Graduate School 125 



the country, and he may begin to exchange letters with 

 colleagues on other continents. Toward the end of his 

 graduate years he may well get a grant to enable him to 

 attend an international conference where he will meet 

 his overseas friends previously known only through cor- 

 respondence or by their published papers. If he has man- 

 aged by this time to have contributed some significant 

 new detail to the pool of knowledge or, perhaps better 

 yet, developed a new technique for seeing something no- 

 body has seen before, people will flock around him at such 

 meetings to get the word on the most recent improvement. 

 Although science has its hierarchy of assistant, instructor, 

 assistant professor, professor, and departmental chairman, 

 its gold medals, Nobel Prizes, and even knighthoods, the 

 graduate student who has done something worth hearing 

 about is immediately accepted into this society as a social 

 equal. Any one of the aforementioned big shots may drop 

 into his lab to find out just how he puts his electrodes 

 into a particular cell or prepares his ion exchange resin 

 to absorb a particular peptide. 



Nothing in life is perfect, of course, and there is at least 

 one very uncomfortable feature to the graduate program. 

 Traditionally the graduate student must demonstrate his 

 capacity for pursuing original work by writing a thesis. 

 Again traditionally, the thesis consists of a more or less 

 comprehensive review of the literature bearing on the 

 subject of the student's choice plus a section deaUng with 

 his own investigations. In an earUer time the completed 

 thesis became the subject of a public discussion or "de- 

 fense" by the student against the questions raised by a 

 designated group of his elders and betters. More or less 

 the whole community turned out and the participants were 

 all dressed in formal academic regalia and comported 

 themselves with great formaUty. If this ordeal was success- 



