As We May Think - Vannevar Bush - The Atlantic
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As We May Think
By Vannevar Bush
As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. —THE EDITOR
This has not been a scientist's war; it has been a war in which all have had a part. The scientists, burying their old professional competition in the demand of a common cause, have shared greatly and learned much. It has been exhilarating to work in effective partnership. Now, for many, this appears to be approaching an end. What are the scientists to do next?
For the biologists, and particularly for the medical scientists, there can be<br>little indecision, for their war has hardly required them to leave the old<br>paths. Many indeed have been able to carry on their war research in their<br>familiar peacetime laboratories. Their objectives remain much the same.
It is the physicists who have been thrown most violently off stride, who have<br>left academic pursuits for the making of strange destructive gadgets, who have<br>had to devise new methods for their unanticipated assignments. They have done<br>their part on the devices that made it possible to turn back the enemy, have<br>worked in combined effort with the physicists of our allies. They have felt<br>within themselves the stir of achievement. They have been part of a great team.<br>Now, as peace approaches, one asks where they will find objectives worthy of<br>their best.
Of what lasting benefit has been man's use of science and of the new<br>instruments which his research brought into existence? First, they have<br>increased his control of his material environment. They have improved his food,<br>his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his security and released him<br>partly from the bondage of bare existence. They have given him increased<br>knowledge of his own biological processes so that he has had a progressive<br>freedom from disease and an increased...