(3 of 8)
By contrast, Russian scientists have won a grand total of two Nobel Prizes, one back in 1904, and the other last year for chain-reaction studies carried out in the 19205. The lack of Nobel Prize quality in recent Russian research supports the opinion of leading U.S. scientists that most of the U.S. yachts in the scientific race are still well in front of their Russian counterparts. The U.S. still leads, the scientists think, in chemistry and most branches of engineering—and it is far ahead in the medical and biological sciences. Says the University of Colorado's pioneering, Russian-born Physicist George Gamow: "If you consider science as an instrument of the cold war, then maybe we are lagging a bit—but if you are talking about science itself, America is doing all right."
Einstein Complex. It is the sense of adventure in science that catches the imagination of the American and makes him good. Asked what he is doing, the scientist is likely to reply, disconcertingly, that he is having "fun"'—a word that recurs again and again, along with "adventure,'' when scientists talk about their work. This sense of joy and excitement that scientists find in their work flatly contradicts the layman's image of science as a grey, austere calling, suited only to eccentrics. University of California Physicist Luis Alvarez blames this image largely on what he calls "the Einstein complex." For years the" only scientist known to the U.S. public at large was the late Albert Einstein. He perfectly fitted the image of the scientist as an unkempt eccentric, to be applauded from a distance, but not imitated.
Tests designed to measure high-school students' attitudes toward scientists show that, along with considering scientists eccentric, they think of them as being 1) underpaid, and 2) elderly. Neither notion fits flesh-and-blood U.S. scientists of 1957 (see box, p. 24). Along with his fun and adventure, a university-based scientist can make, with consultant fees from industry added to his faculty salary, from $10,000 to $20,000 a year. Scientists in industry can do a lot better than that. As for age, middle-aged scientists complain that in science the most brilliant ideas come to men in their 20s and 30s. "The best years are when you are young," says Alvarez. "Your legs give out at 35. It's like baseball. If you can't be a manager by the time you're 35, you'd better run a filling station."
To the Cosmos Club. There is still another path for any modern scientist who has acquired a reputation: it leads toward Washington, the affairs of state, national secrets, and the unscientific intricacies of government. In and out of the intellectuals' Cosmos Club on Washington's Massachusetts Avenue hurry physicists, chemists and mathematicians newly arrived to huddle with generals, admirals, high officials of the Federal Government, even, occasionally, the President himself. "There are three kinds of physicists." says AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss, "theoretical, applied and political." Edward Teller is all three.