The Scientist and the Engineer 65 



or research institute with a tradition of academic freedom 

 that protects whatever sparks of originality there may be 

 in the faculty. Even if he is employed in a government or 

 industrial laboratory, as many scientists increasingly are, 

 he will enjoy more independence than most of his engineer- 

 ing colleagues. Management has begun to admit, however 

 reluctantly, that they get more out of their scientists by 

 leaving them alone than by trying to order them around. 



Nevertheless, it would be wrong to think of the typical 

 scientist in this intermediate level as constantly generating 

 brand new ideas about nature. A great deal of scientific 

 work is concerned, in fact, with exploring how far a new 

 idea generated by somebody else to explain one set of phe- 

 nomena can be used to explain another closely related set. 



For example, back in 1921 Professor Otto Loewi, of the 

 University of Graz in Austria, became interested in explain- 

 ing the by then well known fact that stimulation of the 

 vagus nerve results in slowing of the heartbeat. It had al- 

 ways been somewhat of a puzzle that an increase of activity 

 in a nerve results in a decrease of activity in the organ 

 which it controls. One possibility that interested Professor 

 Loewi was that the nerve liberated a chemical which in 

 turn depressed the heart, since several substances were 

 already known to affect the heart in this way. A compound 

 known as acetylcholine seemed to be a particularly good 

 candidate and he spent some time thinking up ways of 

 demonstrating that such a substance was actually hberated 

 by the nerve in amounts sufficient to have the desired effect. 

 As he later told the story to many of his friends, he woke 

 up one night with a clear idea of just what to do and jotted 

 down an outline of the proposed experiment on a pad he 

 kept by his bedside. Unhappily, he found he could not read 

 his notes the next morning. (Physicians traditionally have 

 very bad handwriting and it is even worse if they are very 



