I HAVE only recently seen the article in NATURE of February 19 and the correspondence so unanimously supporting the view that the present decentralised system of team work by experts in different branches of science in agricultural, forestry, and medical research institutes is greatly superior to the proposed centralisation in distant Simla of each separate science—chemistry, botany, etc.—under directors of research with autocratic powers to decide what each original worker in his branch throughout India shall investigate and publish; for it is clearly impossible in these days for one man to be sufficiently conversant with each special division of his science adequately to fulfil such a stupendous task. I desire to associate myself with that view, which may be illustrated by my experience in organising the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine, shortly to be opened, for which I have just obtained endowments from two successful European and Parsi business men for a whole-time biochemist, in addition to two other chemists for the analysis of indigenous drugs and of food and water respectively, all three of whom will aid nine medical research investigators in team work at important medical problems under a medical director. Could anyone contend that these very specialised chemists would be better controlled by a purely chemical director a thousand miles away in Simla, who could know nothing of the medical problems they will investigate?