1949Lord (John) Boyd Orr of Brechin
Lord (John) Boyd Orr of Brechin – Biography
John Boyd Orr (September 23, 1880-June 25, 1971) was born in Kilmaurs, Ayrshire, Scotland. His father, R.C. Orr, was a pious and intelligent man whose sudden enthusiasms led to frequent reversals of fortune, but, although his finances were often depleted, he and his wife and their seven children enjoyed a pleasant life in their rural community. Having begun his education in the village school, John at the age of thirteen was sent to Kilmarnock Academy, twenty miles away, but he was more interested in the life of the navvies and quarrymen who worked in his father's quarry than in his education and so was returned to the village school. There he became a member of the staff as a «pupil teacher», earning £20 a year by the time he was eighteen.
Aided by scholarships, he was able to attend simultaneously a teachers' training college and Glasgow University. Of these student days he says in his autobiography that he worked hard in the arts curriculum but that his most vivid recollections are of the sights and sounds of the old Glasgow slums which he would prowl on Saturday nights1.
Finding the three years he spent teaching in a secondary school neither financially profitable nor intellectually satisfying, he returned to Glasgow University in 1905, enrolling for a degree in medicine and for one in the biological sciences. Degrees in hand in record time, he served as a ship's surgeon for four months and for six weeks as a replacement for a vacationing doctor, but he forsook the practice of medicine for research, accepting a two-year Carnegie research fellowship in physiology.
On April 1, 1914, Dr. Boyd Orr arrived in Aberdeen to assume direction of the Nutrition Institute, only to be told that there was no Institute in reality, only an approved scheme of research. Within a month, Boyd Orr had drawn up plans for an impressive research facility, too impressive, indeed, to be financed. The compromise he made is symbolic of the nature of the man: he was willing to delay the building of the total structure provided that the first wing be made of granite, not of wood as originally suggested.
His work was interrupted by World War I during which he served first in the Royal Army Medical Corps, earning two decorations for bravery in action, then in the Royal Navy, and finally, simultaneously in both, for he was loaned by the Navy to the Army to do research in military dietetics.
After the war Boyd Orr returned to the Institute and in the next decade or so, put to work a hitherto unsuspected talent for money raising. The first new building of Rowett Research Institute - the name now given to the Institute in honor of a major donor - was dedicated by Queen Mary in 1922; there followed the Walter Reid Library in 1923-1924, the thousand-acre John Duthie Webster Experimental Farm in 1925, Strathcona House, to accommodate research workers and visiting scientists, in 1930. In 1931 he founded and became editor of Nutrition Abstracts and Reviews.
Time-consuming as his various administrative duties were, he was still able to direct fundamental research in nutrition, primarily in animal nutrition in these early days of the Institute. His influential Minerals in Pastures and Their Relation to Animal Nutrition (1929) was published in this period. During the 1930's, however, after extensive experiments with milk in the diet of mothers, children, and the underprivileged, and after large-scale surveys of nutritional problems in many nations throughout the world, Boyd Orr's interests swung to human nutrition, not only as a researcher but also as a propagandist for healthful diets for all peoples everywhere. His report of 1936, Food, Health and Income, revealed the «appalling amount of malnutrition» among the people of England regardless of economic status2 and became the basis for the later British policy on food during World War II, which he helped to formulate as a member of Churchill's Scientific Committee on Food Policy.
At war's end, Boyd Orr, aged sixty-five, retired from Rowett Institute, but accepted three new positions: a three-year term as rector of Glasgow University, a seat in the Commons representing the Scottish universities, and the post of director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Boyd Orr found his work with the FAO exasperating because of the FAO's lack of authority and funds, but he energetically pursued every avenue for improving the world production and equitable distribution of food. In 1946, under the aegis of the FAO, he set up an International Emergency Food Council, with thirty-four member nations, to meet the postwar food crisis. He traveled extensively throughout the world trying to get support for a comprehensive food plan and was bitterly disappointed when his proposal for the establishment of a World Food Board failed in 1947 when neither Britain nor the United States would vote for it.
