THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 



615 



THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 



THE AW ABB OF THE NOBEL 

 BELIZE IN MEBICINE 



The Nobel prize in medicine has 

 this year been awarded to Dr. Alexis 

 Carrel, of the Rockefeller Institute for 

 Medical Research, New York City. 

 This is an honor not only to the dis- 

 tinguished investigator, but also to the 

 institution which has given him oppor- 

 tunity and to his adopted country. It 

 may not. be altogether satisfactory to 

 our national pride that among some 

 forty Nobel prizes conferred in the 

 sciences only two have come to America, 

 and that the men in both cases have 

 been born abroad. Professor Michel- 

 son, who received the prize in physics, 

 is, however, a graduate of the U. S. 

 Naval Academy, and Dr. Carrel has 

 done his work here. It is doubtless the 

 case that obtaining a Nobel prize is a 

 game in which to win skill and chance 

 must be combined. We have native- 

 born investigators who deserve as high 

 honors as MM. Sabattier and Grignard, 

 between whom the prize in chemistry 

 has this year been divided, or Mr. 

 Dalen, of the Stockholm gas works, to 

 whom the prize in physics has been 

 given. Still it should give us pause to 

 reflect that no obvious injustice has 

 been done by the failure to award a 

 Nobel prize in medicine, physics or 

 chemistry to a native American; per- 

 haps also to consider that in the Rocke- 

 feller Institute, in addition to the di- 

 rector, Dr. Simon Flexner, of American 

 birth but foreign parentage, and Dr. 

 Carrel, there are at least three other 

 foreign-born and foreign-educated in- 

 vestigators — Dr. Jacques Loeb, Dr. S. 

 J. Meltzer and Dr. Hideyo Noguchi, to 

 whom a Nobel prize might with justice 

 be awared. 



The work of Dr. Carrel is fairly well 



known, its character being such as to 

 be comparatively interesting to the 

 general public. He has extraordinary 

 skill in technique, such as would give 

 him a fortune beside which the $38,- 

 000 of the Nobel prize would be small, 

 if he were willing to be diverted from 

 scientific research to surgical practise. 

 His work also bears witness to imagina- 

 tion and patience, which when united 

 to skill supply the essentials of success- 

 ful investigation. It is easy to point 

 out that Dr. Carrel has followed lines 

 opened up by others; that organs had 

 previously been transplanted and kept 

 living outside the body; that Professor 

 Harrison, of Yale University, antici- 

 pated him in the methods of cultivating 

 living tissues; but this in no wise de- 

 tracts from the importance of the work 

 he has accomplished. As he himself 

 said at the reception given to him at 

 the College of the City of New York 

 attended by President Taft and the 

 French ambassador : ' ' Almost every 

 step in scientific progress which ap- 

 pears to be due to the efforts of one 

 individual is, in reality, the result indi- 

 rectly of the unknown scientific work 

 of many others." 



Dr. Carrel certainly is not respon- 

 sible for the exaggerations of the 

 newspapers. It is an excellent thing 

 1 that the New York Times and other 

 : daily papers of New York City have 

 become aware of the news value of the 

 scientific work accomplished at the 

 Rockefeller Institute. The reports are 

 usually based on papers presented be- 

 fore scientific men and on articles 

 printed in scientific journals; the in- 

 vestigator may suffer from headlines, 

 inaccuracies and the exploitation of the 

 sensational, but these may become 

 eliminated, and the public may become 



