CHICAGO, February 26 (Special to the Harvard Service News)--Pleading for unhampered research by American scientists in the field of atomic physics, Harlow Shapley, director of the Observatory and Paine Professor of Practical Astronomy, told a mass meeting of the Midwest Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions in Orchestra Hall last night that military control of atomic developments will serve only to "estrange the Russians."

Supports McMahon Bill

Shapley vigorously supported passage of the McMahon Bill, now pigeonholed in a Senate committee, which provides for an immediate civilian commission to direct application of atomic energy discoveries in the United States. An expert on the international state of science who visited Russia last year on the 220th anniversary of the founding of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, he said that "science rides high in Russia," and that "we must accept the challenge of the USSR--we the people, the government, the scientists of America must be the leaders in service to mankind through science."

Specifically assailing the present gagging of distinguished American scientists and the innuendoes from military sources that men of science cannot be trusted with matters of real secrecy. Shapley pointed to a recent radio broadcast of his in which he was required to submit his manuscript for censorship.

"I told the man, 'I won't be subversive.' He said, 'Oh, it's not that.' 'Oh,' I replied, 'don't be afraid of my using obscene words I don't know any. . . . It is that exasperating."

Shapley joined in the appeal with Har- old C. Urey, noted University of Chicago chemist and a leader in the Manhattan Project, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Congresswoman from California, and Norman Corwin, radio writer whose "Set Your Clock at U-235" has forcefully dramatized the menace of atomic destruction. His address, liberally gingered with the Shapley wit, drew a tremendous ovation.

Backing up his central assertion on international affairs that "we in the U.S. are living in a glass house and should be discreet about throwing bricks outside," Shapley observed with a smile that the Boston conscience was hardly lily-white in view of the records of its current political leadership, and that Chicago's daily crime episodes, just as an added example, don't suggest our national moral integrity to be beyond reproach from overseas.

Shapley will go globe-trotting again on Saturday when he takes off from New York for Copenhagen, Denmark, where the International Astronomical Union will hold a two-week confab. "We shall not ask Maj. Gen. Groves," he reminds us, "what he thinks about orbital calculations.