Day of a Scientist 151 



Everyone had recognized since the time of Ambroise Pare 

 that wounds heal much faster in young people than they 

 do in the elderly, but until recently most people who 

 thought about the problem at all simply put it down to such 

 general factors as better blood circulation and the greater 

 vi<Tor of young organisms. Bill and his surgical colleague 

 thought there might be something more specific than that 

 and had embarked a couple of years before on a long pro- 

 gram of extraction of tissue in the process of healing. Dur- 

 ing the first year he had managed to get two or three prepa- 

 rations which served to have some effect in speeding the 

 healing of small cuts on the corneas of rabbits. 



The suggestion for using the cornea as a test object had 

 come from a friend in the anatomy department who had 

 been using the anterior chamber of the eye as a place to 

 grow ovarian tissue. Apparently, this technique had been 

 developed years ago by the early workers on the estrous 

 cycle, but Bill as a biochemist had never heard of it. The 

 cornea had turned out to have a lot of advantages as a place 

 to study wound healing. It was very easy to observe, espe- 

 cially if one employed the old fluorescein trick which made 

 the unhealed part glow in ultraviolet Ught. Furthermore, 

 there was no blood circulation to complicate the problem. 

 At first there had been a good deal of irregularity in the 

 speed of healing in different rabbits, but this had been 

 straightened out by using an inbred strain and buying the 

 lettuce on which they were fed from a local truck gardener 

 who had a greenhouse where he raised lettuce all year 

 around as a sort of hobby. Ordinarily, commercial lettuce 

 from Texas seemed to lack something essential for wound 

 healing in the rabbit during the winter months. It might, 

 of course, be Vitamin C, but it seemed inconceivable that 

 a herbivore like the rabbit could be Vitamin C deficient 

 under ordinary conditions. Bill had made a mental note to 