Believing that the FAO could not, at that point, become a spearhead for a movement to achieve world unity and peace, Boyd Orr resolved to resign as director-general and to go into business. Within three years he earned a bigger net income from directorships than he had ever had from scientific research, and with capital gains made on the Stock Exchange, he established a comfortable personal estate. It was symbolic of this period of his life that he should have been informed of his Nobel Peace Prize award by his banker. The prize money, however, he donated to the National Peace Council, the World Movement for World Federal Government, and various other such organizations.
In the years following the Second World War, Boyd Orr was associated with virtually every organization that has agitated for world government, in many instances devoting his considerable administrative and propagandistic skills to the cause.«The most important question today», he says in his autobiography, «is whether man has attained the wisdom to adjust the old systems to suit the new powers of science and to realize that we are now one world in which all nations will ultimately share the same fate. »3
John Boyd Orr, himself a scientist-adjuster of old systems, died at his home in Scotland in June, 1971, at the age of ninety.
Lord (John) Boyd Orr of Brechin – Nobel Lecture
Nobel Lecture*, December 12, 1949
Science and Peace
The award of the Nobel Peace Prize is an international event of the first importance. It arouses the interest of the people of all countries and focuses attention on the objects of the organization or the views of the individual selected to receive this great honour. It is fitting, therefore, that in the lecture which, in accordance with statutes, the recipient must deliver, he should give his views on the prospects of peace and the best means of attaining it. In this lecture I wish to consider the possibility of eliminating the causes of war and bringing in a new era of world unity and peace by the intelligent application of the new knowledge and new powers over the forces of nature which modern science has given mankind.
The Long Tradition of War
The history of our civilization has been one of intermittent war. In the last five or six thousand years, empires one after another have arisen, waxed powerful by wars of conquest, and fallen by internal revolution or attack from without. But though the centre of power moved from one country to another, the general pattern of the political and economic structure has suffered no radical change. The increase of territory and power of empires by force of arms has been the policy of all great powers, and it has always been possible to get the approval of their state religion. The destruction of the false gods of the enemy, which threaten the true religion, has always justified propaganda of fear and hatred to overcome the natural reluctance of soldiers to kill their fellowmen with whom indeed they had no quarrel. Some wars have been due to the lust of rulers for power and glory, or to revenge to wipe out the humiliation of a former defeat. Most however have had an economic basis: the conquest of foreign territory in the interest of trade, or of land with rich agricultural or other resources. At the present time the control of oil-bearing land is an important factor in the foreign policy of some governments.
If the view I am going to express be true, we have reached the end of the age of competing empires because what Alfred Nobel foresaw has happened. Science has produced such powerful weapons that in a war between great powers there would be neither victor nor vanquished. Both would be overwhelmed in destruction. Our civilization is now in the transition stage between the age of warring empires and a new age of world unity and peace.
Science Molds Society
Though the general principles of statecraft have survived the rise and fall of empires, every increase in knowledge has brought about changes in the political, economic, and social structure. Thus, for example, the use of gunpowder ended the feudal system in Europe. The invention of the steam engine1 led to the mechanical industrial revolution, with all the resulting economic and social changes. Even more important has been the birth of new ideas. The Renaissance with the invention of printing2 spread the revolutionary idea of the dignity and rights of the individual from which arose the democratic system of government in Europe, America, and the British Dominions. These few examples are sufficient to illustrate the effects of the growth of knowledge on the structure of human society. Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge.
But major adjustments do not take place without a struggle. Every impending change which threatens vested interests or tends to undermine authority based on orthodox beliefs is resisted by those who hold power. When the fabric of society is so rigid that it cannot change quickly enough, adjustments are achieved by social unrest and revolutions. It needed a civil war in England to establish the new doctrine that the rights of a king were no more divine than those of a common man3. It needed a French revolution to convince a hereditary aristocracy that the day of its despotic power was past4, and a Russian revolution to get rid of a medieval form of government which had become obsolete5. When the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century brought a rapid increase in wealth, the demand of workers for a fair share of the wealth they were creating was conceded only after riots and strikes.
The Powers of Modern Science
In the last fifty years science has advanced more than in the 2,000 previous years and given mankind greater powers over the forces of nature than the ancients ascribed to their gods. The thunderbolt of Jove was a pip-squeak compared to the atomic bomb; Mercury, the messenger of the gods with wings on his heels, a slow coach compared with the radio; the magic flying carpet of the fairy tale, a crude method of travel compared with a transatlantic air liner. In biological science the advance has been as wonderful though not so spectacular.
