Word: research
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...developed a foliage-penetrating radar that detects Viet Cong hiding in the jungle. The Instrumentation Laboratory has designed a multiple-warhead guidance system for the Navy's Poseidon missile. Radical students, who staged a march at "I-lab" in April, insist that a university should totally shun research that is aimed at killing people. Moderate students and professors argue that the special labs' secrecy violates the academic principle of free inquiry, and more basically, that the growth of the special labs has diverted M.I.T. talent from domestic and social problems, such as housing, pollution and transportation. In fiscal...
Last spring a special faculty-student-administration panel recommended that the labs gradually start new programs in domestic and social research, while reducing secret military work and rejecting "projects involving the actual development of a prototype weapons system, except in times of grave national emergency." The panel also urged the university to set up a standing committee of faculty, students and lab staffers to advise M.I.T. President Howard W. Johnson on which projects the labs should accept or continue to pursue. The recommendations pleased the moderate majority of M.I.T.'s faculty, which last month voted...
Unfortunately, the proposed screening committee is likely to have great trouble deciding which military projects are appropriate for the special labs. For example, all members of the special review panel judged the Poseidon program, now that it is out of the basic-research stage, improper for a university-connected lab. But they split sharply over the I-lab's work on Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) aircraft. The majority defended it on the grounds that VTOLs could be used to speed civilian intercity transit and the project is "far from the production-prototype stage." By contrast, antiwar Guru Noam...
...redirected toward civilian work, says M.I.T. President Johnson, the university may divorce them, presumably by selling the labs to business or the government. Stanford and Cornell are trying that solution with their own special labs.* It might please moderate students and faculty who do not object to weapons research as such but consider it out of place in a university. It definitely would not please the radicals, who want to stop all war-related research at the special labs, whether or not M.I.T. operates them...
Beset by belligerent enemies, Israel has put its scientists and engineers to work overtime on defense projects. It already produces 95% of its own ammunition, and soon may even make its own nuclear weapons. For all their military efforts, however, Israeli scientists have not ignored peaceful research. They have developed new irrigation techniques, tapped solar energy, bred deep-sea fish in captivity and even solved the riddle of how the camel stores water (in the bloodstream). As the late Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first President, once explained: "Of course, miracles happen, but it needs hard work to make them...