Science: Advancement at Aberdeen

Sir James: It is obvious that the country which called a halt to scientific progress would soon fall behind in every other respect as well.

Sir Josiah: The problem of labor-displacing inventions has become acute and will become more acute still at the same rate of scientific innovation.

Sir James: If there is an avenue of escape, it does not lie in the direction of less science but of more science.

Sir Josiah: I feel inclined to say to all of you scientific pundits: There would not be a problem at all if you were not so chaotic in your discoveries—if you would only introduce them under conditions that we could control.

Sir James: No one can control the direction in which science will advance.

Though they did not talk that way face to face, Sir James Hopwood Jeans and Sir Josiah Charles Stamp were in effect last week debating a familiar old question at the Aberdeen meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The question: Shall Science take, a holiday? Sir James as the astronomer-physicist president of the Association, held out doggedly against such an idea one day on one platform. The next day on another platform Sir Josiah, as the Association’s economist-tycoon treasurer, seemed to think it would do no great harm.

Only the tail end of the Jeans presidential discourse was concerned with science in industry. His topic was “The New World-Picture of Modern Physics”—a picture he has displayed to some 300,000 readers in thin, lucid books. Sir James again led his hearers over the trail from the comfortable Victorian universe of jelly-like ethers, billiard-ball particles, gears and levers to the disconcerting, fantastic universe built by Rutherford, Planck. Bohr, Einstein. Heisenberg. Schrodinger, Dirac and others where the electron dances beyond space and time in a field of mathematical formulae.

Other topics discussed at Aberdeen:

Vitamin C. Precisely two centuries ago British mariners discovered that scurvy could be prevented or cured by eating citrous fruits. All in the past two years the anti-scurvy Vitamin C has been identified, its chemical structure determined, its synthetic preparation accomplished. The story was told last week by some of its principal figures.

Scurvy was not brought into the laboratory until 1907 when Hoist and Frolich inflicted it on guinea pigs, tested the curative potency of vegetables. In 1932 Professor A. Szent-Gyorgyi found that hexuronic acid from adrenal glands had powerful antiscorbutic properties, and soon thereafter the name was changed to ascorbic acid and identified with Vitamin C. After long search for raw material from which the vitamin could be mined in quantity, Szent-Gyorgyi turned to the paprika beds near his home in Hungary and in one day obtained a half-pound of his acid. In March last year, Professor Walter Norman Haworth of Birmingham. England determined the vitamin’s constitution, and in August he, and Swiss chemists in Zurich. independently synthesized Vitamin C from a ketonaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide. Now the pure substance is produced as colorless crystals in Swiss and British laboratories at 3¢ per gram.

Professor Szent-Gyorgyi talked about Vitamin C last week, admitted that as a medicinal tool it was too new for fulsome claims. But its application was clearly not limited to scurvy, rare in modern civilization. With it he reported cures of pyorrhea, Addison’s disease, such baffling bleeding diseases as forms of hemophilia, purpura hemorrhagica and hemorrhagica nephritis.

Melting Pot. “I believe that before many centuries have elapsed there will not be a single person in America without a certain portion of Negro blood.”—Fitzroy Richard Somerset, 4th Baron Raglan, vice president of the Anthropological Section of the British Association.

Sun v. Hay. Making hay in the sunshine is poor practice. Sun-dried hay loses a third of its starch and protein content, makes inferior food for animals, makes animals fed with it inferior food for men. Artificial drying is immensely preferable. —Dr. S. J. Watson and H. J. Page.

Beauty & Beasts. Well aware that standards of beauty vary the world over. Professor Charles Samuel Myers set out to uncover some unfamiliar standards. He found an acclaimed Balkan belle with a face like a horse, a beauty on the Island of Cyprus who resembled a frog.