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Given in memory of
Elisha Hanson
by

Letitia Armistead Hanson

414 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

DEMOCRATS AND ARISTOCRATS IN SCIENTIFIC
RESEARCH

By Dr. ESMOND R. LONG
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

OTIVES, methods, and enthusiasm in approaching and con-
M ducting scientific research certainly are as widely different as
those in any other form of public endeavor. This is perhaps obvious
enough to those accustomed to think in research terms. The public at
large, it may be said, does not think in such terms, and has an indistinct
notion as to what scientific research is. And this is not to be wondered
at, for the public at large is not in the habit, not to mention the mood,
of following scientific publications and so is largely dependent for its
information upon a daily press, out of its depth entirely where science
and exact truths are concerned. Much of the press knows a great
scholar and gentleman, William Osler, chiefly, if not solely, for a
chance, half-chaffing remark on longevity. In guileless simplicity it
hails an untried adventurer sailing for southern seas in search of the
“missing link” as a new Darwin, and it will continue in sublime ignor-
ance of the stupendous amount of scientific material submitted to a
critical world by that retiring but superhumanly able observer, to re-
gard the distinguished biologist as the one original “monkey man”
of all time.

Yet a public so educated, even with the movie scientist as the proto-
type of the species, dimly classifies research men into two groups.
The one, alert to the present, includes the physician driving with all the
power of his trained mind toward the achievement of a “cure” for one
of mankind’s maladies, and the engineer or botanist contriving methods
which will make the desert blossom as a rose. In the other, we find
an irresponsible person, perhaps damned with faint praise as an in-
tellectual, given to investigating minute details of unimportant subjects,
fussy and irritable if disturbed in his meditations or laboratory pro-
cedures, and prone to have beautiful if undeserved daughters, popular
and addicted to the habit of staying out late nights. And after all, with
some modifications, the classification holds, if one deserts the movies
and views the latter creature on his own plane. It is this group, the
science-for its-own-sake and knowledge-as-its-own-reward crowd, that
we may designate as the aristocrats of science, in contradistinction to
that other class, impatient, often as closely altruistic as it is given to
man to be, who from their ardent endeavors in the direction of popular

DEMOCRATS AND ARISTOCRATS IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH 415

demand and rigid dependence on the wishes of the people, may be
labeled with the over used and much abused word democrat.

In the passing of William Osler and Emil Fischer of Berlin, science
has in the past year lost two of the foremost minds of the century.
Widely different in their fields of scientific endeavor as well as in their
manner of cultivating them they may serve to illustrate anew the dis-
tinction drawn above.

Osler spent his life among people, giving to the full of his own
strength and skill in the personal effort at the bedside, and outside as
a great organizer. He was a member of innumerable societies and
committees with the avowed purpose of promoting human welfare in
one form or another. His objects are understandable to all. To heal
the sick, to prevent suffering, to teach others to do the same, these are
things that come within the range of common experience. He was a
profound student of tuberculosis and every one knows what tuberculosis
is, of typhoid fever, and diseases of the heart. A layman picking up his
papers of twenty years ago on cancer of the stomach could see at a
glance what he was driving at, might recognize the cuts, and with a
little effort understand something of the pathology. His great text-
book which went through many editions, has traveled far, being often
seen on the “Science Shelf” in the smallest of village libraries. His
name is familiar consequently to some of the most superficial of readers
and because of the nature of his subject he is a person to them, where
to the same individuals Fischer would be “a book.”

The enthusiasm he aroused in his students is characteristic of the
man. His own life-long student’s attitude-that same spirit which used
to lead him to say, “And now let us see where we made our mistakes,”
as he marched into the old autopsy room at Montreal-kept him on earth
as far as his pupils were concerned and made him approachable to
all. There was a very human touch to his work that belonged not
merely to its nature but perhaps much more to his treatment of it.
It must have been a primal urge, something essential in the man, which
led him to devote himself to the people in such a way. His campaign
must have been for end results, however interesting the preceding dis-
coveries were of themselves. If he studied typhoid fever, in the last
analysis it must have been with the object of preventing typhoid fever
and making it unnecessary to study it, not for the mere acquisition of
knowledge of typhoid fever for its own sake. Twenty years ago, com-
menting on the waste of life from this disease due to ignorance and
neglect, he said, “Very different from death which comes with friendly
care to the aged, to the chronic invalid, or the sufferer with some in-
curable malady, is that from typhoid fever. A keen sense of personal
defeat in a closely contested battle, the heart searching dread lest some-
thing had been left undone, the pitifulness of the loss, so needless—

416 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

and as a rule in the ‘morn and liquid dew of youth’—the poignant grief
of parents and friends, worn by the strain of anxious days and still
more anxious nights—these make us feel a death from typhoid fever
to be indeed a Delian sacrifice. For fifty years the profession has
uttered its solemn protest as I do this day; we have done more—we
have shown how the sacrifice may be avoided and the victims saved.”
The marked decline in the incidence of typhoid fever in late years, due
to the combined efforts of medical men, sanitary engineers, and public
health officials, must have given Osler untold satisfaction.

