NDRC, LED BY CONANT, FORMULATES RESEARCH

President James Bryant Conant's job as chairman of the National Defense Research Committee can only be understood in the Committee's connection with the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which is in general charge of pioneering Army and Navy secret weapons.

In the 1944 War Agencies Appropriations Bill, the OSRD got 12 million dollars more than the combined totals granted to the WPB, the ODT, the Petroleum Administrator for War, the WLB, the Office of Economic Stabilization, and the Office of War Mobilization. Congress didn't cut a penny of OSRD Director Vannevar Bush's $135,982,500 budget. (Bush is also president of Carnegie Institution in Washington.)

200 Secret Weapons

The OSRD has produced over 200 unpublicized weapons and secret modifications to military equipment. 46 million dollars of the Office's budget were delegated to radar and radio co-ordination" development; nearly 20 million dollars went to "subsurface warfare" work--the science of killing U-boats. Officials are proud of developments in the latter field which are already in use; they privately claim much of the credit for the recent low rate of ship sinkings.

Origination of "special projectiles" will cost more than 11 million dollars of the 1944 budget, with seven million going for ordinance accessories and four million dollars each to fire control and explosives research, with additional millions going to research in chemistry, chemical engineering, electrical communication, transportation development, metallurgy, optics, and basic physics. Some of the discoveries made through the OSRD may have peace-time applications

Research by Contract

Practically all of the research is done by contract, with about 205 industrial organizations and 124 academic institutions throughout the country participating. About 1100 such contracts are now in force, on "no profit-no loss" basis, under the assumption that a firm should make money from production, not from research preceding production.

All of this work on weapons proceeds under the supervision of President Conant. Besides this work, the OSRD is busy with advanced problems of military medicine, and is attempting to solve such problems as mass production of penicillin, development and testing of substances which will repel sharks, barracuda, and jelly fish, treatment of gas casualties, and development of methods to make drinkable water out of sea water.

Government organization of war science has now been functioning for three years, the first year under a different name. One of the preliminary steps was the work of the National Roster of Scientific and Specialized Personnel, now a continuing function of the War Manpower Commission, which attempted to find out and classify the scientific skills of individuals throughout the nation. Then the scientists were put to work.

Practically Stressed

The first job was to examine a great fund of accumulated peacetime scientific knowledge with an idea to military applications. This is pretty well finished now, and almost everyone in the OSRD is reportedly, working on very practical problems for which solutions are to be expected before the end of the war. In the development of new weapons, every project must offer promise of equipment which will be in the field by the summer of 1945.

OSRD experts make frequent scientific trips to war areas to examine the value of their weapons in action. Once models are approved, Army and Navy experts take over and production contracts are let out. Ford, for example, has been turning out OSRD amphibian jeeps, while the Yellow Truck Division of General Motors produces the two-and-a-half ton amphibian truck.

Data Exchanged With Allies

Exchange of scientific data with Britain and Russia has been going on constantly, with an OSRD office in London and a British Central Scientific Office here. Conant's "scientific mission" to England in February, 1941, was instrumental in effecting this collaboration.

OSRD secrets are "compartmentalized," even within various organizations, so no one of the researchers can tell where his work fits into the general scheme. Army and Navy officials vigorously support the OSRD in Congress, and take the credit for its successes; the civilian scientists who do the real work keep out of the limelight.

Equipment of OSRD origination is now in service on every land and sea combat front, officials say, although its weight is still unimportant in some sectors. Altogether the Army and Navy have secured or let contracts for two billion dollars' worth of OSRD creations. A single discovery, which simplified the manufacture of an existing explosive, resulted in a saying of 100 million dollars in plant construction and continues to save many thousands of dollars a day as production goes on.

But although they are greatly helping to win the war, thoughtful officials within the OSRD admit that in spite of some peacetime uses, the general course of science is being retarded because scientists are diverting their attention from "basic" to "applied" research