On the other hand he will probably have to do a certain disagreeable minimum of drudgery no matter how he hates it and no matter how well organized the laboratory is. For instance, he will have to write his own progress reports, or at least dictate them, because nobody else knows enough about his particular work to do so intelligently. And if you don't make him turn in progress reports, he may die on you, leaving a mass of mysterious wires and tubes whose meaning nobody knows.
Even a "pure" scientist, relieved as far as possible of administrative and routine tasks, will have to learn something of administration in order to manage his assistants. True, some very special scientists like mathematicians work without assistants - without any equipment save a pencil and paper and some reference books.
But most laboratory scientists as they rise in their field are given bigger projects that require the help of extra hands and brains. A young scientist may start out all right until he reaches the point of having six or eight assistants. Then he runs into trouble because he has to get along with one technician who is a chronic loafer, another with a sneering disagreeable personality, another who steals laboratory equipment to sell, and so on. Then, despite his lofty boasts of neither knowing nor caring about the black art of human relations, he has to learn it or else.
So much for laboratory scientists. There remains the matter of scientific expeditions. Here you need not worry much about paper work and over organization, because the ordinary expedition is too small. It may comprise anywhere from one person to a few score; expeditions whose personnel runs into three or four figures, like the Navy's recent reconnaissances to the Antarctic, are very exceptional. And a few score people is still small compared to the six hundred odd researchers of General Motors Research, or du Pont with more than eighteen hundred scientists and an even larger number of technicians.
Expeditions, however, have their own peculiar troubles troubles not often brought out in the stories. The bigger the expedition and the more remote and rugged the place it is going, the more acute the difficulties will be. These troubles are personality conflicts, and any expedition of more than a half-dozen members is likely to have them.
For one thing exploring attracts not the prosaic, steady, average type of person, but the aggressive and unconventional individualist. When you crowd a lot of people of this type, of varied backgrounds, together for long periods, suffering from equatorial heat or polar cold, tempers get short and personalities grate. Faults of character that would be overlooked in civilization show up with glaring distinctness. Moreover if the conditions are to be rugged, the leader must pick comparatively young persons to stand the hardships, and being young they have not developed the self-control and tolerance that might enable an older group to get along.
A candid account of many expeditions would reveal a distressing story of feuds, hatreds, mutiny, and outbursts of temper. The leader of such an expedition is in a difficult position. When a man turns out to be no good after it is too late to send him home, he can't simply shoot the twerp. All he can do is relieve him of all duties connected with the expedition. And then he has the character underfoot for months, sulking, intriguing and plotting absurd revenges.
But when the explorers get home they feel ashamed of having acted in such a childish manner. Hence in writing up their experiences or, more usually, having a ghost do it for them they tend to gloss over their personality troubles, and so most written accounts of expeditions give a deceptive effect of sweetness and light.
One of the most famous American expeditions of the last thirty years operated in a far country for several successive years, and one year the scientists actually threatened to strike if two of their number were not excluded from further participation. These two, while pleasant enough ordinarily I met both of them became hogs when the supply and variety of foods was restricted. Thus when the jelly was passed at dinner one of them would take all of it. Another member almost caused a massacre because he ribbed and kidded a young native government official attached to the expedition, until the young man left in a fury and reported to his government that the group was really a secret military expedition.
However, from what I have been able to gather, most of the personalitytroubles are caused, not by the scientists, but by the other personneclass="underline" aviators, mechanics, photographers, and so on. Scientists are by and large fairly easy to get along with if you don't expect too much of them. Their general tendency is to concentrate on their own recondite researches and to pay little attention to each other and none at all to other human beings.
All these troubles are compounded when an expedition is mixed as to sex, for after a few months in the jungle or on the Greenland ice cap even the average lady scientist looks good. More than one such mixed expedition has come home tearing its collective hair trying to figure out how to effect assorted trades of husbands and wives. When one mixed expedition was sent out some years ago, the people who managed it seriously considered sending the men across the ocean in one ship and the women in the other, to defer as long as possible the evil day when sex would rear its beautiful head.
If an expedition must be mixed, it probably works best when it is small and consists entirely of married couples. If the director brings his wife but does not let anybody else bring his, you have a source of friction. And if you mix married couples, single people of both sexes, and married people without their mates, you are asking for trouble.
But anybody who tries to manage people or activities for any purpose is asking for trouble, which is no adequate reason for giving up a worthwhile project. A successful expedition or laboratory is not one that has no personality or administrative troubles, but one that achieves its objectives in spite of them.