of the future." How are we to embody entity in a "Center for Materials Science and Technology," which seeks insight by "Molecular Science," and proficiency by "Molecular Engineering" for the construction of materials, properties, and devices from the atoms of the Periodic system? How can we strengthen the university concept of free scholars, while simultaneously drawing on the united strength of their knowledge for the common weal, since knowledge-like noblesse-obliges? To perceive the actual organization more clearly, let us turn once more to the analogue machine with its input, output, and converter. The input is people, ranging all the way from students working on bachelor's, master's or doctor's theses to scientists and engineers accepted as post-doctoral fellows or returning from years of activity in laboratories of Government or Industry for a refresher period at the university. Materials and ideas are taken in as needed but, to a major extent, the Center should generate original materials and ideas. Requests will range the gamut from simple information on characteristics to reports on the status of knowledge in certain areas and, finally, to integrated research programs, e.g., on materials for space travel, or the proper allocation of a country's resources. The output obviously is more highly educated people, better materials, new ideas and devices, deeper knowledge, and comprehensive information. But what is the miraculous converter that transforms input into such a varied output by voluntary action? Center Organization If the entity "professor(s) with students, supporting staff and instrumentation" - experts of a special field engaged in imaginative research-is named a "Laboratory," the Center represents a "federation of mutually supporting laboratories." To assure a maximum amount of freedom, unnecessary centralization should be avoided; i.e., each laboratory should retain all of the functions it can discharge effectively. It can best handle its own requirements as to the hiring of man power, purchasing of equipment, and carrying on of research. Close personal contact between experimental projects and supporting machine shops has proven extremely valuable and could be maintained by letting laboratories or groups own and operate individual shops for their normal work. The true driving force of the Center should be its interdepartmental faculty, selected for expert knowl- 24 THE TECHNOLOGY REVIEW [[image]] [[caption]] Arthur Linz, '46 growing crystals by means of flame fusion [[/caption]]