But if William Osler was a public personage whose life played a
part, great or tiny, in that of every one of us who has known what it is
to be sick, what shall we say of the incomparable Emil Fischer, per-
haps the greatest organic chemist who ever lived, whose place in the
history of his science will be secure when Osler’s in the development of
his, is centuries forgotten? How many have heard of Emil Fisher? In
his own group, chemists and biologists, he has for a generation sat on
the highest tier of the seats of the mighty, and yet his place has been
quite without the public ken. A supreme investigator who undertook
the most fundamental and most difficult problems of his science, he
carried on a labor which by its very nature has been inexplicable to
the average man. To be sure the average man would not wish it ex-
plained to him, would resent it deeply if forced to listen to such dry
stuff. But he is safe. No newspaper in the country would be competent
to discuss it for him. The pathetic attempts of the daily press to keep
up on the relatively simple subject of poison gas in the late war and the
rude caricatures of chemical nomenclature which finally found their
way to the proof reader and past him, merely serve to emphasize this
point.

Let us see if, without being too technical, we can show how it was
that Emil Fischer came to stand so high above the crowd. Forty-five
years ago Fischer discovered phenyl hydrazine, an accomplishment
which alone would have sufficed to give him some fame, but in the
hands of its discoverer phenyl hydrazine became a tremendous weapon,
a 42 centimeter gun, a whole park of them in fact, for a war on the
ultimate nature of the carbohydrates. These last substances are of im-
measurable importance, making up as they do the bulk of matter in
the vegetable world, including the sugars, starches, wood and various
intermediary bodies. With the different sugars, scores in number, into
which all of these substances can be ultimately resolved, phenyl
hydrazine yields characteristic crystalline precipitates, permitting
relatively easy identification. Be it said, once and for all, however, that
Fischer did not pack up his phenyl hydrazine and his polariscope and
enter the sugar business, nor did his altruism lead him to desert
theoretical fields and apply his trained mind to the production of cheap

DEMOCRATS AND ARISTOCRATS IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH 417

sugar for the people. What Fischer was interested in was the composi-
tion, the structure of sugars, and to few men has it been given to pene-
trate the subject so deeply. Molecules of the sugars, like those of all
substances, are composed of atoms which stand to each other in definite
relations in space. The molecules, that is to say, the essential units
of a certain group of sugars, all contain six atoms of carbon, twelve of
hydrogen and six of oxygen, and yet the group includes several distinct
substances because the arrangement of these atoms in space is different.
For instance, one possible difference in arrangement is that in which
the atoms of two molecules are so disposed that the three dimensional
molecule of one is the mirror image of the other. When the likeness is
so close the properties are identical, except for one feature. A ray of
light which has been “polarized” by passing through a Nicol prism is
bent to the right by one form, by the other to the left. With greater
variation in the arrangement greater differences in chemical properties
are noted. Abstruse matter this, and all theory, for no piling up of
lenses has ever been sufficient to enable man to gain a faint glimpse of
one of these hypothetical molecules. Yet the theory stands, and by
virtue of the enormous number of predictions made upon its basis which
were later realized by experiment. And to Fischer, using the sugars,
is due much of the credit for the establishment of this, the so called
Van’t Hoff and LeBel hypothesis.

The study of sugars led him to the substances that in nature act
upon them, the enzymes or ferments, substances like the diastase which
acts upon starch converting it into glucose. That enzymes are specific
in their action had long been known, but it remained for Fischer to
demonstrate how high that degree of specificity is. To one of a pair of
extremely closely related substances, differing only in a slight variation
in the arrangement of their atoms in space, a given enzyme is neutral,
while acting readily upon the other. A slight change in the latter
renders it, too, insusceptible. The proof of this led Fischer to the
conclusion that enzymes act upon their substrates through exact spacial
approximations, his famous key and lock analogy.

