166 SCIENTIST 



"The word's all right; it's the people who use it that get 

 me down," said Bill. "Congressmen, university presidents, 

 advertising men — did you see that ad the other day which 

 was trying to claim that mounting the shift lever on the 

 floor instead of the steering post was some sort of a break- 

 through in automobile design? It makes me sick!" 



"I suppose one of our biggest problems is the fact that 

 we feel weighed down by the responsibiUty of seeing to it 

 that our fancy and expensive labs pay off with some sort 

 of creditable production each year. We must always worry 

 that our graduate students have something to show for their 

 conscientious efforts." 



Bill thought so too and went on to say that he found 

 himself picking problems which he was pretty sure could 

 be solved in not more than a couple of years. This practice 

 pretty well ruled out the taking of the big risks necessary 

 to pursue the really important questions. 



The upshot was that Bill and Nick had agreed to set 

 aside three mornings a week to work together in a little 

 isolated corner of the third story of the old physiology 

 building. There was no telephone on that floor, and their 

 secretaries were instructed not to send a messenger to them 

 under any circumstances — well, perhaps if the old building 

 caught fire. 



They had selected a really tough, really important prob- 

 lem, and they told each other that they would work on 

 it for at least five years before giving up. What they were 

 after was some identifiable event in nerve cells which could 

 be correlated with memory. The approach they were using 

 was too technical to be discussed usefully here, but it in- 

 volved a combination of the recording of the electrical 

 events inside a single nerve cell, at which Nick was a real 

 expert, with an effort to record a change in some of the 



