THE HORMONES IN HUMAN REPRODUCTION 



as will be explained hereafter. In the second place, it recalls 

 memories of bafflement, comedy, hard work, and modest suc- 

 cess. Can I forget the time I went racing up the steps of 

 the laboratory in Rochester, carrying a glass syringe that 

 contained the world's entire supply of crude progesterone, 

 stumbled and fell and lost it all.? Or the day Willard Allen 

 showed me his first glittering crystals of the hormone, chem- 

 ically pure at last? 



In the third place, I am writing largely about the work 

 of personal friends. Prenant and Born I did not know, 

 for chronological reasons ; but Paul Bouin received me in 

 his laboratory at Strasbourg many times in the summer 

 of 1924), looking like a Frenchman out of a storybook, 

 writing and teaching like the grand scholar and gentleman 

 he is. The story of Born's legacy I heard from Ludwig 

 Fraenkel himself, to whom in Montevideo may this book 

 carry a special greeting. Dispossessed of his famous clinic 

 in Breslau, driven from his country, he can never be exiled 

 from a world that honors great minds and great hearts 

 wherever they are. Karl Slotta and Eric Fels, when at last 

 I met them in their South American homes, proved no less 

 distinguished in hospitality than in chemistry. Adolf Bute- 

 nandt of Berlin sat happily at my own fireside and dinner 

 table in 1935, and there he will be welcome again now that his 

 country's guns are silenced. 



Nor can I possibly write with detachment of Willard 

 Allen's work, which at first I shared and afterward watched 

 with affectionate admiration. The American pioneers in 

 this work, Leo Loeb and Robert T. Frank, early honored 

 me with their acquaintance and good will. Likewise the names 

 of our Wisconsin fellow-workers, Frederick Hisaw (now at 

 Harvard), Harry Fevold, Charles Weichert, Samuel Leon- 

 ard, Roland Meyer (the latter for three years also in my 

 laboratory at Rochester) are written not only in the formal 

 list of investigators to be mentioned here, but also in mem- 



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