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University Daily Kansan
Friday, Nov. 18, 1960
People of Importance to Research
By L. R. C. Agnew
(Editor's Note: Dr. L. R. C. Agnew is Associate Professor of the History of Medicine and Chairman of the Department of the History of Medicine.)
Last month, Harper's Magazine ran a provocative and stimulating special supplement on "The Crisis in American Medicine." Eight articles were printed and each raises points worthy of, at the very least, serious discussion. However, an article entitled "Medical Research: Choked by Dollars" seems particularly impressive. This piece was written by John M. Russell, President of the Markle Foundation—an organization "which has devoted its resources to keeping outstanding young physicians in the field of academic medicine." Chancellor W. Clarke Wescoe, for example, was a Markle Scholar.
Russell's general thesis is that people rather than projects are what really count in medical research; further, he emphasizes "... the unfortunate way the emotional interest of the public forces categorical research on our scientists. Through control of funds, both from the volunteer health agencies and by Congressional appropriations, public opinion not only tells the scientists that they must attack the problem disease by disease but in effect, through the size of the grants, which disease to go after first. This is like deciding what scientists should do by popular vote. It means that research support is based on dramatic appeal, not greatest need."
NOW THIS IS no new cry — in 1957 a sour-minded investigator tartly recorded in the British Medical Journal how in the United States "... a remarkable situation has developed since President Eisenhower's attack of coronary thrombosis. It is now easy — too easy — to get vast sums of money for the support of research on vascular disease. . . It is interesting to speculate what might happen if a future President were to die of gastric cancer — one suspects that the study of possible, and impossible, dietary carcinogens (cancer-producing chemicals) would boom alarmingly, and that this would have a disastrous effect on other equally promising lines of attack."
Again, many will doubtless recall Harrison Brown's comments some years ago (Saturday Review, March 24, 1956) on "The Case for Pure Research." He asked his readers to imagine themselves "members of a commission formed . . . about the middle of the nineteenth century for the purpose of stimulating research for the improvement of home lighting. . . To which research projects would we have allocated funds?" Brown tells us what we would have done:
“. . . clearly in view of the fact that gas lighting was the most plausible and exciting means for urban home lighting on the horizon, we would have spent most of our money on projects aimed at improving the efficiency of production and utilization of gas. But, naturally, in order to satisfy a piqued minority of candle devotees we should have given a few token research grants aimed at improving candlelight. These might have included a grant for ‘A Critical Study of the Relative Merits of Wool, Cotton, Linen, and Coconut Husks as Raw Materials for Wicks' and a grant for 'A Tentative Appraisal of the Luminosity Efficiency of Mutton Fat as a Function of Animal Age.'”
And so on, and so forth, but "none of us, even the most radical and imaginative of the persons in our group, would have found it possible to vote grants to either Michael Faraday or to James Clerk Maxwell, two of the pioneers in research on electricity, for the simple reason that there were at that time no obvious applications of electricity to home lighting on the horizon."
WHAT'S THE POINT of all this?
Simply that Russell is right in saving that people are more important than projects. Teamwork has its place, certainly—you can't play solitaire
with a cyclotron—but let no one imagine that because crash programs have paid high dividends in, for example, the world of commerce, they will do so in science or medicine.
Is the outlook then completely black for lone wolf research? Not necessarily. There are some signs of administrative enlightenment, the Markle Foundation and "career investigatorships" offered by such organizations as the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association. But the best hope for the future of lone wolf research lies in the man himself. If he stolidly refuses to become a project prostitute and insists on going his own intellectual way, we may well experience a period of scientific achievement unparalleled in our history.
Texas Cave Yields Animal Fossils
SAN ANTONIO, Tex. — (UPI)— The Friesenhahn Cave, 20 miles from here, is one of the most productive archeological caches in the United States, according to the Texas Memorial Museum.
Fossil remains of a number of extinct animals were retrieved from the cave as early as 1919, although scientific excavation did not begin until 1949.
In silence also there's a worth that brings no risk. Simonides of Ceos.
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