Abstract
THE leading article on the “Relationship of Pure and Applied Biology” (NATURE, 147, 427; 1941) paints a lamentable picture of the separation of pure and applied biology, lamentable because, as it claims, each is needed to fertilize the other. The article explains how in the universities research has become an end in itself and purity its ideal. It implies also that in research stations utility often provides an opposite and exclusive ideal. Each of the two ideals justifies its own kind of enthusiasm for research and persuades us of the reality of the opposition between them. Nothing but good can come of showing that the opposition is unnecessary; that snobbery and counter-snobbery are equally artificial, and that pure research can develop as it should develop only if it is continually harassed by the demands of necessity. It is the absence of necessity or apparent use that in past times has often led science, or some parts of it, into backwaters where the inevitable weeds of scholasticism have clogged its stagnant channels.
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DARLINGTON, C. The Cleavage in Biology. Nature 147, 544 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/147544a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/147544a0
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