George Beadle's opening words at the first of our 1959 Forum series on Science, Resources, and Society provide, it seems to me, a fitting introduction to these seasonal summaries of research. "It is an unending source of wonderment," he said, "that out of minute spheres of jelly-like protoplasm little larger than the point of a dull pin there should develop living beings like you and me." He spoke with awe of "this tiny sphere, the fertilized egg of man," wherein is locked "the secret of man's origin from subhuman ancestors and the nature of his destiny in an evolutionary future now unknown."
Long before there were magnetic resonant spectroscopes, or microscopes, or powerful telescopes; three centuries before man could see in the nucleus of the atom, an order and system more complicated than the solar system, a mathematician of the Renaissance, Blaise Pascal, discerned a like relationship and continuum, with no end to it: "All the sciences are infinite in the extent of their researches ... and do not permit of finality."
To explore the globe and no small part of the universe; to gradually discover that our world is not a world of caprice but a consistent world where verification is always possible, provided identical conditions obtain; to increase in control of our environment and thus obtain an ever increasingly high standard of living; and through communication to transmit our observations and interpretations to generations yet unborn—that is humanity's greatest adventure.
—R. G. Gustavson, President, Resources for the Future.
A version of this article appeared in print in the May 1959 issue of Resources magazine.