So much to show the nature of Fischer’s work, to indicate the type
of mind of the man. It was by no means the only, or even the largest,
problem this brilliant and versatile chemist undertook. In another
class of compounds, the proteins, was a chaos which seemed of incon-
ceivable complexity until Fischer pointed the way through. Proteins
are peculiarly biological; without them there would be no life, and
differences in protein are probably ultimately responsible for differ-
ences in living forms, inasmuch as protein must carry the hereditary
characteristics. They are found in greatest bulk in the animal kingdom,
though not confined to it, and include such well known substances as
egg white, the casein of milk, and flesh of all forms. In the analysis

VOL. Xil—27.

418 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

of these proteins, involving breaking them down and identifying the
products, Fischer played a great part, his greatest contribution being
the development of a method which enabled others to expedite the
solution of the colossal problem. Difficult as the analysis has been
Fischer was at the time of his death in a fair way of accomplishing
the reverse, the synthesis or reconstruction of a highly complex protein
from its split products, a tremendous conquest of the world of the
unknown.

One more glimpse and we shall leave the subject of Fischer’s work
and place our label on the man. Combined with certain proteins in
that mysterious portion of the living cell which apparently governs the
latter in its chief actions, the nucleus, is a substance called nucleic acid,
characterized in part by the presence of certain bases, the purines. The
familiar uric acid is a member of this group. Fischer, working on
uric acid and the related substance, caffeine, synthesized both, and not
only them but all other members of the group. It was a work of prime
importance chemically and brings up for our consideration a special
point. Fischer commercialized his artificial synthesis of caffeine, that
substance both praised and reviled, and made many thousands of dol-
lars. The emphasis placed upon this associated his name in many
minds, especially those of medical men, with the substance caffeine, and
in superficial biographical treatment it has been customary to list its
synthesis along with his other great accomplishments and on the same
plane. Asa matter of fact it must be thought of as purely by the way.
Beyond question what really counted in Fischer’s mind was not the
synthesis of this isolated substance but the unshrouding of the relations
of that whole group of compounds of which caffeine was but an
ordinary member, making the previously confused subject as clear as
the light of day.

Fischer was an aristocrat in scientific work if there ever was one.
No man can explain this devotion to his science. We can perhaps say
that the ability created the desire, but most men work for rewards, and
what was Fischer’s? Fischer made money, but no sum of money could
be adequate pay for the superhuman accomplishments of the man, nor
did he make a tithe of what he might have made had he tried. He
saw himself in the front rank of scientific men, but the contemplation
of that spectacle must have palled upon his cold judgment. The only
thing that remains is the thing itself. Pushing back the horizon of
knowledge was its own reward.

Scores of other pairs might be cited to illustrate the grouping over
and over again. A fascinating book might be written by plagiarizing
a method from Plutarch and setting down side by side the biographies
of great scientific men, laboring on similar lines, devoted to different
points of view. We could thus pair off contemporaries, and going

DEMOCRATS AND ARISTOCRATS IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH 419

closer, warm friends, and sometimes master and pupil. What could be
more characteristic than the distinction in the attitude of Darwin and
his brilliant spokesman, Huxley? On the one hand, we have the quiet
naturalist of Down turning over in his mind for twenty years observa-
tions made on the voyage of the Beagle, and the culmination of that re-
flection in the scientific torpedo of the nineteenth century, The Origin
of Species. And on the other, stands the rugged Huxley, self-appointed
champion for truth, the most lucid scientific writer of the day, meet-
ing all comers in defense of the theory of evolution, nay, going much
further, carrying war into the enemy’s country, extending his campaign
beyond the field of biology and evolution and, through the medium of
the public press, hammering into public consciousness the scientific
method in general. In Darwin’s own words in his autobiography we
have this; “I think I can say with truth, though I cared in the highest
degree for the approbation of such men as Lyell and Hooker, who were
my friends, I did not care much about the general public. I do not
mean to say that a favorable review or a large sale of my books did
not please me greatly, but the pleasure was a fleeting one, and I am
sure that I have never turned one inch out of my way to gain fame.”
He must have been regardless of public approbation who spent eight
weary years on the Cirripedia, describing all known living species, and
publishing two quartos on the extinct species, and who passed from
the Origin of Species to a book on the “Fertilization of Orchids.” But
Huxley was different. Brilliant investigator that he was himself in the
field of pure science, he cared more for something else. The educa-
tion of the masses was the supreme thing. He fought to give the people
the truth at a time when they did not want it, and how he came up from
the bottom is appreciated by few of the succeeding generation who take
his victory for granted.

