152 SCIENTIST 



get one of his better graduate students to look into the prob- 

 lem: might make a good thesis problem if things broke 

 right. 



But he mustn't let his mind wander around like this, even 

 if it was still early in the morning. He had to be in the lab 

 by eight-thirty to get his technician going before his lecture 

 to the first-year class in organic chemistry at nine. By eight- 

 thirty too, he should have some reasonable suggestion for 

 getting rid of that trace of lipoid which kept gumming up 

 the efforts to crystallize Protein X. The usual organic sol- 

 vents took the Hpoid out all right, but they seemed to 

 change the protein in some way. Sometimes the activity of 

 the preparation seemed unimpaired, but other times it lost 

 at least 50 percent of its potency and the electrophoretic 

 pattern became less clear-cut. 



Jane seemed to be still asleep. She had come home late 

 from a school board meeting at which there had been a 

 hassle about whether a Jewish girl should be allowed to take 

 the part of the Virgin Mary in the Christmas play, and they 

 had stayed up some time discussing the problem over a 

 drink. Bill wasn't very interested in community affairs him- 

 self. He found that he got terribly impatient at parent- 

 teachers' meetings and said things that made people mad. 

 As a conscientious person and one who was particularly 

 aware of the need for upgrading the schools if the country 

 wasn't going to go into a gradual decline, he regretted his 

 lack of skill and patience in these matters. But he tried to 

 salve his conscience with the thought that his own scientific 

 work probably had a social value and that his teaching of 

 advanced students contributed to the education of at least 

 some Americans. Finally, he regarded as his greatest per- 

 sonal sacrifice to the community the fact that he let his wife 

 join the school board when that citizens' group put the heat 

 on her last fall. 



