The Key West Citizen

MEN FOR SCIENCE

Those who man the laboratories are fully as important to our future as are the munitions of war, and it is urged by educators that in selecting men for the armed services this fact be taken into account.

Among the plans now under consideration by Congress is one which provides for a continuing supply of scientifically trained men. The Reserve Specialist Training Corps, as the projected agency would be called, would consist of 75,000 men selected annually for three-year training on the basis of competitive examination and by a board consisting of both civilians and the military. They would be educated in science, engineering, medicine and other critical fields, after completing basic military training.

This proposal and other similar ones have aroused criticism on the ground that they would create an "intellectual aristocracy" among men of draft age, a privileged group who would escape the general military service to which their fellows are subjected, because of scholastic attainments. Such an idea is foreign to American traditions, yet these traditions would hardly be served better by a willy-nilly draft program which failed to take account of the needs of science.

Our rate of production cannot be increased nor even continued at its present rate without the constant influx of new developments and improved techniques. Nor can a high standard of public health be maintained without the laboratory work which forms its foundation. The man who draws a blueprint or handles a microscope may be performing as necessary a function in time of stress as is the man behind the gun.