Abstract
THIS handsome and well-illustrated report on the Mersey estuary, which has been issued by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, is an example of the working of the best English tradition of co-operation in public affairs. It exhibits the Department in a part for which it is so well equipped—which it might be more often called upon to play—that of an arbiter to determine the scientific facts for the solution of a controversial problem of great public and economic importance. It shows the various public authorities of Merseyside agreeing, in spite of a conflict of interests, to co-operate in order to obtain an independent scientific inquiry ; it also shows them evincing their confidence in the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research by inviting it to undertake the investigation. The Department asked the Water Pollution Research Board to be responsible for the scheme of the investigation; so, in a typically national way, another party to the co-operative work was a body of scientific men who gave honorary service.
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Sewage Discharge and the Mersey Estuary* Co-operation in Technical Research. Nature 141, 1081–1083 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/1411081a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1411081a0