146 
am astounded that he did as much as he has done for us, and that he stuck 
to our program when suffering for almost two weeks with an excruciatingly 
painful dental abscess. .. from Tikopia to Honlaral 
On basic issues of politics, religion, morality. . .Weltanschauung. . . 
he and I would differ as much as have Joe G. and Joe W. , Nancy R. and Joe 
Smadel and I. But I have always worked better and maintained better friend- 
ships with those who have very different values and Weltanschuung from my 
own than with those who correspond too closely to my peculiar penchants 
and values. 
Ponape, Caroline Islands November 21, 1972 
Tomorrow is the critical day. For four days we have been working on 
a messy job of rescuing frozen blood clots by taking them from broken venules 
and transferring them, hardly able to keep them sterile, to vials. Dozens 
of venules broke among the packed vacutainers when the Revco thawed. The 
boxes of 100 vacutainers each (we have 27 such boxesi) were a bloody mess; 
the tubes stuck together and froze together as the clots refroze. It has 
been both a messy and a dangerous job, and two have already been cut with 
broken blood-contaminated glass doing it. We have also had to have three 
shipments of dry ice flown in, about 150 pounds of it on Friday and Saturday 
and yesterday another 200 pounds. The first two from our Guam laboratory, 
exhausting there all insulated containers, and the last 200 pounds from 
Leon Rosen in Hawaii. Thus, we have just enough dry ice to get us by, to 
pack up some 288 sera in each of five large "hat boxes" with dry ice and 
scattering the throat and stool virus isolation specimens — which handles 
only 1440 sera of the 2700+ we have on hand — and to pack up six insulated 
containers of blood clots. The latter six go off with Raymond to Leon Rosen’s 
laboratory for transhipment from there to Bob Kirk in Canberra and the five 
of us hoping that the dry ice in them lasts until they are received at NIH. 
Only the sera are in excellent shape. The Virus isolation specimens have 
been stored only at -10 to -15 C in either the walk-in freezer or the freeze 
compartment of our refrigerator for several weeks already and those that 
were in the Revco have completely thawed for one day or more and since then, 
8 days ago, have been only between 0°C and -15 , with the walk-in freezer 
warming up to almost thaw as we use it excessively. The clots have also 
been thawed in the Revco for one day or more and I am not sure that they 
will be good for the red cell enzymes. We still hope they will be, but all 
our vast efforts and expenses will be to no avail if they are not. Thus, 
this has been a most gruelling and frustrating endeavour, and the only part 
of the expedition that we all could curse. We have been very foolish in 
not providing proper packaging for the clots and proper containers for 
dry ice shipment off to our laboratories. This is the worst part of the 
whole trip’s logistic problems. 
I have a few small bites on my legs which I scratched two days ago and 
again yesterday morning. By mid afternoon one had started to be a rapidly 
advancing tropical ulcer, and within three hours I developed severe painful 
inguinal lymphadenopathy on that side. The femoral glands were also very 
