SCIENTISTS' POLITICS
SIR,—In your issue of May 7th Dr. Toulmin states that the political views of scientists " tend to be uninformed and naive, when not actually Communist." If he will read the list published by the Manchester Guardian of persons who had been so uninformed and naive as to protest too vigorously against Hitler's policy before September, 1939, and were therefore to be arrested when Britain was invaded, he will find science well represented. A number of my French colleagues died as a result of this " political naiveté," as Dr. Toulmin calls it.
Unlike Dr. Toulmin, I think that scientists who have worked in certain fields are more likely to be right in such matters than the average man, for a very simple reason. They have had to make decisions on which their own lives and those of colleagues depended. So far from " dealing with situations which have been artificially simplified " they have had to collect all the available evidence as to the outcome of a situation which was absolutely new, for example the injection into a man of a toxin-antitoxin mixture; and have then betted their lives on the result. I venture to suggest that the habit of mind so engendered may have a certain value, and that those of us who share some of the political opinions of Mr. Bevan or Mr. Pollitt may have come to do so after an intellectual process of this kind.—Yours faithfully, J. B. S. NALDANS
University College, London
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