Quoting from Solly Zuckerman, who pioneered operational research in the Second World War and who later became Chief Scientific Adviser to the British Government, might be appropriate in the present war against a novel virus in which scientific advice plays an even greater rôle:
One simply cannot order up so many assorted scientists to do a job, or command them to make a ‘break-through’. Operational problems, I discovered, savoured more of the characteristics of biological enquiry than of those encountered by chemists or physicists. I had a fear that scientists who were accustomed to the handling of only strictly controlled situations, and who had little taste for others—for example, ‘pure’ mathematicians, or mathematical physicists, or theoretical biologists—would have little to contribute to the solution of the kind of issues that were of overriding importance to the good military leader or politician… War generated an inflexibility of outlook, and the more remote from the scene of action, the more inflexible the desk warriors became.
Pity, as an afterthought, I cannot find a quote about vulpine but scientifically illiterate journalists who labour an unimportant matter to advance their own or their organisation’s political agenda.
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| Solly Zuckerman Tobruk, 1943 |
Zuckerman S. 1978. From Apes to Warlords. London: Hamish Hamilton, p 363
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