Evening star., 1936-09-11
Headline Folk
and What
They Do
Scientists Say Dark Day
Is Upon People
of World.
BY LEMUEL F. PARTON.

by LEMUEL F. PARTON.
~ THIS desk there is piling
III up day by day a heap Of ad-
dresses so high 1t Is hard to
see over them. They are the
outgivings Of famous scientists meet
ing at Harvard, chemists at Pitts
burgh and various scientific gather
irgs In France, England and Csecho-
slovakia.
One of the latter says a new dark
age is upon us, in which devoted men
in laboratories, instead Of monasteries,
will carry through a balance brought
forward to happier day. All sadly
renounce the belief in an organic
pattern" of human society, which so
cheered and nurtured the last CEN
tury. They see only miltonic chaos
recorded on the news tickers.
julius S. Huxley, the famous
British bio-chemist, thinks scientists
may learn to implant some germs Of
intelligence ant decency in prenatal
tissue. He thinks man must Use
what brains he has to fashion better
brains, or lose the decision to the in
sects, or bother eager and prolific
contenders for the planetary cham
pionship.
DR.. E. P. Armstrong, president of
the Association of British Chemical
Manufacturers, visions a new race of
supermen brought about by food
sciences. At Harvard Prof. Ross G.
Harrison Of Yale and his ccnfrere,
Prof. Hans Spemann of Germany,
find a sculptor" and q master
builder" at work in each germ cell.
and they hold out hope that these
artisans, under proper supervision,
may be held up to a much higher
standard of workmanship.
Lacking a sabbatical year, this re.
porter can note only one or two
least common denominators in this
mountain Of addresses One is that
man must learn to lift himself by
his bootstraps and the other is that.
in the world of bio-chemistry. tissue
culture is a new enchantment from
which the miracle may come. Profs.
Harrison and Spemann are outstand-
ing in this field, and some of their
achievements have been so startling
as to suggest. that they might as
semble a citizen and a voter out Of a
few spare parts.
For instance, Prof. Spemann laid
out the Job of fashionIng a Siamese
twin out of a bit of raw material
some embryonic frog tissue, plus his
new cellular merlin called the "or-
ganizer" The living, leaping. croak-
ing twin came through according to
specifications
Old DR.. Spemann, nearing 70 now,
is professor of biology at the Univer-
sity Of Freiberg. Last year he re-
ceived the Nobel prize and marveled
that any man would know what to
do with $4,000. He ana DR. Harri-
son have won resounding acclaim
among scientists all over the world,
and, deliberately and by design. are
among the least publicized Of their
profession. When they turn in a
miracle it is likely to be sunk in the
quicksands of scientific verbiage-
which they don't mind. as they are
anything but circus scientists.
Prof Harrison, 66 years old, lean,
bald, alert, bespectacled, with a white
mustache, works in the Osborne
Geological Laboratory at Yale, stays
down in the deep labyrinths Of the
life maze and dodges publicity. He
never has been photographed, except
for 8 foggy snapshot caught by a
newspaper body-snatcher at a scien-
tific convention few years ago. He
is one more of the many illustrious
alumni Of Johns Hopkins, a native
Of Germantown, Pa. 1t is said that
If any one has even a suspicion of
why an acorn becomes oak and not
an elm he is the man.
Copyright, 1880