154 SCIENTIST 



too respectful of his elders whom he had learned to call 

 "Sir" at prep school. He had now almost abandoned the 

 practice, but he would fall into it if someone with a Boston 

 accent or, above all, some Britisher came to the lab to give 

 a seminar. But he still wasn't able to stand up to Associate 

 Professor Ash who had been working for years on the 

 structure of avian hemoglobin in an attempt to explain the 

 eUiptical shape of bird red cells. Ash had hit some sort of 

 jackpot when he was an instructor and had been rapidly 

 promoted to a tenure position before it became clear that 

 his early papers were largely attributable to the momentum 

 he acquired during a travehng fellowship spent with Sir 

 Frederick Hopkins in Cambridge. He did have an extensive 

 knowledge of the early biochemical literature and was a 

 great help to the graduate students in guiding them through 

 the more pedestrian parts of their theses. Furthermore, he 

 pulled his weight in the department by giving year after 

 year the course in quantitative analysis which none of the 

 younger men wanted to do. In spite of all these assets, he 

 had never caught on to modern work, and there was really 

 no excuse for allowing him ten daylight hours a week on 

 the ultracentrifuge for his crumby hemoglobin problem. 

 The worst of it was, two of Bill's best students had to work 

 from midnight to four in the morning twice a week in order 

 to finish up their paper in time for the April meetings. 



As he walked back to the bedroom to dress. Bill thought, 

 as he had many times before, that one way of solving the 

 problem was to buy another centrifuge. With all the acces- 

 sories, the gadget cost about $30,000 — much too much to 

 be taken out of the regular departmental budget. Besides 

 that, the Dean and the Provost, both of whom were hu- 

 manities types, had scarcely gotten over the shock of paying 

 for the first one. Bill had, in fact, put in an application to 

 the National Institutes of Health, but the Study Section 



