IQ SOCIAL SCIENTIST
strength and abilities. Indeed I will do my best to resume here the scientific work in line in which "Nature" endowed me and also help to develop science in Russia. I am even surprised to find that I have more force to withstand more than I never could expect, like this year, I never dreamt that to be deprived of doing my scientific work should be for me such a trial, but now it is over, in any case the worst of it.
Subsequent events clearly proved that researches in pure scienc could be quite successfully carried out within a short period by Kapitza himself and a set of brilliant colleagues he was able to collect at the Institute, like Lev Landau.
At different historical junctures the tension between the science-government relationship manifests differently. Oppenheimer's prosecution after the successful completion of the Manhatten project and Heisenberg's stay in Germany during the nazi regime are the two extreme examples of it.
The former is the case of a reputed and ambitious scientist being witch-hunted by the State and the latter a great scientist in his tactical judgement succumbing to support the nazi government. Kapitza's story is altogether difficult. He is a scientist willing to work for his country, in sympathy with the goals of the Socialist government and yet retained involuntarily in his homeland. Kapitza's unhappiness over the incident lasts for a brief while till conditions are created to enable him to get back to his work. The unhappy episode in Kapitza's scientific career shows that in Socialist societies the extreme and ugly manifestations of science-scientist and government tension could be avoided if the relationship is handled imaginatively, since science is accorded a preeminent place in the process of development as a matter of conscious policy.
Any realisation, analysis or evaluation of course, does not mitigate the agony that individuals have to undergo at specific historical junctures. Possibly the tension in the relationship between organised science and individual scientists and the State, which on the one hand provides dynamism to the progress of science, also at the same time carries the seeds of the kind of personal 'tragedy' Kapitza had to face for a brief while in his illustrious career.
RAJENDRA PRASAD