50 YEARS AGO

There is something very depressing about contemporary biological journals. Paper after paper records observations or experiments, analyses them cautiously, and in a timid and tentative way compares them with previous observations and experiments on the same theme. That is about all: only rarely does the writer disclose how (in his view) his work is related to the broad panorama of biology. There are doubtless sufficient reasons for these omissions: many writers of papers undertake the research they describe for no other reason that that their supervisors ‘put them on to it’, and many editors of journals consider contemplation out of place in science and do not encourage authors to indulge in it...How refreshing it is, for example, to hear that the choice of a subject for research involves the “art of rejection”, and to be told that this art can be compared with the art of the Chinese in designing the empty spaces in their pictures. It is refreshing, too, to be reminded...that the very observations one makes, and a fortiori, one's interpretation of them, are limited by the Zeitgeist and by unconscious philosophical assumptions derived from Spinoza.

From Nature 27 August 1955.

100 years ago

A somewhat lamentable aspect of modern science is the vast array of unorganized facts which are awaiting coordination; this is too often because they have been amassed without any definite idea of the purpose which they may serve; consequently it may happen that laborious observations belonging to one science may fail to attract the regard of a neighbouring science merely for want of the mutual acquaintance which would make them serviceable to each other; and in these days of exclusive specialisation the introduction which might lead to a happy union is, perhaps, not brought about for years.

From Nature 24 August 1905.