We might confuse the issue a little and pair off Sir Humphry Davy
and his pupil, the immortal Faraday, perhaps the most lovable man
science has ever produced, and, if we except Pasteur, the favorite of all
biographers, Faraday, who never knew what it was to have a decent
income, and presented to the world a set of scientific experiments the
cash value of which to mankind was estimated by Brailsford Robertson
some years ago at seventy five billions of dollars. For to Faraday we
owe the motor and the dynamo.

Which was Faraday? The aristocrat surely, we say when we recall
that he repeatedly dropped his investigations when they neared the
point of marketable value. But he never lost sight of the latter. “T
had rather,” he said, “been desirous of discovering new facts and new
relations dependent on magneto-electric induction than of exalting the
force of those already obtained, being assured that the latter would find
their full development hereafter.’ And when asked of the possible

420 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

utility of some of his discoveries he was wont to reply in the words of
Franklin, “What is the use of a baby?” And it is on record too that in
dispute over the priority of certain scientific discoveries he stood
resolutely on his rights on more than one occasion.

And Davy, baronet and pet of society, aristocrat in the common ac-
ceptance of the term—which was he? “A philosopher” he was in the
old terminology, and the “philosophers” were mostly aristocrats in
science. His fame rests chiefly on his discoveries in electro-chemistry,
but we can not forget the ten years of lecturing in the cause of agricul-
ture and his own experiments for its promotion. And there is the de-
liberate and successful attempt to produce a safety lamp for miners,
followed by the presentation to him of a set of plate worth two thousand
pounds by the coal owners of the Tyne and Wear in testimony of their
appreciation of the benefit thus conferred. And we know that his last
great scientific endeavor was an effort based on exact deduction from
the laws of electro-chemistry to protect the copper sheating of vessels
from the corrosive action of sea water. Vain and selfish he may have
been, but he must have had the interest of the people at heart, and so
we can place that to his credit against his oft cited jealousy and ill
treatment of his rising, more brilliant pupil, Faraday.

Probably the greatest scientific democrat in history is Louis Pasteur.
No more patent testimony of public affection for a scientific man has
ever been given than that expressed in the recent French plebiscite on
the greatest man of the nation, which went easily to Pasteur with Sadi-
Carnot and the great Corsican running second and third. And yet, as
we have defined the term, Pasteur began his researches as one of the
aristocrats; it was his brilliant success in a field of pure science which
laid the foundation and directed the way for his later, more famous,
investigations on the etiology of disease. It was in the course of his
highly technical work on the optical rotation of the salts of tartaric acid
that he discovered the fact that of its isomers one form is destroyed by
fermentation, and the other not. These isomers, like the sugars de-
scribed above, differ from each other simply in the arrangement of the
same atoms in space. He thus anticipated by many years Fischer’s
classic work on enzymes. But in their application of the facts thus
secured is strikingly emphasized the wide divergence in the point of
view of the two men. Fischer’s work on ferments constantly led back
to the theory of sugar structure. With Pasteur’s successful solution of
his problem he turned the page and with new interest in fermenting
bacteria entered upon that lifelong endeavor to thwart the action of
pernicious microorganisms that has made him one of the greatest bene-
factors of mankind.

How he passed first to the relief of stricken industry, adopting
means, based on his discoveries in bacteriology, for the cure of

DEMOCRATS AND ARISTOCRATSIN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH 421

“diseases” of beer and wine, and of the fatal silkworm disease, and
thence to the extermination of those plagues, fowl cholera and anthrax,
which were wiping out the flocks and herds of France, saving to the
country in a matter of months the equivalent of the Franco-Prussian
war debt, and thence to preventive vaccination in man, has been the
theme of a score of biographies and many an inspiring address. The
life of this non-medical man is held up as a shining example by the
most intolerant of professions for the guidance of its students and future
fellow physicians.

Commenting on aims in scientific research the famous British
chemist, Roscoe, chose a text from Pasteur to bear him out in his con-
tention that although it would be foolish and short-sighted to decry the
pursuit of any form of scientific study because it was as yet far re-
moved from practical application to the wants of man, yet discoveries
which tend to diminish the ills that flesh of man or beast is heir to,
deservedly create a more general interest than those having no direct
bearing on the welfare of the race. In the French hero’s simple words,
“There is no greater charm than to make new discoveries, but the
pleasure of the investigator is more than doubled when he sees they
find direct application in practical life.” ,

The same year that Pasteur graduated from the Ecole Normale in
Paris a young German physician, but a few months older, read, before
the physical society of Berlin, one of the two epoch-making scientific
contributions of the century, “Ueber die Erhaltung der Kraft” rivaled
only by the Origin of Species in its effect upon thought. The notion
of the Conservation of Energy may not have originated in the preco-
cious intellect of Helmholtz, for Newton, DesCartes, Leibnitz, Lavoisier,
Mayer, Colding and Joule had more than touched it, but it surely
crystallized there. It remained for a ‘physician to desert his chosen
field for a theoretical one and establish the fact that energy, although
it may be transformed in kind, is indestructible, and the total quantity
in the universe is constant. The physiologist was also a mathematician
of the first order.

