[Q] Maybe you want to comment on two, what I think are actually related topics, which are the basis on which science is supported these days, and also where science seems to be going.

Well, that's a very large set of questions isn't it? It's sometimes difficult to develop enough of a detachment, because I'm still in the middle of it, and only from time to time, because of, I guess, age, I can see a change, and certainly there has been a change – in biological science. What is... what is in the key ingredient?

Well, one of the key ingredients is... is size: the fact is the numbers of biological scientists have increased mightily as compared to when I started in, say, 1954 at the Johnson Foundation, in 1960, '57 to '60, at the Rockefeller Institute. The numbers have increased. Secondly the technology has become extraordinary. It's easy to... in fact marketable, you can buy the kit. You don't have to do anything yourself synthetically; you buy the kit, you pay a little lease, but then it speeds everything up and you just have to look at the profusion of journalists in specialization to see what's happened.

An example: when I dropped out of college and my mother insisted that I'd have to go back or else I'd have to work, I went to Berkeley and took two, two or three, two and a half chemistry courses to make up the time, and I remember the bookstore there. Well, there was Linus Pauling's book. There were a couple of books: there was Shakespeare, there was Thoreau, speak about names I've mentioned before, but nowadays what you'll see is, oh, Quantum Electrodynamics for Sophomores, or a huge... So if you look at the booklist, for example, at the invoices of the Berkeley bookstore in 1960 or 1955 even better and compared them with the invoices now, you'd see a symptom of what I'm talking about. An extraordinary explosion of specialties, an extraordinary increase of the number of details for young people who maybe should have been more instructed in how to write and think; but who perform in these specialized courses, which are usually taught by assistants rather than by the great professor himself.

So there are these big changes, and certainly part of the change is economic, isn't it? That the National Institutes of Health is a major economic force supporting this kind of work, and we're talking over $20 billion a year expended on this, and a whole system of gradation and decision about how you do this, supposedly fairly. But what happens I think is a vast bureaucratization and a careerism sets in. I mean, young people are not allowed to be crazy enough I think early enough, the way it used to be in the good old days.