160 SCIENTIST 



sentence, much less a paragraph. Maybe the trouble is that 

 science requires people to be really clear about what they 

 have in mind while other subjects don't." 



Mrs. MacAvoy, who had been an EngHsh major herself 

 and had the same feeling for grammar that a physicist has 

 for mathematics, merely smiled at this and tried to say 

 something about the apphcation forms for the big training 

 grant which the department planned to ask for from the 

 National Institutes of Health. 



By this time though, Bill had had enough administrative 

 detail and passed by into his personal lab next to the office. 

 There his technician, Betty Smith, was already busy arrang- 

 ing the glassware which had come back from the central 

 dishwashing service and generally putting things to rights. 

 She was delighted to hear that he had decided to abandon 

 for the time being those tiresome and frustrating experi- 

 ments with the organic solvents, many of which smelled bad 

 and all of which were in danger of boiling over and catch- 

 ing fire unless you watched them like a hawk. Hence the 

 emergency showers at each end of the lab under which 

 a flaming technician was supposed to step calmly and pull 

 the chain that would start the fire-quenching shower of 

 water. 



She was doubly glad to hear that she would have the 

 opportunity of working up a new technique more or less 

 on her own. She was a bright girl who had had to break 

 off her graduate training when her mother became ill and 

 ran up a lot of doctor's bills, but she hoped to return in 

 a year or two. In fact, if she did well this year. Professor 

 Stone had promised to help her get a fellowship which 

 would pay her almost as much as she was getting as a 

 technician. 



Bill just had time to outline his plan and give her the 

 reference to the Nature article when he had to rush off to 



