The Promise of Medical Science 
earlier experience. We do not know what gravitation is but 
“understand”? that it is gravitation which holds us bound to the 
sun, once we are told that it is the same force which makes 
apples fall, which we have seen before. 
The history of modern science began with two mysterious 
discoveries, close to the turn of the last century (1896): the 
discovery of X-rays and of radioactivity. Modern science 
disclosed the existence of an entirely different world of which 
man had no knowledge before, the world of quanta and wave 
mechanics, a world which is more real than the one we see. 
The one we see and live in is, more or less, but a flickering 
shadow. Our senses are made so as to see this shadow, to help 
us live through the day. If I saw the floor I stand on as it is—a 
vacuum with here and there an atomic nucleus in it, surrounded 
by clouds of electrons moving with great speed in fantastic 
patterns—I would be afraid to stand on it. No human experi- 
ence comes to help one to understand this world disclosed by 
modern science, its dimensions being far beyond the limits of 
perception. 
This explains the danger of extinction to which mankind is 
exposed at present, and to which we came pretty close during 
the Cuban crisis. Man has returned from this new world with 
cosmic forces in his hand which he is unable to comprehend, 
which he treats as if they were still his old terrestrial forces. 
Chemistry has its roots in classical science. It is true that 
atoms and molecules are far too small to be seen by the human 
eye, but classical chemistry can be “understood”? with our 
human ideas: we consider atoms as points placed at a definite 
distance from one another in definite patterns and we can 
symbolize the benzene ring with a hexagon, with atoms placed 
at its corners, held together by forces which we represent by 
single or double lines. 
Biochemistry has grown up on the shoulders of this ebiieal 
chemistry and we still feel at home in its dimension. A sugar 
molecule is still the same sugar which I may find on my break- 
fast table. This “‘classical biochemistry” is at present dominated 
by “molecular biochemistry’”’, which describes the single 
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