Eureka! And Other Pleasures

Abstract

At first one is very pleased at being invited to write a Prefatory Chapter, but as the delivery deadline draws closer one begins to think, "Oh my God! What on earth can I say that all but family members and few close friends will not find a great bore?" One solution is to write a scientific essay, but I concluded that that was a cop-out. I decided that perhaps the best tack to follow was to try to convey to the reader the personal characteristics I bring to my science and to other aspects of my professional career. The writing of this chapter has certainly convinced me that my particular background influenced what problems I chose to work on and how I approached their solution, but I hope that my results have a more ecumenical significance. There's been much written recently about how one's cultural background affects one's science, but I think that thesis can also be exaggerated. Science is a method of inquiry that by using certain guidelines permits rational individuals to observe Nature in a way that their findings will agree and have permanence. We shouldn't be diffident about defending that claim of objectivity. LEIT MOTIFMy increasingly sedentary work routine prompted me to take up jogging. I run two to three miles a day either in my neighborhood or to work, and since it is strictly recreational, I do it at a pace that exerts but doesn't exhaust me. At one point in my neighborhood route, there's a landmark where I look at my watch to check my pace, and yesterday I passed there at 13.28 min. Today, I did the same course and at the same point my watch read 13.29 min. During the remainder of the run I contemplated that fact. I thought of the number * The US government has the right to retain a nonexclusive, royalty-free license in and to any copyright covering this paper.

Molecular versatility of antibodies

“…I became persuaded that rather than continue to marshal arguments for or against one paradigm or another, or experiment with antigen: antibody complexes in vitro, which at best could provide circumstantial evidence, it would be more productive to select a suitable system in which the mechanism of an antigen‐induced antibody‐mediated response could be explored directly. As I have explained elsewhere (20), I decided not to work in the one system that was ready for such an analysis − the activation of the classical complement fixation pathway − in part because there were already many able investigators engaged in examining the molecular details of this system. Instead, I chose to work on the IgE/mast cell system because several of its aspects appeared favorable for what I had in mind.…”