11 



Day of a Scientist 



So FAR IN THIS BOOK WE HAVE BEEN STANDING A LITTLE 



back from science and scientists and describing what we 

 can see. Insofar as has been possible, I have tried to give 

 what will be defined later as an objective account. What a 

 person who is considering science as a career really wants 

 to know, however, is how it feels to be a scientist. As I 

 shall try to show later on, the sharing of other people's 

 subjective feeUngs requires techniques quite different from 

 those of science. In this chapter, therefore, I shall try to 

 get closer to how a scientist feels by describing a day in the 

 life of a hypothetical scientist. 



Our hypothetical scientist is Bill Stone. He woke up at 

 six o'clock the other morning and began to wonder what he 

 could do to purify the X protein. There was a lot of interest 

 in this unusual substance just then because Goodwin and 

 his colleagues out on the West Coast had recently reported 

 some experiments that made it look as though either it 

 or some closely related polypeptide was important in initi- 

 ating limb bud formation in tadpoles. Bill had been working 

 on the chemistry of sulfur-containing proteins for some time 

 and had, in fact, written a pretty good thesis on the cross- 

 linkages in insulin. The X protein had turned up while he 

 was collaborating with one of the younger men in the 

 department of surgery on the problem of wound healing. 



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