DEREK LOWE: Do We Really Need More Scientists? “There’s surely an upper bound to the proportion of students who could usefully study the hard sciences. We can argue about what that number is, but not, I think about its existence. Stipulating that, the question becomes whether we should find ways to get the smartest and hardest-working students into (or back into) these fields, which would mean dragging some of them away from business and law careers. But there’s a potential problem there, too: if money and social standing are your motivating factors, you’ve probably ruled out the sciences for those reasons alone.”