66 SCIENCE REMAKING THE WORLD 



The number shows the difficulty of this research, for it 

 means that 605 failures preceded this success. 



The only way to get a realizing sense of the influence 

 of the introduction of these coal-tar compounds is to 

 pick out one of them and consider what pleasure or pain 

 it has brought into the world, how much suffering it 

 has caused or cured. 



For instance, did you ever have a headache that you 

 relieved by aspirin or any of the other coal-tar re- 

 medies? If so, multiply your headache by as many 

 million times as you think other people have been so 

 relieved and by as many years as you think people will 

 continue to have headaches. 



Did you ever have a tooth pulled without, and an- 

 other one with, the use of a local anesthetic? If so, 

 you are in position to estimate in some degree the 

 amount of human misery that has been eliminated by 

 the invention of procaine (novocain) and similar pain- 

 killers. 



Did you ever see an epileptic fit? Then imagine 

 that seizure and thousands like it prevented by the use 

 of luminal. 



Did you ever lose a friend from diphtheria? Then 

 you can realize what it meant to the world that the 

 bacterium of the disease was made visible by staining 

 with methylene blue, so that physicians could identify 

 it in any suspected case and administer an anti-toxic 

 serum. 



Statistics are meaningless to us unless we can trans- 

 late them into concrete terms. 



Who can estimate the increase in industrial efficiency 



