Excerpt from Biology in America
To the "man in the street" the biologist, with his "bugs" or his "germs," frequently appears as a harmless but equally useless individual. Thus in an issue of the "New Republic," shortly after America"s entrance into the world war, a seriocomic writer in criticizing the action of President Wilson in appointing a committee on national preparedness from the National Academy of Sciences says, "I doubt if any other nation ever responded to the prospect of war with a scheme of national defense which included a Committee on Zoology and Animal Morphology."
What excuse then has the biologist for his existence? What can he say for the "truth that is in him"?
When half a century ago the Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel, was "puttering" over his sweet peas in the garden of the monastery at Brunn in the Tyrol, the world took small notice of his work, little realizing that he was laying the foundation stones of a science which was to place animal and plant breeding on a scientific basis, and teach us how to build a better race of man himself. When the English army surgeon Ross in India in 1898 was studying a microscopic organism in the blood of the owl, he could not foresee that his work would in a few years" time virtually abolish malaria in Ismailia on the Suez Canal, where in 1902 there were 1548 cases in a population of about 6,000; that it would render possible the building of the Panama Canal, and convert Havana into a health resort.
Of what particular practical importance was Harrison"s discovery that a bit of nerve cord transferred from a tadpole to a drop of frog"s lymph would develop nerve fibres there? Yet Harrison"s method of making that discovery has opened to science an entirely new field in the study of tissue growth, both benign and malignant, has enabled us to observe the growth of the cancer cell, and determine some of the conditions of that growth, and may some day lead us to a solution of the cancer problem.
When a fish embryo is developed in a solution of magnesium chloride it gives rise to various malformations, most conspicuous of which is the "cyclopean eye." Of what possible value to a workaday world is such a discovery?
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