"Getting Purer"

Two major things in common have Professor Frederick Parker Gay of Columbia, Director George Canby Robinson of the new New York Hospital-Cornell Medical College Association (whose blocks of white buildings open this autumn), and Dean Alan Mason Chesney of Johns Hopkins Medical School. They studied medicine at Johns Hopkins and worked at the Rockefeller Institute. To each George Washington University last week gave his first kudos, honorary doctorates in science. Professor Gay made a speech, recalling the university's great bacteriologist --Theobald Smith, "responsible for five or several more fundamental discoveries in bacteriology, protozoology and immunity"; the late Walter Reed, who "told us in essence nearly all we know about yellow fever today"; Frederick Fuller Russell, who "perfected and first employed typhoid vaccination on a large scale." Passing from particular to general, Professor Gay praised the rarely praised medical scientist. More than half the professors of anatomy, physiology, bacteriology and biochemistry are not, said he, medical men in the strict old-fashioned sense. This means "that the medical sciences are becoming increasingly autonomous and important in their general relations, and that they are becoming 'purer,' by which we mean that their main objectives are theoretical and fundamental, rather than practical and applied." He made this modest prediction: "We should, each one of us, like to discover at once a cure for cancer, or for tuberculosis, but I venture to say that the final determining step that will lead to either one will be made by some one who is concerned with the orderly development of some obscure and apparently unrelated branch of science as such, rather than with direct attainment of the great objective." /-L-.

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