Abstract
AS we come to the end of another year we can see, as yet, no prospect for science of escape from the urgent preoccupation with the means of waging war. On the contrary, with the Union of Soviet Russia now locked in a supreme struggle for its own existence and the world's freedom, and with the United States of America rapidly directing its tremendous scientific and technical potential to the support of the same great cause, the diversion of science from its normal uses and objectives has spread right round the world. Yet even this grim necessity has brought with it some measure of compensation, in drawing closer the bonds of friendship between the men of science in the countries thus united in a common purpose. We in Great Britain received a tremendous encouragement, in the early months of this year, from the visit of President J. B. Conant and his associates to establish in London an office for the maintenance of regular and intimate co–operation between the war researches of our American colleagues and those which are here in hand. More recently, and in spite of all difficulties of communication, the sense of a common peril and a common determination is bringing us into a new and growing intimacy of collaboration with our colleagues of Soviet Russia. The organization of the science of the British Empire for war has brought to London already a number of distinguished colleagues from the Overseas Dominions, and we have heard of others who are on the way. It has been a particular pleasure to gather them here, in the house of the Royal Society, and to invite them to regard it as a centre and a rallying point for discussion of the means by which this new and closer collaboration, arising under the stimulus and the necessity of war, may be perpetuated and strengthened for the purposes of peace.
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DALE, H. INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION AND FREEDOM OF SCIENCE*. Nature 148, 678–680 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/148678a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/148678a0