"Where is their sense of loyalty?" asked the article by Susan Dickinson about "The Nomadic Scientists of Today" (The Scientist, July 22, 1991, page 1). But loyalty is generated and reinforced when it is a mutual matter, and today's scientists are about as loyal to their institutions as their institutions are loyal to them. The article should have inquired, "Where is the institutions' sense of loyalty?" Since the 1950s, American universities have treated their scientists as milk cows whose pro

That the “total time to doctorate” (TTD) is longer in the humanities than in the sciences is neither bizarre nor inexplicable, contrary to what is suggested in “University Briefs” (The Scientist, June 26, 1989, page 7). First, one must recall that the humanities and the sciences are not merely different fields of knowledge, they differ profoundly; as C.P. Snow aptly put it, they are different cultures. Furthermore, one must consider some of the specific differences be

Your piece about the "brain drain" from NIH (November 14, 1988, page 1) illustrates how silly and ineffective bureaucracies can be in dealing with professional and creative people. My own brain drained from Australia in the mid-1960s because general conditions for academic and scientific work here offer so much more scope and freedom than in Australia; I was not at all dissatisfied with my salary or with our standard of living in general. So with most of the people who have come here in the la