Definition of Research Department Administration

I HAVE no desire to resuscitate or discuss law court cases in the correspondence columns of NATURE ; but in the summing up of a recent case, which many readers of NATURE will have followed, the judge made the following statement: "Nobody suggested that [the plaintiff] was anything but a thoroughly, perhaps exceptionally competent person in his scientific work, but [the defendants] said that his incompetence lay in his failure to administer his department properly, that is, to keep an eye on finance and to see that the machinery of the department was running with reasonable smoothness" (The Times, July 22, 1938).