636 Third European Journey 



Dr. Smith believed him " a very clever and a very interesting 

 man, on the eve of great discoveries." ^^^ He was " a well- 

 balanced, industrious and quiet man thirty-five or forty years old, 

 with an excellent training for the work he [was] doing. He 

 impressed [Smith] as a keen critic, cautious and well aware of the 

 pitfalls on every hand, and more anxious to be right than to be 

 famous." 



Dr. Smith regarded his three conferences with Dr. Gye as "as 

 interesting as any [he had had} anywhere in Europe." The third 

 took place on April 18 at the National Institute for Medical 

 Research located on Windmill Hill near London. There, Dr. Gye 

 " introduced [him] to his colleague, the physicist and optical 

 expert, J. Edwin Barnard, who [had] devised very clever new 

 apparatus for seeing the ultramicroscopic filterable viruses. He 

 examines them," Smith wrote, ^^® " by monochomatic light through 

 a green screen using a mercury lamp. This screen cuts out practi- 

 cally all the lines except the green and a mere trace of the orange. 

 With this he uses an objective of 1.3 N. A. and eye piece which 

 magnifies 1800 diameters. By this means he can see down to 



Barnard had " been working on the problem of seeing and 

 photographing the organism causing Rous's chicken sarcoma for 

 two years " and Smith believed that he had " succeeded in both. 

 I saw it under the microscope," he said, " and I saw photomicro- 

 graphs of it. He first showed m.e the pleuro-pneumonia germ, 

 fastened to a thin film of gelatin and afterwards the living organ- 

 ism bobbing about in a rabbit serum culture." Smith described and 

 drew various developmental " stages " of the organism which he 

 saw. He saw also " a four dav, fifth transfer " of the Rous sarcoma 

 organism. He " examined the pleuropneumonia culture for a long 

 time and [was] satisfied it is a living thing. ... If this filterable 

 virus is an organism, then," he concluded, " I don't see how one 

 can refuse the same name to the sarcoma virus." "° 



He added: "^ " I got more out of Dr. Gye today. He is trying 

 all sorts of incubator temperatures on his virus cultures from 

 35°C to 42°C with the idea of attenuation and vaccination." 



^^* Journal, Apr. 17, 1925; Recent cancer research, op. cit., 252. 

 ^^* Journal, Apr. 18; Some newer asp. of cane, res., op. cit., 599. 



"^^^ Idem; also, Fifty years of pathology, op. cit., 45. 

 ^"Journal, Apr. 18; Recent cancer research, op. cit., 252. 



