"Vladimir Savchenko. Self-discovery (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

balancing, integrating organic substances. Add such new concepts as a
holographic model as applied to brain function-wherein each cell of a
section seems to contain all functions of that section, just as each segment
of a holograph contains all parts of its picture-and you come close to an
understanding of Krivoshein's scientific accomplishment. Fascinating, and
described with such realism that one is tempted to apply for a grant, build
it, check it out.
Apply for a grant. . . Savchenko has woven into his narrative a
devastating and delicious analysis of the internal politics of a great
research center doing erudite science which politicians cannot hope to
comprehend, but to whom the scientific community must turn for funding. Then
follows the same dreadful situation so brilliantly described-decried? - by
Leo Szilard, which takes the best scientists out of the laboratory and puts
them in administration, where they must work shoulder to shoulder with
administrators who would be hopeless in a lab. Millions of words have been
written about the differences in customs, cultures, political systems,
philosophies; how amazing it is to see how very similar are the symptoms of
this plague wherever it strikes! Ignorance is ignorance, pomposity is
pomposity, and self-aggrandizement is the same in any language, common as
frustration. Whoever reads this and does not recognize the administrator
Harry Hilobok, for example, or the outwardly grumpy, inwardly sensitive
Androsiashvili, has never been exposed to the internal workings of large
research centers anywhere.


It has been observed that a writer says, basically, one thing, and says
it over and over, no matter how wide his spectrum or in how many different
ways he may say it. I am, regretfully, unfamiliar with Savchenko's other
works, but his thrust is clear here. Let me give you some of it by quoting:
"Man is the most complex and most highly organized system known. I want
to figure it out completely-how things are constructed in the human
organism, what influences it....
"You see ... it wasn't always like this. Once man was up against heat
and frost; exertion from a hunt or from running away from danger; hunger, or
rough, unsanitary food like raw meat; heavy mechanical overloads in work;
fights which tested the durability of the skull with an oak staff-in a word,
once upon a time the physical environment made the same demands on man
that-well, that today's military customers make on rockets.... That
environment over the millennia formed homo sapiens-the reasoning vertebrate
mammal. But in the last two hundred years, if you start from the invention
of the steam engine, everything changed. We created an artificial
environment out of electric motors, explosives, pharmaceuticals, conveyors,
communal service systems, computers, immunization, transport, increased
radiation in the atmosphere, paved roads, carbon monoxide, narrow
specialization in work-you know: contemporary life. As an engineer, I with
others am furthering this artificial environment that determines ninety
percent of the life of homo sapiens and soon will determine it one hundred
percent. Nature will exist only for Sunday outings. But as a human being, I
am somewhat uneasy....
"This artificial environment frees man of many of the qualities and