Migration and the generation of new scientific ideas.

Abstract

THE GENEI(ATION of new scientific knowledge often occurs through the coming together, re-working and re-formulation of previously distinct pieces of older knowledge and technique into a new scientific synthesis. This then becomes the basis for further work in what may subsequently develop into a new scientific specialty. Awareness of other pieces of advanced scientific knowledge typically arises either through the direct contact of an individual scientist with other scientists, or through the reading of the relevant literature. The temporary or permanent migration of scientists or technologists from one scientific institution within the same society to another, or from one society to another, is an important condition of such contacts. International migration is one of the most fruitful forms of the movement of scientists between institutions. Another is the migration from one institution to another within the same society. Such mobility of scientists and technologists is important in the transfer of skills and technological knowledge between societies, between one branch of industry and another, and between universities and industry. The diffusion of scientific information through journals is certainly one of the most prominent ways in which pieces of older knowledge are brought into juxtaposition with each other. But it can accomplish this only for those bits of knowledge or technique which are translated into written form. Michael Polanyi has emphasised the central role of the tacit component of scientific knowledge, particularly at the frontier of research where codified formulations have not been achieved. 1 Polanyi stressed the effect of personal, face-to-face relationships in the transmission of scientific knowledge and the scientific ethos from one generation to the next. Such relationships are no less important in the intellectual interactions of scientists of the same generation. Institutional migration, and the new personal scientific interactions they make possible, foster the transmission of advanced scientific knowledge. Indeed such knowledge is sometimes transformed-not just transmitted--when its carriers move from one social and institutional situation to another. Major scientific syntheses, and the consequent formation of new specialties, have thus been fostered primarily--not simply by the "transfer of information" or "displacement of concepts" across intellectual or territorial boundaries--but by the