Perhaps the most frequently cited achievement of Helmholtz is his
invention of the ophthalmoscope, that familiar combination of mirror
and lenses used in examination of the interior of the eye. How did he
come to devise it? As a matter of fact it took its origin in a simple
desire to exhibit a physiological phenomenon to his students. It had
long been known that light could be reflected from the back of an
animal’s eye, but no one had yet been able to put his own eye in such
a position as to have reflected directly back to it light from the
illuminated eye in concentrated form. Helmholtz, by the proper dis-
position of mirrors, involving a knowledge of optics and the anatomy
of the eye, accomplished this for the first time, and, eight days after

422 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

he conceived the desire to show it to his students, he was the first to see
the living human retina.

While following the invention of the ophthalmoscope, Helmholtz
was occupied for some years with physiological optics, it can not be
said that it “set” his career as it might have done with another man, as
for instance his invention of the stethoscope did with Laennec. The
latter putting a paper cylinder to a consumptive girl’s chest discovered
that through it he could hear the sounds of moisture vastly better than
by direct application of the ear. Here was a method, and the young
clinician devoted the rest of his own all too short consumptive’s life
to diseases of the chest. Helmholtz turned the so called practical ap-
plication of his ophthalmoscope over to the clinicians and busied him-
self with the discovery of new facts and explanation of old, quite re-
gardless of their direct application to the ills of man. The physics was
the more attractive field than the pathology, and to the end of his life
he gravitated more and more from the latter toward the former, until
the boy of twenty-eight, who started out as a professor of physiology
and pathology at Konigsberg, became at fifty the dominating figure of
the time in physical science as professor of physics in Berlin. While he
was one of the masters of medicine, his contributions were toward
theory and not practise, his name being associated in the science chiefly
with the explanation of vision and hearing and the theory of color
and tone. That immeasurable practical use of his discoveries is being
made goes without saying. But it is indeed a fortunate thing for man-
kind that the superb intellect of Helmholtz was not turned into the
superficial channels of practical usage but was left free to explore the
unknown depths below.

In later years his trend of thought took him more into the field of
dynamics and electro-dynamics, bringing him back to the direct course
on which he started forty years before with his immortal essay on the
Conservation of Energy. His intellectual goal was never a democratic
one. He felt it his duty as a disciple of science to ascertain truth for
its own sake, and no man more strongly decried the pursuit of science
merely for the practical results. His clear exposition of the principles
of the transformation of energy furnishes the index of his character,
and, whatever the practical applications of the principles thus enunci-
ated may be, we can not avoid the impression of something essentially
aristocratic in a young man of twenty-six killing for all time with one
blow, the idea of a machine for perpetual motion.

Obviously the points of view of Pasteur and Helmholtz were fairly
far apart. This does not mean that the one was consistently demo-
cratic and the other at all times aristocratic in the sense defined above,
throughout their long lives of scientific research. Many times the
Toles were reversed. Helmholtz contributed a practical remedy for

DEMOCRATS AND ARISTOCRATS IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH 423

nasal catarrh, and Pasteur evolved a theory of the essential nature
of fermentation. But the dominant note of each was as given above.
Pasteur burnt himself out in the effort to bring relief to a mankind
patently suffering before his eyes. Helmholtz consumed his candle
more slowly, pursuing the even tenor of his way without committing
himself on his sympathies.

Undoubtedly the distinction is but vaguely general, and perspective
may be needed to bring it out. Undoubtedly there are no pure types.
Scientific men, goaded by poverty or other considerations, may and
often do change the direction of their researches, like the rubber
synthesist of “Marriage.” The war brought out many a quiet man from
purely academic life to construct a poison gas, or detect a submarine,
or relieve a starving people. But most of these men have gone back.
The will of the people was temporarily irresistible. But characters were
not changed much. A certain group are altruistic from the start, and
do not need to explain their motives. The other group are exclusive and
do not try to explain theirs, except to each other. They isolate their in-
tellectual lives to a certain extent, in all the pride of an aristocracy
based on achievement rather than accident. The achievement is the
increase of knowledge, and that is both goal and prize.

TG

a Tor

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