At the same time as mankind has gained these new powers the idea of the rights of the individual, which originated and caused such changes in Europe, has spread among the coloured races which have become dynamic, demanding freedom and a political status and standard of living equal to that of the white race.
The present worldwide revolution is due to the difficulty of adjusting human society to this terrific impact of modern science. Changes commensurate with the magnitude of the new forces are inevitable.
We Are Now One World
The most important change is the one made necessary by the radio and the airplane. Measured in time of transport and communication, the whole round globe is now smaller than a small European country was a hundred years ago. The world is now so small that a major event in any country affects all. A civil war in Greece or China involves the active intervention of foreign governments, not as arbiters to make peace, but for the defeat of the side whose victory would be against the interest of the intervening power. An election in Italy is not so much a purely national matter as a local contest between two groups of nations, each afraid of the spread of the political ideologies of the other, and is of almost as much interest in Washington, London, and Moscow as in Rome. The United Kingdom devalues the pound. Within a few days twenty other nations are forced to devalue their currencies, and all nations to adjust their finance and trade to a decision made by a few men in one country. We are now physically, politically, and economically one world and nations so interdependent that the absolute national sovereignty of nations is no longer possible. However difficult it may be to bring it about, some form of world government, with agreed international law and means of enforcing the law, is inevitable.
Modern Technology
As I have tried to show, science, in producing the airplane and the wireless, has created a new international political environment to which governments must adjust their foreign policies. Almost as important are the new industrial conditions science has created. With the advance of technology, more and more goods can be produced with less and less labour. After the First World War the economic problem was no longer one of production. It was the problem of finding markets to get the output of industry and agriculture dispersed and consumed.
The only solution nineteenth-century economics could offer was to cut down production to the level of economic demand. Land went out of cultivation while the people were hungry. Factories were idle while people urgently needed the things they could produce. Unemployment increased to over ten millions in the United States, nearly three millions in the United Kingdom, and six millions in Germany. World trade decreased to a fraction of its former level. The economic system broke down because it could not carry the great wealth which modern science can create.
At an economic conference in 19336 Viscount Bruce7 warned governments that an economic system which for its own preservation restricted the production and distribution of the things which the majority of mankind urgently need, is one that cannot endure. He predicted disaster. It came. Unemployment was cured, first in Germany and then in other countries, by the production of armaments for the Second World War.
During the last war when there was a market for everything that could be produced, the production capacity of Canada and the United States, which were outside the battle area, increased one hundred percent. What the U.S.A. and Canada have done, all countries can do. Nearly every country in the world is now becoming industrialized as rapidly as it can. Already the acute post-war shortage of goods has been made good, and the fight for markets has begun. What will the position be when Germany and Japan regain and surpass their pre-war capacity for export, when China and other countries, whose workers will be glad of a standard of living much lower than that of American or European workers, become industrialized and join the fight for an export market Shall we again adjust supply to affective economic demand, and cure unemployment by preparation for another world war, or will governments cooperate in a new world economic system which will provide an assured market for all that modern science can produce?
If the target of output were the satisfaction of human needs, there would be no difficulty about markets. When the United States was battling with unemployment, the late President Roosevelt said that there were so many people ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-housed that if their needs were to be satisfied, there would be work for every man and woman willing to work8. If that were true of the United States, how much truer is it of the whole world in which two out of every three people suffer premature death for the lack of the primary necessities of life. The upsurge in Asia, which is liable to spread to all coloured races, is fundamentally a revolt against hunger and poverty. There can be no peace in the world so long as a large proportion of the population lack the necessities of life and believe that a change of the political and economic system will make them available. World peace must be based on world plenty.
Annexation by Conquest Must Change to Union by Consent
If the views I have expressed be right, we can think of our civilization evolving with the growth of knowledge from small wandering tribes to large settled communities which were integrated by law, with a government with power to enforce the law. As the means of transport and communication improved and each community grew larger, the territory under its law increased in size. Thus arose great states or empires, each with its own laws, religions and traditions, and armies to extend its territory by conquest or defend itself against the attack of neighbouring states. So empires have grown by wars of conquest. In recent times, European nations, with the use of gunpowder and other technical improvements in warfare, controlled practically the whole world. One, the British Empire, brought under one government a quarter of the earth and its inhabitants.